Lecture N 4.

RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY.
CONTENTS:
1. Introduction
2. Objectives
3. The Humanistic background of the Renaissance
4. Basic principles and attitudes
4.1. Classicism
4.2. Realism
4.3. Critical scrutiny and concern with detail
4.4. The emergence of the individual and the idea of the dignity of humanity
4.5. Active virtue
5. Humanist themes in Renaissance thought
6. Northern Humanism
7. Humanism and philosophy
8. Political philosophy
9. Philosophy of nature
10. Conclusion
Bibliography:
1. Abbagnano, Nicola. “Renaissance Humanism” in Philip P. Wiener, ed. The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, (1974) online
edition
2. Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), a famous classic; excerpt and text search 2007 edition; also complete text online
3. Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 1. The Renaissance (1903).
4. Campbell, Gordon. The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance. (2003). 4000 entries in 862 pp.; online at OUP
5. Cook, James Wyatt. Encyclopedia of Renaissance Literature. (2005). 598 pp.
6. Ferguson, Wallace K. Europe in Transition, 1300–1520 (1962).
7. Fletcher, Stella. The Longman Companion to Renaissance Europe, 1390-1530. (2000). 347 pp.
8. Grendler, Paul F., ed. Encyclopedia of the Renaissance. (6 vol. 1999). 3000 pp.
9. Grendler, Paul F., ed. The Renaissance: An Encyclopedia for Students. (2003). 970 pp.
10. Hale, John. The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance. (1994). 648 pp.
11. Hattaway, Michael, ed. A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture. (2000). 747 pp.
12. Johnson, Paul. The Renaissance: A Short History. (2000). 197 pp. excerpt and text search
13. Nauert, Charles G. Historical Dictionary of the Renaissance. (2004). 541 pp.
1. Introduction
As we learned in the previous lecture Western philosophy in the Middle Ages was primarily a
religious philosophy, complementing the divine revelation, reflecting the feudal order in its cosmology, and
devoting itself in no small measure to the institutional tasks of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Renaissance of the late 15th and 16th centuries presented a different set of problems and
therefore suggested different lines of philosophical endeavor.
a) Inventions
What is called the European Renaissance followed the introduction of three novel mechanical
inventions from the East: gunpowder, block printing from movable type, and the compass.
The first was used to explode the massive fortifications of the feudal order and thus became an agent
of the new spirit of nationalism that threatened the rule of churchmen—and, indeed, the universalist
emphasis of the church itself—with a competing secular power.
The second, printing -
 widely propagated knowledge,
 secularized learning,
 reduced the intellectual monopoly of the ecclesiastical elite
 and restored the literary and philosophical classics of Greece and Rome.
The third, the compass –
 increased the safety and scope of navigation,
 produced the voyages of discovery that opened up the Western Hemisphere,
 and symbolized a new spirit of physical adventure
 and a new scientific interest in the structure of the natural world.
Each invention, with its wider cultural consequences, presented new intellectual problems and
novel philosophical tasks within a changing political and social environment.
b) Reconsideration and reforms
As the power of a single religious authority slowly eroded under the influence of the Protestant
Reformation and as the prestige of the universal Latin language gave way to vernacular tongues,
philosophers became less and less identified with their positions in the ecclesiastical hierarchy and more
and more identified with their national origins.
Knowledge in the contemporary world is conventionally divided among the natural sciences, the
social sciences, and the humanities. In the Renaissance, however, fields of learning had not yet become so
sharply departmentalized. Each division arose in the comprehensive and broadly inclusive area of
philosophy.
As the Renaissance mounted its revolt against the reign of religion and reacted
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  against the church,
 against authority,
 against Scholasticism, and Aristotle,
there was a sudden blossoming of interest in problems centering on
 humankind,
 civil society,
 and nature.
These three areas corresponded exactly to the three dominant strands of Renaissance philosophy:
 humanism,
 political philosophy,
 and the philosophy of nature.
2. Objectives
In this chapter, you will pay attention to the following questions: the humanistic background, the
ideal of humanitas, the basic principles and attitudes, the humanist themes in Renaissance thought, Northern
humanism, humanism and philosophy, the political philosophy, and the philosophy of nature.
