Scarica The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy e più Dispense in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! T H E C A M B R ID G E C O M P A N I O N T O R E N A I S S A N C E PH I L O S O P H Y The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy provides an introduction to a complex period of change in the subject matter and practice of philosophy. The philosophy of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries is often seen as transitional between the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages and modern philosophy, but the essays collected here, by a distinguished international team of contributors, call these assumptions into question, emphasizing both the continuity with scholastic philosophy and the role of Renaissance philosophy in the emergence of modernity. They explore the ways in which the science, religion, and politics of the period reflect and are reflected in its philosophical life, and they emphasize the dynamism and pluralism of a period which saw both new perspectives and enduring contributions to the history of philosophy. This will be an invaluable guide for students of philosophy, intellectual historians, and all who are interested in Renaissance thought. J A M E S H A N K I N S is Professor of History at Harvard University and editor of Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (2000, 2004). Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 CONTENTS List of figures vii Acknowledgments viii Notes on contributors ix Chronology xii 1 Introduction J A M E S H A N K I N S 1 P A R T I C O N T I N U I T Y A N D R E V I V A L 11 2 The philosopher and Renaissance culture R O B E R T B L A C K 13 3 Humanism, scholasticism, and Renaissance philosophy J A M E S H A N K I N S 30 4 Continuity and change in the Aristotelian tradition L U C A B I A N C H I 49 5 The revival of Platonic philosophy C H R I S T O P H E R S . C E L E N Z A 72 6 The revival of Hellenistic philosophies J I L L K R A Y E 97 7 Arabic philosophy and Averroism D A G N I K O L A U S H A S S E 113 v Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 8 How to do magic, and why: philosophical prescriptions B R I A N P . C O P E N H A V E R 137 P A R T I I T O W A R D M O D E R N P H I L O S O P H Y 171 9 Nicholas of Cusa and modern philosophy D E R M O T M O R A N 173 10 Lorenzo Valla and the rise of humanist dialectic L O D I N A U T A 193 11 The immortality of the soul P A U L R I C H A R D B L U M 211 12 Philosophy and the crisis of religion P E T E R H A R R I S O N 234 13 Hispanic scholastic philosophy J O H N P . D O Y L E 250 14 New visions of the cosmos M I G U E L A . G R A N A D A 270 15 Organizations of knowledge A N N M . B L A I R 287 16 Humanistic and scholastic ethics D A V I D A . L I N E S 304 17 The problem of the prince E R I C N E L S O N 319 18 The significance of Renaissance philosophy J A M E S H A N K I N S 338 Appendix: Brief biographies of Renaissance philosophers 346 Bibliography 361 Index 401 C O N T E N T S vi Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 FIGURES 8.1 Myrobalans page 138 8.2 Pleasures and planets 144 8.3 Evaluating magic 149 8.4 Geode 152 8.5 Crinoid stem 152 8.6 Lion demon 154 8.7 Concentric spheres 155 8.8 Design for a scorpion talisman 159 8.9 Planetary levels of healing 161 9.1 Source: Opera Nicolai Cusae Cardinalis, Paris 1514, vol. I, fol. XLVI verso 189 vii Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 edition and translation of Polydore Vergil, On Discovery, for the I Tatti Renaissance Library (2002), and he is now writing a book about Giovanni Pico. JOHN P. DOYLE is Professor of Philosophy at St. Louis University. His most recent projects include Francisco Suárez, S. J., On Real Relation (Disputatio Metaphysica XLVII): A Translation from the Latin with an Introduction and Notes (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2006), and ‘‘Hervaeus Natalis, O. P. (d. 1323), On Intentionality: Its Direction, Context, and Some Aftermath,’’ in The Modern Schoolman (2006). MIGUEL A. GRANADA is Professor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. He has published Sfere solide e cielo fluido. Momenti del dibattito cosmologico nella seconda metà del Cinquecento (Milano: Guerini, 2002), Giordano Bruno. Universo infinito, unión con Dios, perfección del hombre (Barcelona: Herder, 2002), La reivindicación de la filosofı́a en Giordano Bruno (Barcelona: Herder, 2005) and numerous articles on Bruno and the cosmological revolution between the Renaissance and the early modern period. JAMES HANKINS is Professor of History at Harvard University and General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library. His most recent publications are Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003–4), and Marsilio Ficino: Platonic Theology, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001–6), with Michael J. B. Allen. PETER HARRISON is Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. His books include The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2007). DAG NIKOLAUS HASSE is Professor of the History of Philosophy and the Sciences in the Greek, Arabic, and Latin Tradition at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He is the author of Avicenna’s De anima in the Latin West (London: The Warburg Institute, 2000) and he is currently completing a book on the reception of Arabic sciences and philosophy in the Renaissance. J ILL KRAYE is Professor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy at the Warburg Institute, where she is also Librarian and one of the editors of the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. A collection of her articles was published under the title Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). DAVID A. LINES is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Warwick. A former fellow of Villa I Tatti, he is the author of Aristotle’s Ethics in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650): The Universities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: N O T E S O N C O N T R I B U T O R S x Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 E. J. Brill, 2002). He is currently co-editing a volume on Renaissance ethics with Sabrina Ebbersmeyer. DERMOT MORAN is Professor of Philosophy at University College, Dublin, and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has published widely on medieval philo- sophy, especially Christian Neoplatonism. His books include The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (Cambridge University Press, 1989; reissued 2004) and, edited with Stephen Gersh, Eriugena, Berkeley and the Idealist Tradition (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). LODI NAUTA is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy at the University of Groningen. His publications include an edition of William of Conches’s Commentary on Boethius in the Corpus Christianorum (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999) and a forth- coming monograph In Defense of Common Sense: Lorenzo Valla’s Humanist Critique of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. ERIC NELSON is Assistant Professor of Government, Harvard University, and a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. He is the author of The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and the editor of Hobbes’ translations of the Iliad and Odyssey for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes (in press). N O T E S O N C O N T R I B U T O R S xi Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 CHRONOLOGY 1304 Birth of Francesco Petrarca (d. 1374) 1327 Condemnation of John of Jandun and Marsilius of Padua for heresy 1348–9 Black Death 1367/70 Petrarca writes On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others 1370 Birth of Leonardo Bruni (d. 1444) 1378 Beginning of Great Schism in the Western Catholic Church 1396 Biagio Pelacani of Parma condemned by ecclesiastical autho- rities in Pavia for teaching materialistic doctrines 1397–9 Manuel Chrysoloras teaches Greek in Florence 1401 Birth of Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464) 1403 Birth of Bessarion (d. 1472) 1406 Birth of Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457) 1414–18 Council of Constance marks the end of the Great Schism 1417 Poggio Bracciolini rediscovers the text of Lucretius (1417); Leonardo Bruni initiates the humanist project to retranslate Aristotle with his new version of the Nicomachean Ethics 1420 Birth of Nicoletto Vernia (d. 1499) 1431–49 Council of Basel 1433 Birth of Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499); Ambrogio Traversari pub- lishes his translation of Diogenes Laertius 1437–9 Council of Ferrara–Florence brings about a temporary union between the Eastern Orthodox and the Western Catholic Church 1439 First version of Lorenzo Valla’s Reploughing of Dialectic and Philosophy 1439–40 Nicholas of Cusa composes On Learned Ignorance 1440 Valla attacks the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine xii Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 1547 Birth of Justus Lipsius (d. 1606) 1548 Birth of Giordano Bruno (d. 1600) and Francisco Suárez, SJ (d. 1617) 1553 Michael Servetus is executed in Geneva for heresy 1554 Sebastian Castellio publishes Whether Heretics Should Be Persecuted, supporting freedom of thought and attacking theocracy 1559 Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis ends the first phase of the reli- gious wars between Catholic and Protestants; first edition of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations; first publication of an Index of Prohibited Books by the Roman Inquisition 1561 Birth of Francis Bacon (d. 1626) 1562 First edition of Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1562–98 French Wars of Religion 1564 Birth of Galileo Galilei (d. 1642) 1565 First edition of Telesio’s De rerum natura iuxta propria prin- cipia is published 1568 Birth of Tommaso Campanella (d. 1639) 1571 Foundation of the Holy Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books by Pope Pius V 1572 Petrus Ramus killed in the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre 1573 Henri II Estienne publishes the first collection of Presocratic fragments 1576 Francesco de’ Vieri the Younger becomes the first university teacher of Platonic philosophy in Florence; Francisco Sánchez publishes Quod nihil scitur, a standard work of skeptical philosophy 1580 First edition of Montaigne’s Essays 1583 Birth of Hugo Grotius (d. 1528) 1584 Justus Lipsius’ On Constancy is published, launching a revival of Stoicism 1588 The Spanish Armada attacks England; Thomas Hobbes is born 1591 Francesco Patrizi publishes the Nova de universis philosophia, an attempt to create a systematic Christian Platonism to replace Aristotelianism 1592 Birth of Pierre Gassendi (d. 1655) 1594 Tommaso Campanella arrested by the Inquisition under suspi- cion of heresy; he is arrested a second time in 1599 and tried for heresy and rebellion, remaining imprisoned for twenty- seven years C H R O N O L O G Y xv Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 1596 Birth of René Descartes (d. 1650); Telesio’s De rerum natura and Patrizi’s Nova de universis philosophia are placed on the Index 1598 Edict of Nantes, granting full civil rights and religious liberty to Protestants in France (later annulled) 1599 The Ratio studiorum is adopted by the Jesuit Order, becoming the most influential school curriculum in the early