Our Events

A webinar lecture with Richard Oosterhoff (University of Edinburgh). Part of our summer webinar series on "Reason and Beauty in Renaissance Christian Thought and Culture," presented in collaboration with the American Cusanus Society Perspective drawing, map-making, musical harmonics, astronomy, and number theory—these were all mathematical disciplines in the Renaissance. We tend to link measuring sounds, sights, and sensations with outstanding philosophers, from Nicholas of Cusa to Galileo and Descartes. But every university student met these topics, in their first textbooks. This webinar will focus on the hugely popular Paris master and humanist Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples (c. 1455–1536), who wove a programme of...

A webinar lecture with Douglas Hedley (University of Cambridge). Part of our summer webinar series on "Reason and Beauty in Renaissance Christian Thought and Culture," presented in collaboration with the American Cusanus Society The Cambridge Platonists are the first modern Platonists. They are a group of English philosophers around the University of Cambridge in the seventeenth-century, in the context of reformed theology and the English Civil War. Yet while accepting the New Science of Copernicus and Galileo, they offer a fierce protest against mechanism and naturalism. Their notion of aesthetics and beauty--as historian Ernst Cassirer correctly saw--was one of the sources of...