[MaFLa] Unn Irene Aasdalen: Double Aphrodite and the dangers of beauty

[István Bodnár]

Double Aphrodite and the dangers of beauty

Unn Irene Aasdalen
(Nansenskolen-Norsk Humanistisk Akademi, Lillehammer, Norvégia)

2016. március 2., szerda, du. 4 óra
ELTE BTK Filozófia Intézet, Intézeti Tanácsterem (I épület, I. emelet
122-123)

In Plato’s Symposium Pausanias explains that Love and Aphrodite are
inseparable (Symposium 180c). If therefore, Aphrodite were a single goddess,
there could also be a single Love. But, since there are two goddesses of
that name, there are also two kinds of Love. In the Italian High Renaissance
Neoplatonists generally agreed that there were two kinds of love, heavenly
and vulgar, but the exact role of Aphrodite was much disputed. Marsilio
Ficino honoured in his De amore (from 1469) higher Aphrodite, but assured
that lower Aphrodite had an important role in the hierarchy of being. His
younger contemporary, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, disagreed. His love
theory from Commento sopra una canzone d’amore (1486) argued that man had to
choose either vulgar Aphrodite or heavenly Aphrodite, he couldn’t have both.
Pico warned against the dangers of Aphrodite. Their disagreement had a wide
range of consequences, and will be discussed in this paper.

Unn Irene Aasdalen, is director of Nansen Academy, the Norwegian Humanistic
Academy at Lillehammer. Chairs the Nordic Network for Renaissance Studies,
NNRS. Her Ph.D. in Intellectual History from the University of London, Royal
Holloway College (2008) had the title “Climbing Diotima’s Ladder: Marsilio
Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Their
Neoplatonic Commentaries in Italian”. Her main interest is Italian
Renaissance philosophy, and she has mainly published articles on
Machiavelli, Tullia d’Aragona, Pico and Ficino. She recently published a
book in Norwegian on love-treatises in the Italian Renaissance, Den
gjenfødte Eros (Oslo, Scandinavian Academic Publishing: 2014)

 

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