THE MEDIEVAL INHERITANCE

‘It has been the achievement of the Italians’, wrote Poggio Bracciolini in his De nohilitate, ‘to spread to all other nations a proper understanding of humanitas, virtus and the whole art and science of living a communal life’. There is much truth in Poggio's seemingly extravagant boast. If we wish to understand the origins and development of Renaissance political thought, we must certainly focus our main attention on the city-states of the Regnum Italicum and the forms of political literature to which they gave rise.

The revival of Roman law

By the time Poggio was writing in the 1440s, the Italian city-states had already enjoyed a long and distinguished history. They first began to establish themselves as independent communes around the year 1100, and by the end of the twelfth century most of them had adopted an elective system of government centred on an official known as the podestà, so-called because he was invested with supreme power or potestas in the administration of the community's affairs. At the same time they began to evolve a new and distinctive form of political literature, a literature of advice-books devoted to explaining the duties of a podestà and how best to discharge them. The earliest known example is the anonymous Ocuius pastoralis of 1242, the doctrines of which were later expanded by Giovanni da Viterbo in his De regimine civitatum and Brunetto Latini in his Livres dou trésor, an encyclopaedic work of the 1260s which ends with a discussion of ‘The government of cities’.

These concepts constitute one of the fundamental philosophical problems about human destiny in general and about human actions in particular. Is the individual a rigidly defined link in a universal chain of being in which birth, life and death have been entirely preordained by physical cosmic forces? Or can the individual control his life and, by means of more or less independent decisions, direct it to some consciously chosen goal? Such questions are as old as humanity itself. Sometimes they are coloured by religious beliefs or magical and astrological superstitions and scarcely emerge into popular awareness. At other times they stimulate the philosophical reflections which are humanity's first steps away from a dark and fearful fate towards a rational understanding of natural and historical events.

THE PROBLEM IN ANTIQUITY AND THE MIDDLE AGES

In antiquity philosophy could not entirely disburden itself of ειμαρμενη the mysterious fate which ruled men and gods, impervious to protests and invocations. Except for thinkers like Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, who achieved a profound and rigorous grasp of the first principle, the bulk of Greek, Hellenistic and Roman thought tended to be drawn by its monistic and materialist metaphysics into a kind of cosmic necessity which denied human freedom and excluded providence (πρóνοια) and the contingency of events (τυχη). The first centuries of the Christian era teemed with tracts about fate. One current was represented by Alexander of Aphrodisias, who, following Aristotle, asserted the possibility of contingency, that is, ενδεχóμενον By contrast, evolving Neoplatonism petrified the causal links between the degrees of being, thus unleashing a frenzy of magical-mystical practices which profoundly affected the purity of man's religious relationship with the divine.

A SCEPTIC'S DEFINITION OF MAGIC

When Henricus Cornelius Agrippa published an enlarged edition of his De occulta philosophia in Cologne in 1533, seven years after he had written his invective De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum atque artium (1526), he appended to it a Censura sive retractio in which he reprinted the chapters on magic from De incertitudine. Since in these chapters Agrippa's ardour for occult wisdom had somewhat abated, we may take their definition of natural magic to be the tempered judgement of a man who was, in any event, sincere in his Christian piety and skilled as a vulgariser of other people's ideas. ‘That magic is natural’, he explained, ‘which, having observed the forces of all things natural and celestial and having examined by painstaking investigation the sympathy among those things, brings into the open powers hidden and stored away in nature; thus, magic links lower things (as if they were magical enticements) to the gifts of higher things… so that astonishing miracles thereby occur, not so much by art as by nature to which – as nature works these wonders – this art of magic offers herself as handmaid.’

Agrippa recognised that magic was an art, a practical technique, but he also insisted on a theoretical content in magic, an analytic basis in the study of nature. Learned men had called magic ‘the highest point of natural philosophy’ because they saw in it speculative as well as pragmatic responses to the cosmos. The obverse of this learned natural magic, was sinful demonic magic. Warning that ‘natural magic has sometimes relapsed into sorcery and theurgy (most often through strategems of evil demons)’, Agrippa raised the spectre of demonology that haunted the Renaissance revival of ancient magic as it animated the concurrent witchcraft craze.

