Brian P. Copenhaver

Brian P. Copenhaver

Fellow: Awarded 2011
Field of Study: Philosophy

Competition: US & Canada

University of California, Los Angeles

Brian Copenhaver is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and History in UCLA’s Departments of Philosophy and History; he also holds the Udvar-Hazy Chair of Philosophy and History. Until June 2003, he served as a Dean or a Provost for twenty-two years, fifteen of them in the University of California and, most recently, for ten years as Provost of UCLA’s College of Letters and Science. He now directs UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Lyons in France, and, as a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, he pursued postdoctoral studies at the Warburg Institute of the University of London (1975-76).

He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, past President of the Journal of the History of Philosophy and a member of the Council of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento in Italy. He serves or has served on the board of Rinascimento, Renaissance Quarterly, Annals of Science, the Journal of the History of Ideas, Early Science and Medicine, the International Archives of the History of Ideas, and the I Tatti Renaissance Library. He is the founding co-editor of a new journal, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Medieval Academy of America, and by a Fulbright Scholarship. He has been the principal investigator on institutional grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Arcadia Foundation, and the Alcoa Foundation.

He studies philosophy and science in late medieval and early modern Europe. His publications include books on Symphorien Champier; the Hermetica; Renaissance philosophy (1992); Polydore Vergil’s On Discovery; Lorenzo Valla’s Dialectical Disputations; and modern Italian philosophy; as well as articles on magic, astrology, the Hermetica, Cabala and their foundations in Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, and scholastic philosophy; natural philosophy; scepticism; Averroism; philosophical translation; modern Italian philosophy; historiography; the classical tradition in philosophy; Lorenzo Valla; Marsilio Ficino; Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; Lorenzo de’ Medici; Polydore Vergil; Tommaso Campanella; Isaac Newton; Henry More; Giovanni Gentile; and Benedetto Croce.

 

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