|
Brian P. Copenhaver is a Professor of Philosophy and History at The University of California, Los Angeles, teaching and writing about philosophy, religion and science in late medieval and early modern Europe. He studies magic and related beliefs and practices - astrology, demonology, divination, Kabbalah - as parts of normative philosophy and science as they were a few centuries ago. His research shows that magic and other 'occult' beliefs and practices were supported primarily by the philosophy and science of Aristotle and Aristotelian scholasticism, which dominated European culture from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries. When confidence in Aristotelianism collapsed in the seventeenth century, magic and its attendant beliefs collapsed with it as serious issues for Europe's leading thinkers.
Copenhaver also studies the ancient Greek and Latin Hermetica, writings from late antiquity ascribed by Renaissance scholars to an ancient Egyptian god, Thoth, whose Greek name is Hermes Trismegistus. Although this legendary Hermes has often been identified as a divine patron of magic, Copenhaver has shown that the Greek Hermetic texts recovered in the fifteenth century by Marsilio Ficino are not about magic: their topic is a religious practice aiming at personal salvation.
|
