In the Renaissance the discipline of philosophy was based on ancient systems of thought: Aristotelianism predominantly, and to a lesser extent Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Scepticism. This continued to be the case well into the seventeenth century. As specialists in the study of classical antiquity, humanists were therefore able to make an important contribution to philosophy in this period: rediscovering ancient philosophical texts that had been lost or neglected for centuries and supplying editions, translations and commentaries both for these works and for other classical texts which had been part of the philosophical curriculum since the Middle Ages.

Though philosophers and humanists shared an interest in the same texts, their methods of approaching this material differed radically. Humanists believed that philosophical discourse, like all forms of learned communication, should be composed in a Latin style modelled on the best classical authors. The stress they laid on clarity, persuasiveness and, above all, eloquence was a deliberate challenge to the scholastics, who monopolized university teaching of philosophy and who wrote in a technical, jargonladen language, incomprehensible to non-philosophers. More importantly, humanists studied philosophical works in the same manner that they dealt with literary or historical texts, that is, as philologists.