3. The humanistic background of the Renaissance
Although the spirit of the Renaissance ultimately took many forms, it was expressed earliest by the
intellectual movement called Humanism. Humanism was initiated by secular men of letters rather than by
the scholar-clerics who had dominated medieval intellectual life and had developed the Scholastic
philosophy. Humanism began and achieved fruition first in Italy. Its predecessors were men like Dante
(1265–1321) and Petrarch, and its chief protagonists included Gianozzo Manetti (1396–1459), Leonardo
Bruni (c. 1370–1444), Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), Lorenzo
Valla (1407–57), and Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406).
Humanism had several significant features.
 it took human nature in all of its various manifestations and achievements as its subject.
 it stressed the unity and compatibility of the truth found in all philosophical and theological schools and
systems, a doctrine known as syncretism.
 it emphasized the dignity of human beings. In place of the medieval ideal of a life of penance as the highest and
noblest form of human activity, the humanists looked to the struggle of creation and the attempt to exert
mastery over nature.
 Finally, humanism looked forward to a rebirth of a lost human spirit and wisdom.
In the course of striving to recover it, however, the humanists assisted in the consolidation of a new
spiritual and intellectual outlook and the development of a new body of knowledge. The effect of
humanism was to help people
 break free from the mental strictures imposed by religious orthodoxy,
 to inspire free inquiry and criticism,
 and to inspire new confidence in the possibilities of human thought and creations.
From Italy the new humanist spirit and the Renaissance it engendered spread north to all parts of
Europe, aided by the invention of printing, which allowed the explosive growth of literacy and the greater
availability of Classical texts. Foremost among northern humanists was Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536),
whose Praise of Folly (1509) epitomized the moral essence of humanism in its insistence on heartfelt
goodness as opposed to formalistic piety. The intellectual stimulation provided by humanists helped spark
the Reformation, from which, however, many humanists, including Erasmus, recoiled. By the end of the
16th century, the battle of Reformation and Counter-Reformation had commanded much of Europe’s energy
and attention, while the intellectual life was poised on the brink of the Enlightenment.
The ideal of Humanitas - In short, humanism called for the comprehensive reform of culture, the
transfiguration of what humanists termed the passive and ignorant society of the “dark” ages into a new
order that would reflect and encourage the grandest human potentialities. Humanism had an evangelical
dimension: it sought to project humanitas from the individual into the state at large.
4. Basic principles and attitudes of humanism.
Underlying the early expressions of humanism were principles and attitudes that gave the movement
a unique character and would shape its future development.
4.1. Classicism
Early humanists returned to the classics less with nostalgia or awe than with a sense of deep
familiarity, an impression of having been brought newly into contact with expressions of intrinsic and
permanent human reality. Petrarch dramatized his feeling of intimacy with the classics by writing
“letters” to Cicero and Livy. Salutati remarked with pleasure that possession of a copy of Cicero’s letters

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would make it possible for him to talk with Cicero. Machiavelli would later immortalize this experience in a
letter that described his reading habits in ritualistic terms.
Machiavelli’s term umanitа (“humanity”), meaning more than simply kindness, is a direct
translation of the Latin humanitas. In addition to implying that he shared with the ancients a sovereign
wisdom of human affairs, Machiavelli also describes that theory of reading as an active, and even
aggressive, pursuit common among humanists. Possessing a text and understanding its words was
insufficient. Analytic ability and a questioning attitude were essential before a reader could truly enter the
councils of the great. These councils, moreover, were not merely serious and ennobling. They held secrets
available only to the astute, secrets the knowledge of which could transform life from a chaotic
miscellany into a crucially heroic experience. Classical thought offered insight into the heart of things.
4.2. Realism
Early humanists largely shared a realism that rejected traditional assumptions and aimed instead at
objectively analyzing perceived experience. Humanism is owed to the rise of modern social science, which
emerged not as an academic discipline but rather as a practical instrument of social self-inquiry.
Humanists avidly read history, taught it to their young, and, perhaps most important, wrote it
themselves. They were confident that proper historical methods, by extending across time their grasp of
human reality, would enhance their active role in the present. Direct experience took precedence over
traditional wisdom. Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) later echoed the proclamation of Leon Battista
Alberti (1404–72), that an essential form of wisdom could be found only “at the public marketplace, in the
theatre, and in people’s homes”.
