Humanism, scholasticism, and Renaissance philosophy

The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, 2007

Et Amicorum: Essays on Renaissance Humanism and Philosophy, 2018

This volume is offered as an affectionate tribute to Professor Jill Kraye, long one of the intellectual lights of the Warburg Institute, London, as well as one of the world's leading scholars of Renaissance philosophy and humanism, the two interconnected subjects of this volume. Jill supervised each of our doctoral dissertations, Margaret's in 1997-2001, and Anthony's in 2007-10, and has remained close to us since then, continuing to offer her friendship, professional guidance, and expertise, not to mention stepping in now and then to solve Latin quandaries. Of course, Jill has had a host of other students at both the master's and doctoral levels, all of whom have fond memories and the deepest respect for her. For this volume we have assembled as many of them as were able to participate:

New Horizons for Early Modern European Scholarship, 2021

Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy presents a glittering fresco of grandiloquent personalities and cultural dynamism, the colors of which gleam brighter because of their contrast to his briefly sketched medieval dystopia. Burckhardt, of course, did not introduce this dichotomy; it was Petrarch who “created” the Middle Ages. Modern scholars have recognized the artificiality of Petrarchan-Burckhardtian periodization, and medievalists, in particular, have railed against it. Yet in spite of copious evidence for continuities between medieval and Renaissance intellectual life, students, and many scholars, still contrast an ahistorical, otherworldly, clerical intellectual culture of the period before 1300 with a secular, classicizing, and anthropocentric Renaissance agenda. Although specialists would eschew this stark dichotomy, those trained as medievalists continue to focus on scholasticism when they discuss 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th century intellectual life, while those trained as early modernists highlight everything that was (or was claimed to be) novel about the humanists’ program. This chapter argues that a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the emergence of humanism requires, first, that scholars examine the records of schools, courts, and chanceries with the care of researchers like Robert Black and Ronald Witt. Second, it demands that medievalists and early modernists adopt, or at least borrow, each other’s research tools and questions. What are the post-Augustinian, as well as the classical, sources for a humanistic text? How do figures like Marsilio of Padua, Nicholas of Cusa, and Pietro Pompanazzi evince or disdain a new historical approach? Substantive intellectual changes can only be identified by modern scholars who are equipped to distinguish between the inflammatory rhetoric of eager self-promoters and novel ways of thinking. Recognizing the true importance of humanism within early modern European culture requires better understanding of its continuing interaction with earlier scholarly practices.

This entry examines the humanist articulation of three key philosophical relations: being and seeming, virtue and fortune, and stasis and mutability. These relations address matters of epistemology (knowing), ethics, and ontol-ogy (reality). Humanists, when grappling with these concerns, resorted to alternative approaches. They identified reality on the basis of the stability of reason, which could ground an objective view of things. In this sense, they became finders of wisdom. Or, as seekers of wisdom, they acknowledged the transience of phenomena, which they confronted in their awareness of illusion and limited vision. If they grounded their role as objective expositors of the truth of things on the traditional concept of the animal rationale, they also celebrated the new force of the homo ludens, the philosopher at play, who participates in the unveiling of reality through masking and seeming, and also intersubjec-tively, through conversations with others.

The Brill Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World, 2014

Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. M. Sgarbi and T. Katinis

This entry examines the humanist articulation of three key philosophical relations: being and seeming, virtue and fortune, and stasis and mutability. These relations address matters of epistemology (knowing), ethics, and ontol-ogy (reality). Humanists, when grappling with these concerns, resorted to alternative approaches. They identified reality on the basis of the stability of reason, which could ground an objective view of things. In this sense, they became finders of wisdom. Or, as seekers of wisdom, they acknowledged the transience of phenomena, which they confronted in their awareness of illusion and limited vision. If they grounded their role as objective expositors of the truth of things on the traditional concept of the animal rationale, they also celebrated the new force of the homo ludens, the philosopher at play, who participates in the unveiling of reality through masking and seeming, and also intersubjectively, through conversations with others.

Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 2018

This paper examines a facet in the long history of Italian Renaissance humanism: how later historians of philology understood Renaissance humanists. These later recon-siderations framed the legacies of Italian Renaissance humanism, at times by asking whether the primary contribution of humanism was philosophical or philological. Philologists-especially from nineteenth-century Germany in the generations before Voigt and Burckhardt-wrote about Renaissance humanists by employing prosopog-raphy and bio-bibliographic models. Rather than studying humanists and their works for their own merits, the authors of these histories sought to legitimize their own disciplinary identities by recognizing them as intellectual ancestors. Their writings, in turn, helped lay the foundation for later scholarship on Italian Renaissance humanism and defined, in particular, how later twentieth-century historians of philology and scholarship understood the Italian Renaissance.

The recent debates about justification have compelled scholars to reassess the traditional understanding of the doctrine, particularly considering whether the interpretation of the New Testament have been overly shaped by a sixteenth-century lens. These critiques indicate the need not only to revisit what the biblical texts say, but also to properly understand the history of Christian witness in the development of our theology. In important ways, it is accurate to say that the historiography of the Reformation is "no more and no less the historiography of the Renaissance." 1 Paul Oskar Kristeller paved the way for recognizing this reality in his groundbreaking study that overturned the prevailing view that Renaissance Humanism was an anti-Christian philosophical system distinct from the Reformation. 2 He demonstrated that Renaissance Humanism is better understood to have been a cultural and educational program which was influential on the emergence of the Reformation movement. 3 Two of the most important elements of humanism for the Reformation were the textual and philological return to 1 Bard Thompson, Humanists and Reformers: A

2011

Interpretations of Renaissance Humanism, 2006

Interpretations of Renaissance Humanism, ed. Angelo Mazzocco, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006), pp. 137-153.