Renaissance philosophy
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The designation "Renaissance philosophy" is used by historians of philosophy to refer to the thought of the period running in Europe roughly between 1400 and 1600.
Continuities
The structure, sources, method, and topics of philosophy in the Renaissance had much in common with those of previous centuries.
Structure of philosophy
Particularly since the recovery of a great portion of Aristotelian writings in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it became clear that, in addition to Aristotle's writings on logic, which had already been known, there were numerous others roughly having to do with natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and metaphysics. These areas provided the structure for the philosophy curriculum of the emerging universities. The general assumption was that the most 'scientific' branches of philosophy were those that were more theoretical and therefore more widely applicable. During the Renaissance too, many thinkers saw these as the main philosophical areas, with logic providing a training of the mind to approach the other three.
Sources of philosophy
A similar continuity can be seen in the case of sources. Although Aristotle was never an unquestioned authority[2] (he was more often than not a springboard for discussion, and his opinions were often discussed along those of others, or the teaching of Holy Scripture), medieval lectures in physics consisted of reading Aristotle's Physics, lessons in moral philosophy consisted of examinations of his Nicomachean Ethics (and often his Politics), and metaphysics was approached through his Metaphysics. The assumption that Aristotle's works were foundational to an understanding of philosophy did not wane during the Renaissance, which saw a flourishing of new translations, commentaries, and other interpretations of his works, both in Latin and in the vernacular.[3] After the Reformation, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics continued to be the main authority for the discipline of ethics at Protestant universities until the late seventeenth century, with over fifty Protestant commentaries published on the Nicomachean Ethics before 1682.[4]
In terms of method, philosophy was considered during the late Middle Ages as a subject that required robust enquiry on the part of people trained in the subject's technical vocabulary. Philosophical texts and problems were typically approached through university lectures and 'questions'. The latter, similar in some ways to modern debates, examined the pros and cons of particular philosophical positions or interpretations. They were one of the cornerstones of the '
Topics in philosophy
Given the remarkable range of
Discontinuities
Having established that many aspects of philosophy were held in common during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it will now be useful to discuss in what areas changes were afoot. The same outline as above will be used, to show that within trends of continuity one can also find surprising differences.
Sources of philosophy
It is therefore useful to reconsider what was mentioned above about philosophical sources. The Renaissance saw a significant broadening of source material. Plato, known directly only through two and a half dialogues in the Middle Ages, came to be known through numerous Latin translations in fifteenth century Italy, culminating in the hugely influential translation of his complete works by
Other movements from ancient philosophy also re-entered the mainstream. While this was seldom the case for
Structure of philosophy
While generally the Aristotelian structure of the branches of philosophy stayed in place, interesting developments and tensions were taking place within them. In
Other important figures, such as
Method of philosophy
If, as mentioned above, scholasticism continued to flourish, the Italian humanists (i.e., lovers and practitioners of the humanities) challenged its supremacy. As we have seen, they believed that philosophy could be brought under the wing of rhetoric. They also thought that the scholarly discourse of their time needed to return to the elegance and precision of its classical models. They therefore tried dressing philosophy in a more appealing garb than had their predecessors, whose translations and commentaries were in technical Latin and sometimes simply transliterated the Greek. In 1416–1417, Leonardo Bruni, the pre-eminent humanist of his time and chancellor of Florence, re-translated Aristotle's Ethics into a more flowing, idiomatic and classical Latin. He hoped to communicate the elegance of Aristotle's Greek while also making the text more accessible to those without a philosophical education. Others, including Nicolò Tignosi in Florence around 1460, and the Frenchman Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples in Paris in the 1490s, tried to please the humanists either by including in their commentaries on Aristotle appealing historical examples or quotations from poetry, or by avoiding the standard scholastic format of questions, or both.
The driving conviction was that philosophy should be freed of its technical jargon so that more people would be able to read it. At the same time, all kinds of summaries, paraphrases, and dialogues dealing with philosophical issues were prepared, in order to give their topics a wider dissemination. Humanists also encouraged the study of Aristotle and other writers of antiquity in the original.
Other important figures were Benedetto Varchi, Bernardo Segni and Giambattista Gelli, all of them active in Florence. Efforts got underway to present Plato's doctrines in the vernacular as well. This rise of vernacular philosophy, which quite predated the Cartesian approach, is a new field of research whose contours are only now beginning to be clarified.[9]
Topics in philosophy
It is very hard to generalize about the ways in which discussions of philosophical topics shifted in the Renaissance, mainly because to do so requires a detailed map of the period, something we do not yet have. We know that debates about the freedom of the will continued to flare up (for instance, in the famous exchanges between Erasmus and Martin Luther), that Spanish thinkers were increasingly obsessed with the notion of nobility, that duelling was a practice that generated a large literature in the sixteenth century (was it permissible or not?).
Earlier histories gave perhaps undue attention to Pietro Pomponazzi's pronouncements on the immortality of the soul as a question that could not be resolved philosophically in a way consistent with Christianity, or to Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, as if these were signals of the period's increasing secularism or even atheism. In fact, the most successful compendium of natural philosophy in the period (Compendium philosophiae naturalis, first published in 1530) was authored by Frans Titelmans, a Franciscan friar from the Low Countries whose work has a very strong religious flavour.[10] We must not forget that most philosophers of the time were at least nominal, if not devout, Christians, that the sixteenth century saw both the Protestant and the Catholic reformations, and that Renaissance philosophy culminates with the period of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). In other words, religion had a massive importance in the period, and one can hardly study philosophy without remembering this.