Renaissance realism also involved the unblinking examination of human uncertainty, folly, and
immorality. Petrarch’s honest investigation of his own doubts and mixed motives is born of the same
impulse that led Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) to conduct in the ‘Decameron’ (1348–53) an encyclopedic
survey of human vices and disorders. Similarly, critical treatments of society from a humanistic perspective
would be produced later by Erasmus, Thomas More (1478–1535), Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529),
Franзois Rabelais (c. 1494–1553), and Michel de Montaigne (1533–92). But it was typical of humanism
that this moral criticism did not, conversely, postulate an ideal of absolute purity. Humanists asserted the
dignity of normal earthly activities and even endorsed the pursuit of fame and the acquisition of wealth.
The emphasis on a mature and healthy balance between mind and body, first implicit in
Boccaccio, is evident in the work of Giannozzo Manetti, Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481), and Paracelsus
(1493–1541) and eloquently embodied in Montaigne’s final essay, “Of Experience.” Humanistic tradition,
rather than revolutionary inspiration, eventually led Francis Bacon to assert that passions should become
objects of systematic investigation. The realism of the humanists was, finally, brought to bear on the Roman
Catholic Church, which they called into question not as a theological structure but as a political institution.
Here as elsewhere, however, the intention was neither radical nor destructive. Humanism did not aim to
remake humanity but rather aimed to reform social order through an understanding of what was an
inalienably human.
4.3. Critical scrutiny and concern with detail
Humanistic realism supposes a comprehensively critical attitude. Indeed, the productions of early
humanism constituted a manifesto of independence, at least in the secular world, from all preconceptions
and all inherited programs. The same critical self-reliance shown by Salutati in his textual emendations
and Boccaccio in his interpretations of myth was evident in almost the whole range of humanistic
endeavors. It was cognate with a new specificity, a profound concern with the precise details of perceived
phenomena that took hold across the arts and the literary and historical disciplines and would have profound
effects on the rise of modern science.
4.4. The emergence of the individual and the idea of the dignity of humanity
a) Individualism
These attitudes took shape in concord with a sense of personal autonomy that first was evident in
Petrarch and later came to characterize humanism as a whole. Intelligence capable of critical scrutiny
and self-inquiry was by definition free intelligence. The intellectual virtue that could analyze experience
was an integral part of that more extensive virtue that could, according to many humanists, go far in
conquering fortune. The emergence of Renaissance individualism was not without its darker aspects.
Petrarch and Alberti were alert to the sense of estrangement that accompanies intellectual and moral
autonomy.
b) The idea of human dignity

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 Parallel with individualism arose, as a favorite humanistic theme, the idea of human dignity. Backed
by medieval sources but more sweeping and insistent in their approach, spokesmen such as Petrarch,
Manetti, Valla, Pico della Mirandola, Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), and Ficino asserted
humans’ earthly preeminence and unique potentialities.
4.5. Active virtue
The emphasis on virtuous action as the goal of learning was a founding principle of humanism and
continued to exert a strong influence throughout the movement. Salutati, the learned chancellor of Florence
whose words could batter cities, represented in word and deed the humanistic ideal of armed wisdom, that
combination of philosophical understanding and powerful rhetoric that alone could effect virtuous policy and
reconcile the rival claims of action and contemplation. In “On the Manners of a Gentleman and Liberal
Studies” (1402–03), a treatise that influenced Guarino Veronese (1374–1460) and Vittorino da Feltre
(1378–1446), Pietro Paolo Vergerio (c. 1369–1444) maintained that just and beneficent action was the
purpose of humanistic education.
Palmieri’s philosophical poem, “The City of Life” (1465), developed the idea that the world was
divinely ordained to test human virtue in action. Later humanism would broaden and diversify the theme of
active virtue. Machiavelli saw action not only as the goal of virtue but also as the basis for wisdom.
Castiglione, in his highly influential The Courtier (1528), developed in his ideal courtier a psychological
model for active virtue, stressing moral awareness as a key element in just action. Rabelais used the idea of
active virtue as the basis for anticlerical satire (Gargantua (1534)).
Endorsements of active virtue, as will be shown, would also characterize the work of English
humanists from Sir Thomas Elyot (c. 1490–1546) to John Milton (1608–74). They typify the sense of
social responsibility—the instinctive association of learning with politics and morality—that stood at the
heart of the movement.
5. Humanist themes in Renaissance thought
Although the humanists were not primarily philosophers and belonged to no single school of formal
thought, they had a great deal of influence on philosophy. They searched out and copied the works of ancient
authors, developed critical tools for establishing accurate texts from variant manuscripts, made translations
from Latin and Greek, and wrote commentaries that reflected their broad learning as well as their new
standards and points of view.
