Music and Mind in the Renaissance

FAIN: FEL-263043-19

Giuseppe Gerbino
Columbia University (New York, NY 10027-7922)

Preparation for publication of a book about music, sound perception, and pre-Cartesian theories of mind in the Renaissance.

My proposed project concerns pre-Cartesian theories of mind as they relate to music and sound perception in the Renaissance. Music occupies a special and at times difficult position in the early modern history of the philosophy of mind. In Greek antiquity, Plato sought to explain the emotional hold that music has on human beings by postulating an ontological relationship between the mathematical ratios expressing musical intervals and the harmonic constitution of the human soul. Gregor Reisch’s Margarita Philosophica, one of the textbooks adopted in German, French, and Italian universities during the Renaissance, well summarizes this point: “Since everything welcomes what is similar and rejects what is dissimilar, Plato argues that our soul is composed of musical proportions.” However, Aristotle rejected the notion that the soul is a harmonious musical-mathematical construct (De anima I, 4). Given their interest in recovering Ancient Greek culture, Renaissance writers had to face this conceptual conflict: Is there really a structural congruence between music and soul as Plato claimed? And if so, can such congruence be reconciled with an Aristotelian understanding of the operations of the mind? Ultimately, the problem was to choose or find a compromise between the Platonic “harmonic” soul and the Aristotelean “organic” soul. Music stood at the crossroad of this conceptual topology as a theoretically ambiguous object of sensation and cognition.