This is true among others for the philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who reinterpreted Plato in the light of his early Greek commentators and also of Christianity. Ficino hoped that a purified philosophy would bring about a religious renewal in his society and therefore transformed distasteful aspects of Platonic philosophy (for instance, the homosexual love exalted in the Symposium) into spiritual love (i.e., Platonic love), something later transformed by Pietro Bembo and Baldassare Castiglione in the early sixteenth century as something also applicable to relationships between men and women. Ficino and his followers also had an interest in 'hidden knowledge', mainly because of his belief that all of ancient knowledge was interconnected (Moses, for instance, had received his insights from the Greeks, who in turn had received them from others, all according to God's plan and therefore mutually consistent; Hermeticism is relevant here). Although Ficino's interest in and practice of astrology was not uncommon in his time, one should not necessarily associate it with philosophy, as the two were usually considered to be quite separate and often in contradiction with each other.
In conclusion, like any other moment in the history of thought Renaissance philosophy cannot be considered to have provided something entirely new nor to have continued for centuries to repeat the conclusions of its predecessors. Historians call this period the 'Renaissance' in order to indicate the rebirth that took place of ancient (particularly classical) perspectives, sources, attitudes toward literature and the arts. At the same time, we realize that every re-appropriation is constrained and even guided by contemporary concerns and biases. It was no different for the period considered here: the old was mixed with and changed by the new, but while no claims can be made for a revolutionary new starting point in philosophy, in many ways the synthesis of Christianity, Aristotelianism, and Platonism offered by Thomas Aquinas was torn apart in order to make way for a new one, based on more complete and varied sources, often in the original, and certainly attuned to new social and religious realities and a much broader public.
Renaissance philosophers
- Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406)
- Gemistus Pletho(1355–1452)
- Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444)
- Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464)
- Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472)
- Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457)
- Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499)
- Antonio de Nebrija (1444–1522)
- Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1524)
- Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494)
- Erasmus of Rotterdam(1466–1536)
- Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527)
- Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543)
- Thomas More (1478–1535)
- Charles de Bovelles (1479–1553)
- Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540)
- Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546)
- Martin Luther (1490–1546)
- Martín de Azpilcueta (1492–1586)
- Domingo de Soto (1494–1560)
- Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573)
- Bernardino Telesio (1509–1588)
- Diego de Covarrubias y Leyva (1512–1577)
- Luis de León (1527–1591)
- Jean Bodin (1529–1596)
- Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
- Luis de Molina (1536–1600)
- Juan de Mariana (1536–1624)
- Tycho Brahe (1546–1601)
- Joest Lips(1547-1606)
- Giordano Bruno (1548–1600)
- Francisco Suárez (1548–1617)
- Gabriel Vásquez (1549 or 1551–1604)
- Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
- Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
- Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639)
- Johannes Kepler (1571–1630)
- Giulio Cesare Vanini(1585–1619)
See also
- Age of Enlightenment
- Hermeticism
- Renaissance humanism
- Renaissance magic
- Platonism in the Renaissance
- Second scholasticism
References
- ^ "Renaissance philosophy - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy".
- ^ Luca Bianchi, '“Aristotele fu un uomo e poté errare”: sulle origini medievali della critica al “principio di autorità”', in idem, Studi sull'aristotelismo del Rinascimento (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2003), pp. 101–24.
- ^ Charles B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
- S2CID 237798959.
- ^ Helpful if weighty guides to philosophical topics in the period are The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. by Norman Kretzman et al., and The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt et al.
- ^ James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1990, 1991).
- ^ On the melding of various traditions in moral philosophy see especially Jill Kraye, 'Moral Philosophy', in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy.
- ^ David A. Lines, Aristotle's Ethics in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650): The Universities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 271–72.
- ^ For now see Luca Bianchi, 'Per una storia dell'aristotelismo “volgare” nel Rinascimento: problemi e prospettive di ricerca', Bruniana & Campanelliana, 15.2 (2009), 367–85.
- ^ David A. Lines, 'Teaching Physics in Louvain and Bologna: Frans Titelmans and Ulisse Aldrovandi', in Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Emidio Campi, Simone De Angelis, Anja-Silvia Goeing, Anthony T. Grafton in cooperation with Rita Casale, Jürgen Oelkers and Daniel Tröhler (Geneva: Droz, 2008), 183–203.
Bibliography
- Copenhaver, Brian P., & Schmitt, Charles B., Renaissance Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
- Hankins, James, (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Riedl, John O., A Catalogue of Renaissance Philosophers (1350–1650), Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1940.
- Schmitt, Charles B., Skinner, Quentin (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
External links
- Media related to Renaissance philosophy at Wikimedia Commons
- Renaissance philosophy at PhilPapers
- Soldato, Eva Del. "Natural Philosophy in the Renaissance". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- "Renaissance philosophy". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy, c. 1400 – c. 1650
- Pico Project