All of these were to have far-reaching effects on the subsequent development of European thought.
While humanists had a variety of intellectual and scholarly aims, it is fair to say that, like the ancient
Romans, they preferred moral philosophy to metaphysics. Their faith in the moral benefits of poetry and
rhetoric inspired generations of scholars and educators. Their emphasis on eloquence, worldly achievement,
and fame brought them readers and patrons among merchants and princes and employment in government
chancelleries and embassies.
Humanists were secularists in the sense that language, literature, politics, and history, rather than
“sacred subjects,” were their central interests. They defended themselves against charges from conservatives
that their preference for classical authors was ruining Christian morals and faith, arguing that a solid
grounding in the classics was the best preparation for the Christian life. This was already a perennial debate,
almost as old as Christianity itself, with neither side able to sway the other. There seems to have been little
atheism or dechristianization among the humanists or their pupils, but there were efforts to redefine the
relationship between religious and secular culture.
6. Northern Humanism
The resumption of urban growth in the second half of the 15th century coincided with the diffusion
of Renaissance ideas and educational values. Humanism offered linguistic and rhetorical skills that were
becoming indispensable for nobles and commoners seeking careers in diplomacy and government
administration, while the Renaissance ideal of the perfect gentleman was a cultural style that had great
appeal in this age of growing courtly refinement. At first many who wanted a humanist education went to
Italy. By the end of the century, however, such northern cities as London, Paris, Antwerp, and Augsburg
were becoming centers of humanist activity rivaling Italy’s. The development of printing, by making books
cheaper and more plentiful, also quickened the diffusion of humanism.
Northern humanism (i.e., humanism outside Italy) was essentially Christian in spirit and
purpose, in contrast to the essentially secular nature of Italian humanism. Christian humanism was more
than a scholarship program, however; it was fundamentally a conception of the Christian life grounded in the
rhetorical, historical, and ethical orientation of humanism itself. That it came to the fore in the early 16th
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century was the result of various factors, including the spiritual stresses of rapid social change and the
inability of the ecclesiastical establishment to cope with the religious needs of an increasingly literate
and self-confident laity.
By restoring the Gospel to the center of Christian piety, the humanists believed they were better
serving the needs of ordinary people. They attacked Scholastic theology as an arid intellectualization of
simple faith and lamented the tendency of religion to become a ritual practiced vicariously through a priest
Humanists also despised the whole late-medieval apparatus of relic mongering, hagiology, indulgences, and
image worship and ridiculed it in their writings, sometimes with devastating effect. According to Christian
humanists, the fundamental law of Christianity was the law of love as revealed by Jesus Christ in the Gospel.
Love, peace, and simplicity should be the aims of the good Christian, and the life of Christ his perfect
model.
The outbreak of the Reformation polarized European society along confessional lines, with the
paradoxical result that the Christian humanists, who had done so much to lay the groundwork for religious
reform, ended by being suspect on both sides—by the Roman Catholics and by the Protestants. Toleration
belonged to the future, after the killing in the name of Christ sickened and passions had cooled.
7. Humanism and philosophy
Renaissance humanism was predicated upon the victory of rhetoric over dialectic and of Plato over
Aristotle as the cramped format of the Scholastic philosophical method gave way to a Platonic
discursiveness. Much of this transformation had been prepared by Italian scholarly initiatives in the early
15th century.
Except in the writings of Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno, the direct influence of
Platonism on Renaissance metaphysics is difficult to trace. The Platonic account of the moral virtues,
however, was admirably adapted to the requirements of Renaissance education, serving as a philosophical
foundation of the Renaissance ideal of the courtier and gentleman. Yet Plato also represented the importance
of mathematics and the Pythagorean attempt to discover the secrets of the heavens, the earth, and the world
of nature in terms of numbers and exact calculation. This aspect of Platonism influenced Renaissance
science as well as philosophy. The scientists Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), Johannes Kepler (1571–
1630), and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) owe a great deal to the general climate of Pythagorean confidence
in the explanatory power of numbers.
The recovery of the Greek and Latin classics, which was the work of humanism, profoundly
affected the entire field of Renaissance and early modern philosophy and science through the ancient
schools of philosophy to which it once more directed attention. In addition to Platonism, the most notable of
these schools were atomism, Skepticism, and Stoicism. De rerum natura, by the Epicurean philosopher
Lucretius, influenced Galileo, Bruno, and later Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), a modern follower of
Epicurus (341–270 bce), through the insights into nature reflected in this work.