modern world 1600 Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for heresy 1601 Pierre Charron’s De la sagesse published 1604 Justus Lipsius publishes Manuductio ad Stoicam philoso- phiam and the Physiologia Stoicorum, the first comprehensive accounts of Stoicism as a philosophical system 1605 Francis Bacon publishes The Advancement of Learning 1610 Galileo publishes The Starry Messenger, announcing his astro- nomical discoveries with a telescope 1620 Francis Bacon’s Novum organum 1623 Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun published 1632 Galileo’s Dialogue of Two World Systems attacking Aristotelian physics and astronomy is published and con- demned by the Church 1637 Descartes’s Discourse on Method 1655 Gassendi’s Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri, reviving the philo- sophy of Epicurus, is published posthumously C H R O N O L O G Y xvi Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 1 JAMES HANKINS Introduction Readers who come to David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Under- standing (1748) equipped only with the taxonomies provided by modern histories of philosophy – ‘‘British empiricism’’ versus ‘‘continental rational- ism,’’ scientific versus scholastic, ancients versus moderns – are likely to be taken aback at the way Hume in his first chapter, ‘‘Of the Different Species of Philosophy,’’ anatomizes the philosophy of his time. He distinguishes first a moral philosophy that ‘‘considers man chiefly as born for action,’’ which regards virtue as the most valuable of objects and ‘‘paint[s] her in the most amiable colours, borrowing all helps from poetry and eloquence,’’ treating the subject ‘‘in an easy and obvious manner.’’ Moral philosophers of this kind ‘‘make us feel the difference between vice and virtue; they excite and regulate our sentiments; and so they can but bend our hearts to the love of probity and true honour, they think, that they have fully attained the end of all their labours.’’ But there is a second species of philosophers who ‘‘consider man in the light of a reasonable rather than an active being, and endeavor to form his understanding more than cultivate his manners.’’ This kind of philoso- pher does not address the generality of men but ‘‘aim[s] at the approbation of the learned and the wise,’’ seeks ‘‘hidden truths’’ rather than an improvement in the behavior of mankind. Hume claims the first species of philosophy, being ‘‘easy and obvious,’’ will always be preferred to the ‘‘accurate and abstruse,’’ as is shown by the relative popularity of the first: ‘‘the fame of CICERO flourishes at present; but that of ARISTOTLE is utterly decayed. LA BRUYERE passes the seas, and still maintains his reputation: But the glory of MALEBRANCHE is confined to his own nation, and to his own age. And ADDISON, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when LOCKE shall be entirely forgotten.’’ Hume goes on to make a second distinction, dividing the ‘‘accurate and abstruse’’ philosophy (now called ‘‘metaphysics’’) into two subspecies, a ‘‘false and adulterate metaphysics,’’ and a ‘‘true metaphysics.’’ The first is ‘‘not properly a science, but arise[s] either from the fruitless efforts of 1 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Humanism, originally a movement in north Italian city-states to revive Roman literature, was refashioned by Francesco Petrarca into a distinct form of culture, challenging the hegemony of scholasticism, which he regarded as dogmatic, excessively technical, useless, impious, and (worst of all) French. Petrarch proposed instead that the study of ancient Roman literature would lead to the moral renewal of Italian society and the return of Roman great- ness. Humanists would address all educated persons and would spread virtue, eloquence and love of country. Humane studies would embrace all ancient philosophers, not just Aristotle. As humanism became an estab- lished educational tradition in the fifteenth century, Petrarca’s vision was gradually realized. Humanists searched for, edited and translated the works of neglected and unknown ancient philosophers, including Platonists, Epicureans, and Stoics, and even encouraged the study of non-Christian religions such as Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism as well as the ‘‘ancient theologies’’ of Hermeticism, Orphism, and Zoroastrianism.3 They proposed humanistic reforms of other educational traditions, so that one can speak of humanistic medicine, humanist logic, humanistic law, and humanistic theol- ogies; even the Aristotelian philosophy of the schools was affected. The hallmarks of humanist reform were always accurate study of texts in the original languages, preference for ancient authors and commentators over medieval ones, and avoidance of technical language in the interests of moral suasion and accessibility. The success of the humanists did not by any means signal decadence in the world of scholastic philosophy. In Italy, especially at the universities of Padua and Bologna, it might even be said that scholasticism was enjoying a second golden age. Italy developed its own tradition of university philo- sophy, sometimes misleadingly referred to as the ‘‘School of Padua’’ or ‘‘Averroism,’’ which flourished between the time of Paul of Venice and Pietro Pomponazzi and for long afterwards. In addition to developing a range of distinctive and subtle positions in logic, metaphysics, natural philo- sophy and psychology, Italian scholastics responded to the challenge of humanism by seeking out more correct texts and translations and by reviving the study of the Greek commentators on Aristotle. But they did not usually share the sweeping prejudice of the humanists against the ‘‘medieval’’ or their hostility to technical language. Italian scholastics in fact continued or revived the study of their medieval predecessors, so that one can find lively Renaissance traditions of Albertism, Thomism, Scotism, and nominalism. The other great scholastic tradition of the Renaissance, that radiating from the Iberian and Hispanic worlds in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, also continued to find inspiration in medieval scholastic traditions, particu- larly Thomism. And it too developed its own distinctive metaphysical and J A M E S H A N K I N S 4 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 ethical positions, particularly in response to the Spanish conquests in the New World, which raised issues about the morality of empire, conquest and slavery. Hispanic scholastic philosophers ultimately helped found new forms of international law which emerged in the seventeenth century with the burgeoning of the European overseas empires. Even though by any objective standards scholastic philosophy was still creative and responsive to new cultural influences during the Renaissance, many philosophers of the time found the categories, intellectual habits, and interests of school Aristotelianism too confining; some, indeed, denounced it as dry, morally empty, or pernicious to true piety. So the Renaissance saw a number of ‘‘new’’ philosophies – ‘‘new’’ in the sense of ‘‘non-Aristotelian’’ – which went beyond the eclectic moralism of the humanists and challenged the scholastics on their own ground. These philosophies constituted full- fledged alternatives to current Aristotelian philosophies, and usually sought inspiration in other ancient philosophical systems, principally Platonism. The first of the new philosophies (though ‘‘new theology’’ might be a more correct term) was elaborated by Nicholas of Cusa, who, though continu- ing the traditions of Dionysian and Proclan Platonism descending from the Rhenish students of Albert the Great, deserves the title of the first ‘‘new philosopher’’ of the Renaissance for reasons discussed by Dermot Moran in chapter 9.4 Other new philosophers include Ficino (who revived Neoplatonism), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (who based his new univer- sal theology on Cabala and other esoteric philosophies), Francesco Giorgi, Agostino Steuco, Giambattista della Porta, Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, and Pierre Gassendi. All of these men drew on neglected ancient philosophies to propose comprehensive alternatives to Aristotelianism. In this group of philosophers – it would be too strong to call it a tradition – one finds an effort to propose new philosophies of language, new natural logics, new physical theories, new cosmologies, psychologies, and politics as well as new philosophical vocabularies. In this group one also finds the most incautious challengers of Christian orthodoxy. Of the ten figures just mentioned, the Inquisition investigated four, tortured and impri- soned another, and burned a fifth at the stake; the works of all but Cusanus and Steuco were on the Index of Prohibited Books at one time or another. Finally, it is this group of thinkers that most clearly reveals, above all through their interest in magic, the desire for power over nature that is characteristic of the Renaissance as a whole and a precondition for the emergence of applied science and technology in the early modern period.5 The fractiousness and pluralism of the philosophical enterprise in the Renaissance raised in acute form a question that concerns philosophers in all periods: just what is philosophy, and what should it be? Should it be Introduction 5 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 what it often was in antiquity, a cult-like group of disciples following the teachings of a master, seeking an esoteric, transformative view of reality distinct from that of the society around them, providing them with godlike tranquillity or a sense of moral worth? Or should it be merely a form of culture, part of the education of the orator–statesman, outfitting him with topics and arguments, as Cicero preferred? Or should it be what it became in the Middle Ages, a faculty in a university, preparatory to the study of theology, medicine, and law? Some philosophy masters rejected this humble role already in the Middle Ages, and were accused by the theologians of wanting to make philosophy the rival rather than the handmaid of theology. By the fourteenth century some scholastics evidently believed that philo- sophy should declare its independence from ‘‘higher’’ studies, even from religion, and become an autonomous branch of knowledge, offering a kind of happiness distinct from religious beatitude.6 Such claims naturally drew criticism, above all from humanists. Humanists wanted philosophers to give up their pretensions to a theoretical wisdom above the reach of human reason and confine themselves to the modest task of moral formation. But they in their turn were vociferously contradicted by the new philosophers, the Platonists and Naturphilosophen, who believed that philosophy should teach an esoteric wisdom or constitute a source of secrets about the natural world, an avenue to power over nature, even a way to escape the limits of our humanity and become gods. Others influenced by medieval Arabic thinkers saw philosophy as a master-science, embracing and giving principles to all the sciences; some, like Campanella or Bacon, saw it as a guide to the reform of politics; others, like the skeptics Montaigne, Pierre Charron, or Francisco Sanches, saw it as a form of psychic therapy. Marsilio Ficino and Giambattista della Porta identified the aims of the philosopher with those of the magician. Given