Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Translators
- Preface
- PART I CONCEPTS OF MAN
- PART II ARISTOTELIAN ETHICS AND THE SUPREME GOOD
- PART III ARISTOTELIAN ETHICS AND CHRISTIANITY
- PART IV PLATONIC ETHICS
- PART V STOIC ETHICS
- PART VI EPICUREAN ETHICS
- 20 Petrarch
- 21 Francesco Filelfo
- 22 Cosma Raimondi
- 23 Francisco de Quevedo
- Bibliography of Renaissance Moral Philosophy Texts Available in English
- Index Nominum
- Index Rerum
22 - Cosma Raimondi
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Translators
- Preface
- PART I CONCEPTS OF MAN
- PART II ARISTOTELIAN ETHICS AND THE SUPREME GOOD
- PART III ARISTOTELIAN ETHICS AND CHRISTIANITY
- PART IV PLATONIC ETHICS
- PART V STOIC ETHICS
- PART VI EPICUREAN ETHICS
- 20 Petrarch
- 21 Francesco Filelfo
- 22 Cosma Raimondi
- 23 Francisco de Quevedo
- Bibliography of Renaissance Moral Philosophy Texts Available in English
- Index Nominum
- Index Rerum
Summary
Introduction
Very little is known about Cosma Raimondi. He calls himself a native of Cremona in Lombardy and a pupil of the well-known humanist teacher Gasparino Barzizza, probably at Milan in the 1420s. His life seems to have been dogged by ill fortune: he was forced to seek employment abroad, as a teacher of law at Avignon, where he appears to have emigrated about 1430. His efforts to return to a post in the Milanese dominion were rebuffed, and he hanged himself in 1436.
His only significant work, apart from decipherment of the newly discovered manuscript of Cicero's rhetorical works (1421), is the epistolary treatise in defence of Epicurus translated here. It is addressed to an unknown Ambrogio Tignosi, perhaps a student at the Milanese university at Pavia, and seems to date from before Raimondi's departure for France, probably about 1429. Its importance lies in the fact that it is the only thoroughgoing espousal of Epicurean ethical doctrine of the Quattrocento, preceding not only the widespread dissemination of the ancient sources on Epicureanism (Book X of Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Philosophers and De rerum natura of Lucretius) but also the popular dialogue of Lorenzo Valla, On Pleasure (1431). Raimondi argues for a human good, one which takes account of the whole parcel of body and mind which we are; and he finds it in the pleasure (voluptas) of Epicurus, a pleasure not opposed to virtue but both guided and produced by it.
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- Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical TextsMoral and Political Philosophy, pp. 238 - 244Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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