Imagination, coutume, pouvoir (XVIe-XVIIe siècles)

Вісник НАУ. Серія: Філософія. Культурологія., 2014

The aim of this article is to explain the role of imagination in human life, as it was understood by Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola. First, I analyze the cognitive function of imagination. Then, I discuss its place within the intellectual powers, its misleading character, and its ability of causing emotions. Finally, I try to point at the ways of controlling it by reason and using it by man for their own purposes.

Interchange, 2005

The notion of imagination is central to our contemporary western conception of and valuing of art. Yet the conception of imagination upon which this valuing rests is based on certain assumptions about art-making and about persons. Imagination refers to the creation of an idea or artifact from the mind of the creator. That a work of art arises from the imagination of an artist is thus taken to mean that the work is a reflection of the person's individuality, an authentic product of the artist's inner being. As such is will be marked by originality since each person is unique. There is, moreover, a belief that external constraints on the imagination of the artist are inhibiting and that she should be free to express her visions or emotions without constraints. Historically, however, the centrality of imagination viewed in this way has been the product of gradual development. This paper examines one particularly important moment in this development, that is, the Renaissance in Italy. By examining the changes in the nature, practice, and conception of art during this period, the paper probes the changing assumptions about the connection between imagination and art.

2017

Revista Letras UFSM, 2019

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the conceptual significance of "imagination" was indebted primarily to Aristotle's theory of the phantasia, translated as imaginatio and thoroughly discussed in treatises on poetry, rhetoric and philosophy. In this text, I intend to briefly explore some ideas concerning the historical specificity of the notion of "imagination" in Renaissance poetics, attempting to avoid a transhistorical approach to the study of poetry and its interpretation. In order to do this, I will present specific passages from Philip Sidney's The Defense of Poetry (1595), Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning (1605) and Shakespeare's works.

2008

This essay focuses on the treatises of Marsilio Ficino and Leon Battista Alberti in the Florentine Renaissance, how the ideas in the treatises were applied to artistic production, and how the ideas were developed from classical philosophy. Keywords: Renaissance, perception, Plato, Euclid, Plotinus (Enneads), Marsilio Ficino (De amore), Leon Battista Alberti (De pictura, De re aedificatoria), Piero della Francesca (De prospectiva pingendi), George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, Alessandro Botticelli (Birth of Venus), Leonardo da Vinci (Last Supper), perspectival construction Keywords:

In-cognita: Ioan Petru Culianu’s Approaches to Religion. Ed. by Daniela Dumbravă / Bogdan Tătaru-Cazaban, 2022

w/ P.D. Omodeo. In this essay, we reassess Culianu's political interpretation of Renaissance culture in Éros et magie à la Renaissance (1984), focusing on his reading of Ficino and Bruno's magic doctrines, which he saw as the first steps towards modern theories and practices of erotic manipulation. His ideas were based on a comprehension of the relation between politics and symbolic forms as had been developed by scholars such as Cassirer, Warburg, and Wind. In addition to this, Culianu projected the concerns of his time about mass psychology and media manipulation back onto Renaissance culture. He regarded Bruno as the philosopher who reworked Ficino's individualist psychology and magic towards a collective and practice-oriented art. We reassess the actuality of Culianu's anachronism by relating it to today's populisms. In this perspective, we establish an ideal connection between Éros et magie and Laclau's post-Gramscian theory of hegemony and populist reason (1985 and 2005), according to which rhetoric and symbolism are the main constituents of groups and political society. We suggest that Culianu's inquiry into Renaissance manipulative psychology and Laclau's inquiry into the ideological construction of post-modern identities stem from a similar cultural-political concern about the connection between media control, eros and mass democracy, although they interpreted the relation between the masses and their leaders differently.