Medicina y política en Francesco Patrizi: el cuerpo de La Ciudad Feliz
Besides some disagreements, La citta felice of Francesco Patrizi has usually been considered both as a work belonging to the utopian genre of sixteenth century or as a philosophical portrait of the real Venice. In this essay, I maintain, instead, that La citta felice was born in Patrizi’s mind from his attempt to support the Aristotelian political, aristocratic, order and to justify it according to the principles of the philosophical and Platonic medicine of Marsilio Ficino. Such an attempt led him to describe the polis as a human body, applying the Hippocratic-Galenic system to explain its internal functions and considering that the political order of the city arises from the civic body’s needs for maintaining the quantity and quality of natural, vital and animal spiritus.
Amor, spiritus, melancholía
En la tradición platónica CUERPO y ALMA son muy desemejantes: el alma (anima, 4ux.i)) es, por definición, <tmobilis in se)> (o automóvil); el cuerpo, ccmobilis ab alio),. El alma, por tanto, es el principio y el origen del movimiento en todo cuerpo, el cua1 se mueve precisamente en virtud del alma. Si esta -de manera definitiva (muerte) o temporal (éxtasis, sueño)abandonara el cuerpo, éste quedaria tendido e inmóvil como materia ccin-animada), '. Ahora bien, tal desemejanza plantea problemas de relación entre ambos, pues naturalezas tan desemejantes s610 pueden entrar en contacto a través de un intermediario, un cctertium quid), que haga de transición. Es conocido el principio ficiniano de que <(a summo usque ad imum omnia per media transeunt),. La tradición neoplatónica señala que este punto intermedi0 entre alma y cuerpo, por el cua1 el uno entra en comunicación con la otra, es el SPIRITUS, y de nuevo Ficino nos dice en el comentari0 al Banquete de Platón que <(tria profecto in nobis esse videntur, anima, spiritus atque corpus. Anima et corpus natura longe inter se diversa spiritu medio copulantur)> (discurso VI, cap. 6). Ya sabemos que en Platón el alma es precisamente habitante del
Work, Status, and Income: Men in the American Occupational Structure since the Late Nineteenth Century
The historical record rarely presents researchers with precisely the evidence they desire. This is particularly true for social historians and like-minded scholars, whose subjects left precious few signs of their passing. Consequently, certain data have borne a disproportionate evidentiary load in social-historical research. The occupation a person pursued is one key piece of information on which scholars have come to depend. Our understanding of the historical social structure and where people fit into it is bound up with the interpretation of occupations. But this reliance on occupation as the primary social locator in historical research depends on some largely unexamined premises. Whether scholars group occupations or convert them into numerical status measures, they make assumptions about the nature of the occupational structure. When researchers incorporate change over time into their analyses, they suggest that the meaning of occupations remained stable for the purpose of measuring social mobility, class position, or group status-attainment. This assumption has been the subject of little discussion and even less research. For all the use to which historians have put occupation, there has been little effort to assess systematically its stability as a social or economic indicator.