The I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast.

Brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the

LEMU in Munich, online at History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Unpast Waters, Undreamed Shores, Robert Flood.

In the last episode I started with the thought that the Renaissance ended in about

1600, which is indeed where I'm drawing the line in this and the past few series of the podcast devoted to the period between

medieval and early modern philosophy. But as we have often noted, typically

Renaissance phenomena like humanism and even typically medieval phenomena like

scholasticism survived in Europe well beyond 1600.

So it's perfectly reasonable that one of the more important books on the figure of interest to us today

should be called Robert Flood and the end of the Renaissance even though

flood did not die until 1637. With this title the author William Huffman suggests

that flood contrary to his name represents only the last ebb of a certain tradition of thought, one that is distinctive to the Renaissance.

It's the tradition we associate with figures like Cornelius Agrippa, Marcellio Ficino, Pico de la Marandola, and John D.

These were men who looked back to antiquity for inspiration and liked what they saw.

A near unanimous chorus of agreement praising divine transcendent principles that govern the crude matter of our cosmos.

Aristotle, so central in the

scolastics seemed in comparison a rather limited thinker and also something of an outlier within antique philosophy.

His pedantic writings put him out of step with the perennial wisdom that could be found in Plato and the Neoplatan before them in the pre-Sachratics and still further a field in the venerable teachings of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, and Indians.

To delve into these sources was to discover the underlying harmonies of the universe and to uncover its secret powers.

What more narrow-minded contemporaries might attack as black magic or demonology was in fact a philosophical and scientific enterprise.

After all, there could be no doubt that God had endowed natural things with many occult properties.

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