this diversity of outlook, it is no surprise that many subjects consid- ered to belong to philosophy in the Renaissance would no longer be thought philosophical today: most of natural philosophy (which included botany, biology, medicine, physiology, optics, physics and cosmology), magic, demo- nology, music, astrology, mysticism, theosophy, and theology. Also within the purview of Renaissance philosophers were classical philology, history, literature, politics, poetry, rhetoric, the art of household management, and biblical hermeneutics as well as the sciences of angelology, numerology, and Cabala. Indeed, since in the Renaissance philosophy could still mean learn- ing in general (as Robert Black points out in chapter 2), the list of subjects potentially to be included under philosophy could be extended indefinitely. Clearly some compromise is called for between the requirements of the modern academy and strict historicism, so philosophy for the purposes of J A M E S H A N K I N S 6 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 moral philosophy using Petrarca as a case study. Peter Harrison explains the impact of the sixteenth-century Reformation on philosophy and how it was taught, and shows how Protestantism provided a model for the seventeenth-century reforms of philosophy while promoting voluntarism, corpuscularism, experimentalism, and the demystification of nature; the Reformation promoted, he argues, a new conception of philosophy as a body of doctrines rather than as an avenue of self-transformation. Finally, Ann Blair describes how classifications of the disciplines and the ordering of knowledge and objects changed in response to the information revolution of the Renaissance – the invention of printing – while emphasizing the broad continuity of disciplinary schemes and techniques of information retrieval between the medieval period and the end of the seventeenth century. NOTES 1. Sorell 1993, Parkinson 1993, Menn 1998b; Kraye and Stone 2000; French and Wetstein 2002. 2. English translation in Cassirer 1972. 3. For the recovery of ancient philosophical literature in the Renaissance, see Hankins and Palmer 2007. 4. De Libera 1984. 5. The classic study is Yates 1964; see also chapter 8 in this volume. 6. Bianchi 2003. Introduction 9 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 2 ROBERT BLACK The philosopher and Renaissance culture Philosophy as an academic discipline in schools and universities During the Renaissance, the term philosophy could still denote learning in general: thus Gregor Reisch named his encylopedic textbook (published first in 1503 but reprinted extensively in northern Europe as well as in Italy throughout the sixteenth century) Margarita philosophica, a work which served as an introductory compendium of learning from the most elementary reading to theology, normally regarded as the pinnacle of knowledge. At the same time, however, Reisch focused on the subjects which had, in the course of the Middle Ages, come to constitute philosophy as an academic disci- pline: logic, natural philosophy (meaning natural sciences), morals, and metaphysics. Up to the twelfth century, when Europe witnessed the emergence of specialized institutions of higher education – now known as universities but usually called studia or studia generalia in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance – philosophy, as an academic discipline, regularly formed part of a unitary curriculum, beginning with elementary reading and gram- mar and terminating with theology, all of which was taught within one institution or school. Such schools usually had an ecclesiastical affiliation, often with a monastery or a cathedral. The best of these schools (e.g. at Chartres) embraced a remarkably catholic range of knowledge. William of Conches, for example, a great teacher who taught in the French schools during the first half of the twelfth century, left a series of commentaries reflecting his teaching activity: from grammar (on Priscian, in two different redactions) to moral philosophy, physics, cosmology, metaphysics, and theology (on Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Macrobius, and Plato’s Timaeus). The rise of universities had a revolutionary impact on the institutions and curriculum of learning, not least in Italy. In the new specialized educational system which emerged there at the turn of the thirteenth century, higher 13 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 of linguistic philosophy became, in the hands of Italian grammar masters, a way of teaching Latin almost by, so to speak, filling in the blanks.3 In Italy, these changes in language theory had overwhelmingly practical consequences: they offered a facile and rapid method for teaching Latin syntax. The results in northern Europe were less down-to-earth. French teachers such as Petrus Helias had pioneered the new language theories; they were popularized by French pedagogues such as Alexander of Villedieu and Evrard of Béthune in their popular verse grammars; the inno- vations were closely identified with the premier seat of higher education in northern Europe: the University of Paris. All this meant that the educational establishment in northern Europe took these developments in language theory more to heart than in Italy, where they were mainly regarded as a convenient and utilitarian teaching tool. Northern teachers – e.g. Martin of Dacia or Michel de Marbais – developed grandiose theories to transform grammar into a demonstrative philosophy, culminating in various treatises on modes of meaning (modi significandi): this logical and scientific approach to grammar – generally known as modistic or speculative grammar – became the height of fashion in northern