Download or read book Sperone Speroni and the Debate over Sophistry in the Italian Renaissance written by Teodoro Katinis and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Sperone Speroni and the Debate over Sophistry in the Italian Renaissance Teodoro Katinis mines a number of little or unstudied primary sources and offers the first book on the rebirth of ancient sophists in the Italian literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Leonardo Bruni to Jacopo Mazzoni, with a focus on the Italian writer and philosopher Sperone Speroni (1500-1588). Katinis convincingly argues that Speroni is a unique case of an early modern thinker who explicitly rejected Plato’s demonization and defended the public role of the sophistic rhetoric, which enhanced the debate over the sophistic arts and scepticism in a variety of fields and anticipated some of the most revolutionary modern thoughts.