  As the new science took hold in the seventeenth century and as, in the eighteenth century, new styles of thinking about the history of philosophy grew, Ficino’s reputation declined. The canon-making historian of philosophy Johann Jakob Brucker wrote in the 1740s that Ficino “obtained a humble rank” because, “captivated by the trifles of later Platonists, he feigns, re-feigns, and changes Plato” (Brucker, 4.1: 55). For Brucker, as for many who followed him, the enterprise of philosophy needed to become a “critical,” rationalistic enterprise; and philosophy itself, separating itself from natural philosophy, grew ever more concerned with questions of epistemology. This is to say that philosophers’ concerns began to revolve, if sometimes only obliquely and unconsciously, around the question of how a formally distinct, “extension-less” mind could know things about and within an exterior world to which it was fundamentally unconnected. Citizens of this new philosophical republic had little time for semi-mythical ancient sages, hidden natural sympathies, and the interpretive style of philosophizing (concerned more with styles of life and less with systematic theories) at which Ficino so excelled. Yet his thought permeated many aspects of western intellectual life. Making Plato and Platonism respectable subjects of research and philosophical reflection; embracing a broad view of human religious history; and focusing overtly, through practice as well as theory, on the importance of teaching the young: these aspects of his achievements and more make Ficino a Renaissance philosopher worth remembering today.