Europe from the later thirteenth to the fifteenth century. It is not surprising to discover that speculative and modistic theory pene- trated the introductory subject of grammar in northern schools too. The great verse grammars by Alexander of Villedieu and Evrard of Béthune, both written at the turn of the thirteenth century, circulated widely both north and south of the Alps, but their use reveals the difference between Italian and transalpine approaches. In Italy, these works served primarily as mines of mnemonic verses, used to help pupils memorize grammar rules and key examples. North of the Alps, on the other hand, the texts were memorized in their entirety and subjected to commentaries impregnated with logical and philosophical terminology and content. Thus, about 1300 Jupiter (the pseu- donym of a Dijonais grammar teacher named Jean [de Clacy?]) introduced a new style of commentary on Evrard’s Graecismus, influenced by the latest fashions in modistic grammatical theory then current in the University of Paris arts faculty; in this connection, he was particularly beholden to Radulphus Brito and Michel de Marbais, two leading contemporary practi- tioners of speculative grammar.4 In the Renaissance period, philosophy thus penetrated school education in northern Europe to an extent inconceivable in Italy, where schools tended to be more utilitarian institutions, hardly touched by philosophy in any form. At the level of higher education, on the other hand, the status of philosophy offered less contrast either side of the Alps. The expansion of learning – often known as the ‘‘twelfth-century Renaissance’’ – had resulted in broader and R O B E R T B L A C K 16 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 deeper study at every level of the hierarchy of knowledge, not least at the upper stages. No longer could philosophy – any less than law, medicine, and theology – receive adequate treatment in unitary monastic or cathedral schools; the result was the gradual emergence of specialized institutions of higher education in Western Europe. The philosophical disciplines became the core of the emerging arts faculties in the nascent universities from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. The teaching of logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics Logic normally constituted the first step on the road to competence in philo- sophy (as well as in other related disciplines such as medicine). The key text- book was Peter of Spain’s (d. 1277) Summulae logicales, the most extensively published manual on logic in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, surviving in more than 300 manuscripts and 150 printed editions; during the fifteenth century, another widely used textbook was the linguistic or terminist Logica by Paul of Venice (d. 1429).5 Their approach was subjected to virulent attacks by Italian humanists for undermining latinity, eloquence, and good morals, as well as for displacing genuine ancient textbooks. Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457) offered an alternative with his Dialectica, calling for logic to be reformed according to the principles of rhetoric.6 This work (as well as other humanist rhetorical treatises on logic) had no impact whatever in Italian universities, but in northern Europe humanist logic was more potent: the Dutch humanist Rudolph Agricola’s De inventione dialectica (1479) became a widely used introductory textbook north of the Alps, often paired with the traditional compendium of Aristotelian logic by George of Trebizond (c. 1440). Particularly influential was Peter Ramus (d. 1572), who rejected the Aristotelian and medieval distinction between rhetoric, with its emphasis on probability based on evidence, and logic, with its focus on certain proof; his Dialectique (not an entirely revolutionary work, retaining as it did certain key Aristotelian features such as the syllogism) took Protestant universities by storm in the later sixteenth century, although Ramus had little impact in Catholic universities, where he never supplanted Aristotle. In Italy, humanist influence was significant in another way: during the sixteenth century there was a growing tendency to replace medieval scholastic dialectical manuals with new translations of Aristotle’s original logical textbooks into humanist Latin.7 Natural philosophy signified science in Renaissance universities, embra- cing the modern subjects of chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy, physics, and psychology, the latter two gaining in importance at the expense of the rest in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The discipline of natural philosophy was based on the canonical textbooks of Aristotle, most The philosopher and Renaissance culture 17 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 importantly his Physics and De anima, although his De caelo et mundo and De generatione et corruptione maintained a secondary position late into the period. Important too were medieval reworkings of Aristotle, particularly Latin versions of the Arabic commentaries by Averroes (d. 1198).8 The major curricular development in Italy was the addition of Aristotle taught on the basis of Greek texts, especially in Padua at the end of the fifteenth century; thereafter late ancient commentators on Aristotle such as Alexander of Aphrodisias (c. AD 200), Themistius (fourth century AD), Simplicius and John Philoponus (both sixth century) exerted some influence (a process possibly beginning with Ermolao Barbaro in the 1480s). In the end, eclectic Aristotelianism or Aristotelianisms emerged, combining medieval transla- tions and commentary, new translations and commentaries based on the Greek original, and some late