Universitat de València

The López Piñero Institute organises the seminar "Francesco Patrizi and his dialogue about kisses", taught by Susana Gómez.

The López Piñero Institute for the History of Medicine and Science (joint center of the University of Valencia and the CSIC), with headquarters at the Palacio de Cerveró, presents the seminar "Francesco Patrizi and his dialogue about kisses: love, spirits and natural philosophy in the 16th century", which will take place on Tuesday 23 October, at 17:00 in the conference room of the institute. The seminar will be taught by Susana Gómez, Professor from the Department of History of Science at the Complutense University of Madrid.

The conference will approach the figure of the philosopher Francesco Patrizi da Cherso who in the 16th century wrote a short book called "Il Delfino, ovvero the bacio", a text that was never published and that a few decades ago Kristeller found buried in the archives. Traditionally, Patrizi has been labelled as a completely Neoplatonist philosopher, but he surprises us in this text with a dialogue on carnal, sensual, physical love, a dialogue about kisses, bright spirits, and things that, in theory, had very little interest to those Neoplatonists who were almost obsessed with theological and metaphysical love.

The purpose of understanding the meaning of this text in its intellectual, philosophical and scientific context of the time arises from a research work that has led and leads the speaker to visit the most unexpected places, which she aims to share with those who attend the seminar. From attempting to reconstruct the intellectual trajectory of Patrizi to going into the field of 16th-century treaties on love, from approaching the concept of aegritudo amoris to trying to understand how the Neoplatonists transformed the concept of spiritus through a synthesis of theories about medicine and animist cosmology and theological elements.

Love has always been the subject of reflection of philosophers, the main motif of poets and narrators, privileged core of artistic expression. Currently, we see how scientific research also intends to address the phenomenon of love. It seems an absolute novelty, an intrusion by science in foreign fields. However, the desire to give an account of love in naturalistic and physiological terms, far from being a novelty, is rooted in a long tradition in the history of scientific thought. Delfino of Patrizi is a beautiful and interesting chapter of this exciting story.

Susana Gómez is currently Professor of History of Science at the Complutense University of Madrid. She had previously developed her research work at the University of Bologna, the Istituto di Storia della Scienza in Florence and the Istituto per gli Studi Filosofici Naples, centres with which she still collaborates.

Her main research interests are the theory of matter and its relationship to experimental physics, as well as conceptions of light in the Italian thought of the 16th and 17th centuries. In recent years she has also studied the changes in the concept of representation in the origins of modern science, which has led her to work on issues of visual representation and the relationship between science and language conceptions. She has published several articles on these topics, and now she is preparing a book about Francesco Patrizi and his natural philosophy of love.