Syllabus
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS NOT A COURSE FOR ERASMUS STUDENTS
We start on Tuesday, February 25.
Course outline: 25. 2. Introduction: the original connection between genius and melancholy. Pseudo-Aristotle, Problem XXX.1 3. 3. The sources of Problem XXX.1: the medical theory of the humors and Democritean moods 10. 3. Hippocrates visits the mad Democritus: Letter to Damagetes no. 17 17. 3. Acedia and Sadness: Thomas Aquinas’ synthesis 24. 3. Aquinas continued 31. 3. Genius and philosophy. Ficino in the wake of ancient wisdom 7. 4. Ficino as a melancholic. Doing philosophy in first person 14. 4. Dürer’s engraving Melancholia I: reading seminar (analysis of the chapter on Dürer in Saturn and melancholy) 21. 4. Michel de Montaigne. The study of melancholy 28. 4. Descartes and the melancholic seventeenth century 5. 5. Seminar by our guest, Dr. Serena Masolini, on acedia (the mortal sin of sadness) 12. 5. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” and the historic turn towards melancholy as nostalgia
Annotation
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS NOT A COURSE FOR ERASMUS STUDENTS! We start on Tuesday, February 25.
The course aims at clarifying the centuries-long evolution of the concept of “melancholy” as not only a condition of exceptional geniuses in all domains of human creativity, but also a larger mirror of human situation in the universe. Staring with the Aristotelian Problem XXX.1 as a text which elaborates the blueprint for all subsequent treatments of melancholy, we will therefore test the hypothesis according to which the melancholy genius is to humankind what humankind is to the whole universe. While reading the Aristotelian text we will be interested in its sources in Hippocratic writings but also in Democritean ethics. We will also take a look at how this synthesis itself influences the apocryphal Letter to Damagetes no. 17 where “Hippocrates” describes his encounter with the “laughing Democritus” and the nature of the latter’s alleged madness. In this context, we will focus on the systematization of the theory of humors and on its cultural use in the theory of temperaments, with an emphasis on the theoretical construction of the “black bile”, a matter whose capacity for extreme states underlies the dynamics of melancholy. Thanks to this dynamism, the original conception of melancholy often inclines towards the active pole of the variable melancholy states. Later on, however, the passive side of melancholy will often prevail, whether in the notion of acedia (also known as the sin of sloth) or in the modern nostalgia. To follow this development, we will work with a wide range of texts, from Thomas Aquinas through Ficino, Montaigne and Descartes to Freud and Foucault.