8. Political philosophy
As secular authority replaced ecclesiastical authority and the dominant interest of the age shifted
from religion to politics, it was natural that the rivalries of the national states and their persistent crises of
internal order should raise with renewed urgency philosophical problems, practically dormant since pre-
Christian times, about the nature and the moral status of political power. This new preoccupation with
national unity, internal security, state power, and international justice stimulated the growth of political
philosophy in Italy, France, England, and Holland.
In Italy Machiavelli, sometimes state secretary of the Florentine republic, explored techniques for
the seizure and retention of power in ways that seemed to exalt “reasons of state” above morality. His
‘The Prince’ and ‘Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy’ codified the actual practices of Renaissance
diplomacy for the next 100 years. In fact, Machiavelli was motivated by patriotic hopes for the ultimate
unification of Italy and by the conviction that the moral standards of contemporary Italians needed to be
elevated by restoring the ancient Roman virtues. More than half a century later, the French political
philosopher Jean Bodin (1530–96) insisted that the state must possess a single, unified, and absolute
power. He thus developed in detail the doctrine of national sovereignty as the source of all legal
legitimacy.
In England, Thomas Hobbes, who was to become a tutor to the future king Charles II (1630–85),
developed the fiction that in the “state of nature” that preceded civilization, “every man’s hand was
raised against every other” and human life was accordingly “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
A social contract was thus agreed upon to convey all private rights to a single sovereign in return for general
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protection and the institution of a reign of law. Because the law is simply “the command of the sovereign,”
Hobbes at once turned justice into a by-product of power and denied any right of rebellion except when the
sovereign becomes too weak to protect the commonwealth or to hold it together.
In Holland, a prosperous and tolerant commercial republic in the 17th century, the issues of
political philosophy took a different form. The Dutch East India Company commissioned a great jurist,
Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), to write a defense of their trading rights and their free access to the seas, and
the resulting two treatises, ‘The Freedom of the Seas’ (1609) and ‘On the Law of War and Peace’ (1625),
was the first significant codifications of international law.
In general, the political philosophy of the Renaissance and the early modern period was dualistic: it
was haunted, even confused, by the conflict between political necessity and general moral responsibility.
Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes asserted claims that justified the actions of Italian despotism and
absolutism of the Bourbon and Stuart dynasties. Yet Machiavelli was obsessed with the problem of human
virtue, Bodin insisted that even the sovereign ought to obey the law, and Hobbes found the rational
motivation that causes a person to seek security and peace in natural law.
9. Philosophy of nature
Philosophy in the modern world is a self-conscious discipline. It has managed to define itself
narrowly, distinguishing itself on the one hand from religion and on the other from an exact science. But
this narrowing of focus came about quite late in its history—certainly not before the 18th century. The
earliest philosophers of ancient Greece were theorists of the physical world. Pythagoras and Plato were
philosophers and mathematicians at once; in Aristotle, there is no clear distinction between philosophy and
natural science. The Renaissance and early modern period continued this breadth of conception
characteristic of the Greeks. Galileo and Descartes were at once mathematicians, physicists, and
philosophers, while physics retained the name natural philosophy at least until the death of Sir Isaac
Newton (1642–1727).
The great new fact that confronted the Renaissance was the immediacy, immensity, and uniformity of
the natural world. But what was of primary importance was the new perspective through which this fact was
interpreted. To the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages, the universe was hierarchical, organic, and God-
ordained. To the philosophers of the Renaissance, it was pluralistic, machinelike, and mathematically
ordered. In the Middle Ages, scholars thought in terms of purposes, goals, and divine intentions.
Renaissance scholars thought in terms of forces, mechanical agencies, and physical causes. All this was
clarified by the end of the 15th century.
Here are enunciated respectively (1) the principle of empiricism, (2) the primacy of mechanistic
science, and (3) faith in mathematical explanation. It is upon these three doctrines, as upon a rock, that
Renaissance and early modern science and philosophy were built.
10. Conclusion
During the period of the Renaissance, many things changed from Medieval Times. Many inventions
of this day evolved from the Renaissance.
Inventing of the printing press brought many influences on the world in education in politics,
economy, and society.
New ideas were distributed throughout the world, changing the way how people think. Humanism
changed how people viewed their lives. The exchange of cultures was distributed. Secularism varied the
view of religion to people. Individualism shaped the view of individuals.