John Monfasani

This volume cannot but call to mind The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy published twenty years ago under the editorship of Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner. The Cambridge Companion fares well in the comparison. The Cambridge History contained some weak or irrelevant articles, as well as articles that flatly contradicted each other, but its largest flaw was its artificial division of Renaissance philosophy, in almost cookie-cutter fashion, into synthetic themes that tended to obscure rather than illuminate historical developments and connections. Far more successful was what has, up to now, been unquestionably the best survey of Renaissance philosophy available, Schmitt’s and Brian Copenhaver’s Renaissance Philosophy that appeared in 1992, where the chapters are organized by schools of thought , and thinkers are presented in diachronic succession within each chapter. The Cambridge Companion combines many of the virtues of both volumes and, of course, brings the reader up to speed on the literature that has appeared in the last two decades

I Pletho's Date of Death In 1976 I denied the correctness of the commonly held date of 1452 for Pletho's death. I argued instead for 1454. The difference of two years meant not only that Pletho lived to see the fall of Constantinople in 1453, but also that a whole series of works in the Plato-Aristotle controversy had to be redated. The basis for the 1452 date is a notice found amid other notes by an unknown hand on the last folio of the fifteenth-century manuscript M. 15 in the University Library in Salamanca and in another series of notes in the hand of Pletho's disciple and admirer Demetrius Raoul Kabakes on f. 50v of Gr. 495 of the Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek, Munich. With only trivial variation, both notes state that Master Gemistus died on the first hour of Monday, 26 June in the fifteenth Indiction. Since the only year in this period in which 26 June falls on a Monday in the fifteenth Indiction is 1452, Pletho's date of death seems well established. Though Kabakes was a bizarre character whose trademark was, in Bidez's phrase, an orthographe fantasiste, the fact that he wrote the notice in Munich Gr. 495 might be viewed as strenghtening its credibility. Futhermore, since Dositheus, Metropolitan of Monembasia seems to have died on 1 September 1452 and on blank folios (ff. 7v–8r) in MS Venice, Bibl. Marc., Zan. Gr. 333 (= 644) Bessarion wrote his memorial verses on Pletho and then his memorial verses on Dositheus, one can argue that in the summer of 1452 Bessarion first heard of Pletho's death and then a few months later of Dositheus'. Nonetheless, the death notice is certainly wrong.

Trained by some of the most notable philosophers and scholars in Germany before World War II, Paul Oskar Kristeller was one of the great scholars of the twentieth century. He spent his whole career in America in the Philosophy Department of Columbia University, where he became the internationally recognized authority on Renaissance thought. Yet he failed to establish Renaissance philosophy as an ordinary subject of study in American philosophy departments. His publications in philosophy were wide-ranging and influential, but it was his writings in many other fields that confirmed his pre-eminent scholarly status. This essay explores his relationship with the American philosophical establishment and discusses his various works in the history of philosophy and on the relationship between history and philosophy.