Sperone Speroni and the Debate over Sophistry in the Italian Renaissance. Teodoro Katinis. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 272. Leiden: Brill, 2018. xii + 174 pp. $109

Often, the vibrancy of such intellectual life was associated with institutionalized Peripatetic schools. [...]as Katinis explicitly notes, two brief and openly polemical works written by the Aristotelian Sperone Speroni (1500–88), In Defence of the Sophists and Against Socrates, offer a surprising a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRenaissance Quarterly Vol. 74; no. 1; pp. 333 - 335
Main Author Gulizia, Stefano
Format Journal Article Book Review
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.04.2021
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Summary:Often, the vibrancy of such intellectual life was associated with institutionalized Peripatetic schools. [...]as Katinis explicitly notes, two brief and openly polemical works written by the Aristotelian Sperone Speroni (1500–88), In Defence of the Sophists and Against Socrates, offer a surprising anticipation of Nietzsche's approach to Plato's condemnation of the ancient Sophists. [...]this new art of rhetoric, Katinis insists, has a target audience among Venetian merchants and its artisanal community (e.g., the citation at page 72, “these are citizens’ delight”); second, it is probable that Speroni practiced a form of “Plato against Plato,” taking advantage of an aporetic variety of dialogue (67). [...]Speroni also experimented with a paradoxical fashion of dialogue, seemingly defending the use of discord and usury (chapter 3), and this development is also what makes these texts difficult to interpret and historicize.
ISSN:0034-4338
1935-0236
DOI:10.1017/rqx.2020.387