THE MEANING OF HUMANISM

Humanism was one of the most pervasive traits of the Renaissance, and it affected more or less deeply all aspects of the culture of the time including its thought and philosophy.

Humanism has been described and interpreted in many different ways, and its meaning has been the subject of much controversy, just as has been the concept of the Renaissance itself. Whereas the term ‘humanism’ in current discourse often denotes an emphasis on human values unrelated to any intellectual or cultural traditions, Renaissance humanism was understood and studied by most historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as that broad concern with the study and imitation of classical antiquity which was characteristic of the period and found its expression in scholarship and education and in many other areas, including the arts and sciences. The modern term ‘humanism’ has been used in this sense since the early nineteenth century and was derived from the term ‘humanist’ coined in the late fifteenth century to designate a teacher and student of the ‘humanities’ or studia humanitatis. The word ‘humanity’ and its derivatives were associated with a ‘liberal’ education by several Roman writers, especially Cicero and Gellius. The term was revived by Petrarch, Salutati and others in the fourteenth century, and by the middle of the fifteenth century it came to stand for a well-defined cycle of studies, called studia humanitatis, which included grammatica, rhetorica, poetica, historia and philosophia moralis, as these terms were then understood. Unlike the liberal arts of the earlier Middle Ages, the humanities did not include logic or the quadrivium (arithmetica, geometria, astronomia and musica), and unlike the fine arts of the eighteenth century, they did not include the visual arts, music, dancing or gardening.

The natural philosophy of the Renaissance was far from being a homogeneous body of knowledge uniformly accepted and taught in the universities. As one might expect during a rebirth of learning, new views of nature and of man's place in nature took their place alongside those of classical antiquity then being rediscovered and explored for a wisdom long lost. Yet a surprising amount of energy was focused on what might be termed ‘traditional natural philosophy’, i.e., a philosophy of nature hallowed by tradition in the Latin West from the twelfth century onwards and constituting a major part of university studies. In essence this was an Aristotelian philosophy, for the texts that were commented on were those of the Lyceum, but it also contained a considerable accretion of Neoplatonic elements as well as the developments of Islamic, Jewish and Christian commentators. The diversity of sources from which it sprang and the variety of situations in which its teachings took root argue against its ever having been a monolithic system of thought. Indeed, the tradition it embodied was complex, hardly capable of being characterised in simple terms. More, its written expression was prolix, and few scholars have had the inclination or the stamina to read and analyse the many printed works and manuscripts in which its teachings are preserved. Yet it was a particularly fruitful tradition, for it provided the seed-bed from which many disciplines now respected as parts of ‘modern science’ emerged. The difficulty of studying it is matched only by its importance, which until recent years has not been fully appreciated by intellectual historians.

THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSLATION

Between Roberto Rossi's translation of the Posterior Analytics in 1406 and Niccolò Leonico Tomeo's rendering of the Parva naturalia in 1522–5, eighteen Italian and Byzantine scholars produced nearly fifty different Latin versions of half as many of Aristotle's works –including spurious works and counting the Parva naturalia as one work. In the sixteenth century more than fifty scholars from various parts of Europe produced nearly 200 Latin translations of over forty texts ascribed to Aristotle. The most productive of the fifteenth-century translators were the Byzantines George of Trebizond and Johannes Argyropulos, who each completed ten texts, but in the sixteenth century the Frenchman Joachim Périon challenged even the prolific William of Moerbeke by turning more than twenty works into Ciceronian Latin. These three scholars took very different approaches to philosophical translation. George of Trebizond stayed as close to the verbal structure of the text as comprehensible Latin would permit, while Argyropulos translated so loosely that he was often condemned as a paraphraser. George believed that transliteration was sometimes justified by an untranslatable word or phrase in Greek, but Périon wanted to find a Ciceronian equivalent for everything the Stagirite had said – unlike Argyropulos, who was content with some of the unclassical Latin that medieval translators had introduced. Variations in translation served varieties of audience, and the audience changed with time as it was educated by new accomplishments in translation. Before the 1520s, most works of Aristotle that were printed were medieval Latin translations; only after that time did readers of Aristotle see more humanist Latin in print or much Greek at all.

Manuscripts proved to be an effective vehicle for the expression and dissemination of ideas throughout the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Even though the invention and advance of printing narrowed their scope, printing never rendered manuscripts completely irrelevant. Numerous treatises either did not require to be or could not be printed or were published only long after their composition. Such texts had to be read in manuscript. Philosophical manuscripts in particular retained their value, both for the continuation of traditional philosophical schools and procedures and for the exposition and communication of new ideas. The manuscript culture which had developed in the Middle Ages continued to serve a variety of readers throughout the sixteenth century.

A comprehensive history of the role played by manuscripts in Renaissance thought is yet to be written. Renaissance philosophical manuscripts as a topic of scholarly investigation have been ignored for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, they have fallen victim to the medievalists' concentration on the various scholastic traditions in the Middle Ages to the exclusion of their (and other philosophical schools') later manifestations, while on the other hand the Renaissance humanists' hostility towards scholasticism and Aristotelian logic and metaphysics have caused historians to slight many branches of Renaissance philosophy. We lack large-scale studies delineating the diffusion of philosophical manuscripts and their use in the Renaissance on which to base large-scale generalisations, even for such fundamental writers as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Here only a brief sketch can be offered by way of providing certain general organising themes and proposing a coherent explanation for the continued importance of manuscripts as a philosophical medium throughout the Renaissance.

THE TRIPARTITE DIVISION OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

In the Renaissance moral philosophy was divided into three parts: ethics, oeconomics and politics. This division corresponded to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics and the pseudo-Aristotelian Oeconomics, the basic texts used in university teaching of moral philosophy. Aristotle referred in passing to this type of tripartite division, which was later codified and adopted by his Greek commentators as the standard Peripatetic classification of practical philosophy. This tradition, transmitted to medieval Latin philosophy by Boethius and Cassiodorus, is reflected in the classification of sciences presented by Hugh of St Victor and other twelfth-century authors, even though they lacked the Aristotelian texts on which it was based. Dominicus Gundissalinus, for example, in his De divisione philosophiae, written around 1150 and based on both Arabic and Latin sources, divides practical philosophy into the science of governing a state, ruling one's own family and controlling oneself. With the rise of the universities in the thirteenth century and the availability in Latin of the Aristotelian Ethics, Oeconomics and Politics, the triad of ethics, oeconomics and politics became the normal structure for the moral philosophy curriculum.

Renaissance authors continued to follow the tripartite division which they inherited from their medieval predecessors. The traditional scholastic organisation of moral philosophy was used by humanists and philosophers, Aristotelians and Platonists alike. It continued to be a standard feature of moral philosophy treatises and textbooks in the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth century.

INTRODUCTION

The theory of knowledge, as a or the central branch of philosophy, is a post-Renaissance phenomenon that develops from certain critical movements in Renaissance thought. If epistemology deals with the three basic questions set forth in John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding: What is the origin, the extent and the certainty of human knowledge?, these were not the central issues for most Renaissance thinkers. Most accepted Aristotle's explanation in De anima of how we gain information and form concepts, and Aristotle's account in the Prior and Posterior Analytics of how the concepts abstracted from sense experience are connected by logical inferences to provide knowledge.

Certain problems were raised in the Renaissance about whether the Aristotelian account could lead to ‘higher’ or ‘the highest’ knowledge, or whether it was adequate to account for religious knowledge. Various critics of Aristotelian thought challenged each element of Aristotle's account, his empiricism, his theory of concept abstraction and his theory of logical connections of concepts. In addition, radically different proposals were offered about how knowledge is acquired and what it is about, ranging from various Platonic views, to various claims about how to acquire esoteric knowledge, to doubts about whether any genuine knowledge could be acquired.

