Lux intelligibilis: What's in a Metaphor? - Inaugural Lecture -Professor Dilwyn Knox (UCL Italian)

Lux intelligibilis: What's in a Metaphor? We say ‘I see what you mean’. We speak of the Enlightenment. What is this inner light that helps us think? Who discovered it? What does it do? Why has it inspired for centuries the most pervasive metaphors used to describe how we think? Why are we heliotropes rather than dung beetles in our quest for knowledge? And what does it matter or, rather, why has it mattered to some people so much that they have become martyrs in its name? And what on earth - or for heaven’s sake? - has it to do with the Renaissance. A passage written in a villa just outside fifteenth-century Florence will, it is hoped, shed some light and clarify all. Dilwyn Knox is Director of the School of European Languages Culture & Society. His main interests are late medieval and Renaissance cosmology and philosophy, particularly Nicolaus Copernicus, Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno.