THE ORIGINS OF RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY: SCHOLASTIC THOUGHT AND THE NEEDS OF A NEW CULTURE

Any approach to the meaning of philosophy in the Renaissance requires some preliminary qualification and explanation. How far, for instance, is it permissible to speak of a specifically Renaissance philosophy – a philosophy that might be said to reflect the growing complexity of intellectual activity in this particular historical situation? May the term be applied to ways of thinking which, though current in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, perpetuate typically medieval thinking? Do the speculative currents which emerged in the mid thirteenth century, above all in Italy, represent continuity or a break with the past? How closely are scholastic natural philosophy and logic connected with the scientific revolution? Was ‘humanist rhetoric’ an obstacle to what might otherwise have been a swift and linear development? The historical significance of many of the issues discussed in this volume cannot be assessed without considering those social factors, which shattered the ideological unanimity of western Christianitas in the thirteenth century, emphasising the difference rather than the similarities between intellectual centres and ushering in new ways of thought. There is little point in trying to define the Renaissance concept of philosophy if no heed is paid to the cultural institutions emerging outside the universities, the social class and status of their members, their aims, their rivalries and their audiences. From the early fourteenth century there was a complex interaction between scholasticism and humanism with the former profiting from the methodological and linguistic advances made by the latter.

Aristotle's teaching on the intellective soul (De anima III.4–5) serves as the starting-point for Renaissance discussions and, therefore, predetermines the questions raised and the answers given. In the Averroist tradition, this was treated as the beginning of the entire third book. Chapter 4 attempts to define the activity of the intellective soul through analogy to sense-perception and by so doing introduces an interdependence between psychological and epistemological theories. In the fifth chapter, distinguishing between the possible and the agent intellect, Aristotle goes beyond the analogy with sense-perception and alludes to the active role of the soul in the process of knowing. This extremely condensed and enigmatic chapter has provoked many different interpretations, ranging from the outright denial of the agent intellect to the postulation of an agent sense as well, in order to maintain the analogy with sense-perception. For those commentators, however, who kept between these two extremes, III.5 provided both the chance and the need for metaphysical speculation on the ontological status of the intellective soul including its relation to the celestial intelligences and the question of its immortality. It was to this last question that particular attention had to be paid, since on the one hand, Aristotle is not explicit about it, and on the other, Christian doctrine required an affirmation. Thus, for the Middle Ages the question was not whether the human soul was immortal but rather how an immortal soul could fit into the ontological structure of the universe. Consequently, the metaphysical point of view gained prominence, until, in fourteenth-century nominalism, metaphysics lost ground and a new approach was possible from the perspectives of natural philosophy and epistemology.

The subject-matter of metaphysics has been debated since the time when Aristotle first conceived the idea of the science. He himself speaks of ‘the science we are seeking’ and describes it differently in different places. In Metaphysics IV.I (1003a 21–6) he speaks of a science which studies being as being and contrasts this science with the special sciences, like the mathematical disciplines, which investigate the attributes of a part of being. Two chapters later, IV.3 (1005b), Aristotle speaks of a science which he calls ‘first philosophy’ because it grounds the first principles or axioms of the special sciences. But in book VI.I (1026a 18–19) he distinguishes three types of speculative science, physics, mathematics and ‘divine science’, so that one must ask how he understood the relationship between the general science of being, first philosophy and divine science. It is clear that divine science studies objects that are separate from matter and not subject to change. But Aristotle seems to have wanted to identify this science both with the investigation of being and with the science of the principles of the sciences, on the ground that divine science concerns itself with the highest principle of being in general and can for this reason preside over the special sciences. At the same time, each of these definitions of metaphysics must be understood in accordance with Aristotle's own idea of what science is. In his conception, scientific knowledge is attained by way of the definition of the essential natures of things and the demonstration of the attributes which necessarily belong to them. Basically, Aristotle understood reality as an ordered structure.

By 1860 India was locked into a pattern of imperial subordination which was to be essentially maintained, despite formal constitutional changes, until 1935. The Indian Army had rid itself of the troublesome Hindi-speaking villagers of the Gangetic plains. The post-Mutiny army, furnished with a steady supply of Punjabi recruits, now carefully segregated on grounds of caste and religion, was forged into a reliable mercenary force for internal security or protection of the North-West Frontier against the supposed Russian threat. Indian troops were also dispatched with more confidence to East and South Africa, South-East Asia and ultimately, in 1914, to Europe itself. Detachments of troops from quiescent native states added to the paper strength of this large land army. Most pleasing of all to the new India Office in London and to the British Treasury, Indian taxation, which had been reorganised after 1857, continued to bear the cost of this expensively re-equipped force.

A more satisfactory imperial economic relationship – from the British point of view – had also emerged after the 1840s, though this was somewhat obscured by the bloody drama of 1857. Exports of British-manufactured textiles picked up sharply, despite a lull in the 1860s. Indian merchants created an excellent inland retailing system for Lancashire goods in eastern and southern India and they were now linked to the sea-ports by railway lines. It was calculated that one-third of the demand for moderate and finer cloth in Bengal and Bihar was met by British imports by 1860. Raw material exports to the developed world had also achieved a more stable trend.