Although Renaissance philosophical interests dealt mainly with metaphysical and ethical issues, and with problems in logic and natural science, nonetheless some of the epistemological issues that were raised in discussing these matters led to the central problems of knowledge that philosophers have been struggling with from the time of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes up to the present.

THE NATURE OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL TEXTBOOK

We must start by defining what is meant by ‘textbook’, a modern term more or less equivalent to other formulations such as manual, cursus, or systema. In the most general way a textbook can be said to be a book specifically designated for classroom use. As the universities developed from the twelfth century onwards, it was the writings of Aristotle which dominated in most scientific and philosophical subjects. In general for the Middle Ages and Renaissance down to the end of the sixteenth century, classroom instruction in philosophy was based upon a direct reading of Aristotle's works in Latin translation, though there were some exceptions. The one branch of philosophy where a manual derived from Aristotle replaced a reading of the master's works quite early was in the field of logic. Thus, Porphyry's Isagoge and the De sex principiis had both become a part of the Aristotelian logic corpus by the high Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century other manuals came into play, the most famous example being Peter of Spain's Summule logicales. Though not entirely absent from the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, textbooks covering other branches of philosophy were not nearly so common.

The philosophical textbook during the period with which we are concerned was nearly always a summary, exposition or expansion based on Aristotle. These often took the form of compendia, i.e., brief, simplified treatments of an Aristotelian text or group of texts. They could also, however, be of a more inclusive nature, expanding upon what was available in the corpus Aristotelicum.

‘What is history?’ has been a controversial question from antiquity down to the present, but it was never more vigorously discussed than in the Renaissance (‘Che cosa sia storia?’ asked Dionigi Atanagi in 1559; eight years later Giovanni Viperano, ‘Quid sit historia?’ and still a quarter-century after that Tommaso Campanella, ‘Quid historia sit?’). Then, as before and since, answers ranged widely – from simple happenings (res gestae) to God's ‘grand design’, from a lowly ‘art’ to an elaborate ‘science’, from a vague ‘sense’ to the ‘most certain philosophy’ (certissima philosophia, in the phrase of Andrea Alciato) and indeed to a position, according to Jean Bodin, ‘above all sciences’. ‘History’ could be objective or subjective, could refer to the past or merely to the memory thereof, to ancient testimony or modern reconstruction; but in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it rose grandly in the scale of western learning. Through the classical revival it became a liberal art and a literary genre; through the Reformation it became a surrogate for the tradition of ‘true religion’; through Counter-Reformation controversy it became a highly organised science. In various ways history became a dominant mode of expression and argument in the later sixteenth century, and its significance for the contacts with philosophy increased accordingly.

LOGIC: CRITICISMS BY HUMANISTS

Introduction

Humanism encountered Aristotelian logic as a central component in the scholastic curriculum, a curriculum which it was humanists' ambition to replace with one more appropriate to a ‘classical’ education. Because it was from their position as teachers of the liberal arts that humanists challenged traditional treatments of logic, their interventions in the field have tended to be characterised as crucially disruptive and destructive, and they have been blamed for producing a hiatus in the development of formal logic from which the discipline has barely recovered. Although recent scholarly work has established humanist dialectic as an area of energetic intellectual activity, the secondary literature continues to give credence to the view that the activity was fragmented and eclectic, and continues to assume a fundamental lack of relevance of developments associated with humanist dialectic to the development of logic proper.

This is, however, to underestimate the importance of Renaissance developments in logic, both in the context of specifically humanist interventions and, perhaps even more importantly, in the light of cross-influence and interaction between humanist and scholastic scholarly contributions. In spite of scholastic logicians' insistence on the formal nature of their concern with ratiocination (as opposed to the more ‘linguistic’ interest of terminists and moderni), technical exploration of argument forms was inevitably conducted with at least sidelong glances at other available approaches. Furthermore, separate specialist discussions do not remain neatly cut off from one another in the context of the curriculum and the textbook. Thus (to take a single example) the Aristotelian Agostino Nifo chooses to react to the humanist Lorenzo Valla's reformulated dialectic in his Dialectica ludicra (‘Schoolroom dialectic/Playful dialectic’), rather than to dismiss it out of hand.

As the scale of this volume attests, the period of the Renaissance was one of intense philosophical activity. It is only recently, however, that the extent of this activity has come to be recognised fully. Although eighteenth-century historians of philosophy such as Jakob Brucker saw in the Renaissance an important period of reorientation, their awareness did not in general carry over into nineteenth-century attempts at historical synthesis. Burckhardt's celebrated essay remained virtually silent about the contributions of philosophy to the civilisation of the Renaissance, while Anglo-Saxon traditions of scholarship generally treated the two centuries after the death of William of Ockham, if at all, merely as a backdrop to the heroic age of Francis Bacon and the ‘new philosophy’. A few Renaissance thinkers – Ficino, Bruno, Campanella – occasionally found a place in nineteenth-century histories, but even then the interpretation of their work tended to remain deficient in several respects. One problem was that the kind of historical research needed to make possible a comprehensive evaluation of Renaissance philosophy largely remained to be carried out. A further weakness derived from the fact that most nineteenth-century historians were more interested in tracing the roots of ‘modern’ thought than in considering the ebb and flow of philosophical teaching and speculation at different times. Even when Renaissance writers were discussed, they were generally treated as pawns in the philosophical battles of later centuries, not as thinkers of their own age and in their own right.

THE IMPACT OF PRINTING

Printing had an enormous effect on all learning, but its impact was neither revolutionary nor sudden. Instead, over a period of fifty to one hundred years it so greatly facilitated the dissemination of the results of enquiry as to propel philosophy and all other branches of learning into a new era. This brief survey attempts to explain how printing affected the conditions of learning in the Renaissance, and especially how the press communicated the results of scholarly enquiry. The perspective is that of author and reader, with the printer as usually helpful but occasionally as an obstructionist intermediary.

The development of printing

An earlier innovation helped make printing possible: paper came from China through the Near East into the West about 1100. It spread quickly throughout Europe until the majority of manuscript books were written on paper in the early fifteenth century. Paper suited printing far better than vellum (prepared animal skin): it was more pliable, absorbed ink better than vellum, and was considerably cheaper.

Johann Gutenberg at Strasburg and Mainz experimented for years before he and his associates were able to solve the technical problems necessary for printing. Their first major achievement was the beautiful forty-two-line Bible, probably begun in 1452 and certainly completed by 1455. But printing did not make a significant impact on learning until presses had multiplied, their production had diversified, and the reading public had become aroused. This led gradually to a broad system of distribution and marketing. This process began about 1470 and came to full fruition about 1500.

LOGIC 1350–1600

The study of Aristotle

The Organon of Aristotle played a central role throughout the period, at least in principle. During the medieval period, the Organon was divided into two parts. The Categories and the De interpretatione along with Porphyry's Isagoge formed the Logica vetus, which was already known in the twelfth century. The Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics and the Sophistici elenchi formed the Logica nova, which became known only during the twelfth century. Both the Logica vetus and the Logica nova were firmly embedded in the university curriculum, with the single exception of the Topics. It was not included in the list of books prescribed by the Vienna statutes of 1389 or in the list of books read at Erfurt in 1420, and at Greifswald in 1456 it was to be lectured on only for the master's degree, although at all these places the other books of the Organon were specifically mentioned as part of the undergraduate course. In many places, including Paris, only four books of the Topics were to be read; and it was sometimes specified that these books were to be I, II, VI and VIII. An obvious result of humanist influence in the sixteenth century was the renewed attention paid to the Topics, though this interest was not to last.

There were several waves of commentaries during the period after 1350. Some of these were on individual books from the Organon, such as the commentary on the Prior Analytics by Marsilius of Inghen, which was published in Venice in 1516, and the commentary on the Posterior Analytics by Paul of Venice, which had been published seven times by 1518, nearly always in Venice.