ancient commentators; the emphasis tended to be on exegesis, using a wide variety of sources in order to discover the true Aristotle.9 There was possibly a less deferential and more critical approach to Aristotle, beginning in Paris and spreading to other parts of transalpine Europe (such as Portugal); it may be no accident that, while Italian univer- sities remained wedded to tradition, the Parisians, by the second half of the seventeenth century, had remodeled the traditional natural philosophy curriculum according to advances made by the New Science. Metaphysics remained a more conservative university discipline through- out Europe during the Renaissance. Aristotelian metaphysics had tended to be taught either according to the more intellectualist approach of the Thomists or the more voluntarist view of the Scotists and Ockhamists. But from the end of the sixteenth century a pervasive influence was exercised throughout Europe by the Disputationes metaphysicae (1597) of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco de Suárez (d. 1617), who aimed to rewrite Aristotelian metaphysics as a series of systematically organized disputations; his was a work that not only inspired further metaphysical textbooks, notably in Protestant Germany, but also established the method of teaching metaphy- sics for centuries, not just in Catholic but in Protestant universities as well.10 Suárez’ contribution was as much one of consolidation as of innovation, given that most commentaries on Aristotle beginning in the fourteenth century were in the form of disputed questions, sometimes following the order of Aristotle’s texts, sometimes the author’s own order. In Renaissance universities, the central text for the study of moral philo- sophy was Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Fourteenth- and fifteenth- century Italy witnessed a decline in Thomist influence and a rise in humanist impact on the Ethics, particularly regarding the base translated text selected for comment. Florence emerged as the leading centre of Ethics study in the fifteenth century: here the key figures were the humanist/scholastic Niccolò R O B E R T B L A C K 18 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 meetings, which could even follow a pre-ordained program. The philosophi- cal allegiances of the participants were eclectic, ranging from Platonism and Aristotelianism to Scotism and Thomism. Its interests transcended philosophy in a narrow sense, extending to biblical studies and theology, astronomy and mathematics. Philology was a key concern of this group, particularly the editing of texts and the correction of manuscripts. The subsequent Roman Academy, gathered under the leadership of the humanist Pomponio Leto (d. 1498), had interests mainly in Latin philology, literature and archeology. The Neapolitan Academy, led by Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (d. 1503), also had mainly Roman literary interests, although some of Pontano’s own writings (especially his dialogues) were concerned with moral philosophy in an eclectic, Ciceronian manner. The Venetian Academy, founded by Aldus Manutius about 1500, was, by contrast, Hellenist in character: Greek was spoken at its meetings and its rules were drawn up in Greek; its aim was to promote the study of Greek literature and the printing of the Greek classics. The fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Roman, Neapolitan and Venetian Academies had, at most, a peripheral concern with philosophy, but an association with interests expli- citly devoted to natural philosophy was the Academia Secretorum Naturae, founded at Naples in 1560 under the presidency of Giambattista della Porta (d. 1615), who himself wrote a widely circulated book on natural magic. Later scientific academies included the Roman Accademia dei Lincei (founded in 1603) and the Florentine Accademia del Cimento (established in 1651). Academies spread to France by the second half of the sixteenth century, devel- oping from a poetic movement known as the Pléiade. Jean-Antoine de Baı̈f’s Académie de poésie et de musique was established with legal statutes and royal letters patent by Charles IX in 1570. It continued during the reign of Henri III, producing an offshoot known as the Palace Academy. These academies were concerned with music in the sense of the entire range of knowledge, and so it is not surprising to discover that they had natural and moral philosophical, as well as musical and poetic, interests. The earlier seventeenth century saw various other academies or proto-academies conceived or established in England, Germany, and Russia.13 Special consideration is due to the Florentine ‘‘Platonic Academy,’’ often regarded as an institution particularly dedicated to the study of philosophy, especially the Platonic variety. One text has figured prominently in discus- sions of the Florentine Platonic Academy. Most vivid is the testimony of a dialogue written by the obscure humanist Benedetto Colucci and dedicated to Giuliano de’ Medici. Indeed, this text constitutes the only vivid description we possess of the activities of a group identified as Ficino’s academy (not, needless to say, his ‘‘Platonic academy’’). The philosopher and Renaissance culture 21 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Colucci, an old school friend of Ficino’s, later a grammar teacher in Colle and Florence, was well acquainted with Ficino and in a good position to know the habits of his circle; Ficino himself recommended the Declamationes to Giuliano’s notice. The Declamationes depict the activities of Ficino’s academy during three days around Christmas of 1474. The scene of the action is, significantly, referred to twice as Ficino’s ‘‘gymnasium.’’ During the three days, five noble Florentine youths (‘‘quinque praestantes ex nobilitate huius inclitae civitatis iuvenes’’), who were all apparently attending Lantino’s lec- tures in the city, deliver practice orations (declamationes) in which they encour- age the princes of Italy to take up arms against the Turk. Ficino, who is referred to once as ‘‘tamquam Academiae princeps’’ and again simply as ‘‘Academiae princeps,’’ is clearly the mentor of the five youths (whom he calls ‘‘academici’’): it is Ficino who, fifteen days earlier, had allotted to each the task of delivering his oration; it is he who commends the youths after their performance and who sets the order of delivery. As in ancient Greek gymnasia and in the Roman rhetorical schools, there are also present a number of older men and distin- guished spectators who watch and comment informally on the performances. These include the poets Naldo Naldi, Alessandro Braccesi, and Poliziano, as well as Lorenzo de’ Medici’s secretary Niccolò Michellozzi.14 Hankins goes on to say that it is not ‘‘entirely clear what meaning we should assign to the word ‘academy,’ but a number of parallel texts suggest that the closest equivalent to academia in Ficino’s usage is gymnasium, as indeed is already suggested by Colucci’s alternate use of academia and gymnasium to describe the scene of the Declamationes.’’15 He concludes by stating, with reference to Colucci’s Declamationes, that ‘‘the most detailed portrait we have of Ficino’s gymnasium shows it engaged in rhetorical practice on a subject having nothing to do with Platonism.’’16 Hankins’ interpretation that the Declamationes depict Ficino’s school of rhetoric has not met with universal acceptance: there is more to these speeches than Hankins indicates. First, the assembled students giving the orations are identified as students of Cristoforo Landino (‘‘clarissimus vates vesterque sanctissimus praeceptor’’); hence it is not really Ficino’s academia at all, but an extraordinary gathering at Ficino’s school, whether at Careggi or in Florence, of others from the Florentine Studio. Secondly, Ficino is presiding over this group not as the master of his school of rhetoric but as a philosopher. At the very beginning Colucci describes Ficino, philosophus gravissimus, as follows: ‘‘in tali viro magna autoritas sit, apud eos praecipue qui vere philosophiam sectantur.’’ And after the first speech, all are described as immobilized by grief (recent Turkish conquests being an occasion for lamentation); Ficino, however, ‘‘graviore nos teneri dolore sensit, quam eos qui philosophiam profitentur deceat.’’ Indeed Ficino is here no master of rhetoric but a spiritual leader in Platonic philosophy.17 R O B E R T B L A C K 22 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The point at issue, therefore, is whether these Declamationes18 depict Ficino’s school (‘‘gymnasium’’) or his philosophical academy: that is, the gathering of a group devoted to the study of philosophy. Further examination suggests that both these interpretations are revealing, and that, in fact, the text portrays the simultaneous gatherings of two distinct groups: Ficino’s rhetoric school and his philosophical academy. Ficino appears throughout as the organizer of these declamations. In contrast, the Academy here is revealed, not as the pupils, but as the group constituted by Ficino and other members, socii (Naldi, Braccesi, Michelozzi, Poliziano), a kind of associa- tion over which he presides as princeps. The Academy also includes Colucci, who addresses Ficino as princeps (president) and the other academicians as fellow members (socii). That the Academy is not the same as Ficino’s pupils is clear when he turns from addressing the pupils (pp. 46–7) to addressing the Academicians.19 Ficino is still addressing the Academicians when he refers to ‘‘Landinus clarissimus vates vesterque sanctissimus praeceptor’’: so Landino (who is not even present) is or was, in this context, the teacher (presumably at the Studio) of the Academicians, not of the young orators.20 The Academy here (in Colucci’s usage) is not a school, but is Ficino’s group which has been gathered in his school (gymnasium) to hear the oratorical performances of Ficino’s pupils of rhetoric. The youths are not referred to as attending Landino’s lectures in the city, and he does not call the youths ‘‘academici.’’ The language in reference to the Academy is that of an association: princeps, socii.21 The scene of the Declamationes is Christmas Day, 1473, when Naldo Naldi and Alessandro Braccesi together with Niccolò Michelozzi and Angelo Poliziano (the latter two described as companions [contubernales] of the work’s dedicatee, Giuliano de’ Medici), meet Ficino in the latter’s gymnasium. They are also joined by five noble Florentine youths, who had each been assigned a topic to declaim fifteen days before. First to speak was Giovanni Cavalcanti, when Colucci himself, together with one Mariano da Pistoia, chanced to join the gathering at Ficino’s house. The opening of the text supports Hankins’ view that Ficino was the rhetoric teacher of these five youths, since he had assigned them the topic for declamation fifteen days before, and since the action took place in his school.22 After the opening oration, Ficino is the first to react;23 he then turns to the members of his group (Michelozzi, Braccesci, Naldi, Poliziano, and Colucci) and reprimands them for failing to control their emotions without appro- priate philosophical restraint.24 In order to restore philosophical calm to the gathering, Ficino takes up his lute and sings.25 Given the emphasis here on philosophy and philosophical demeanor, it is hard to deny that the purpose of the association formed by Ficino and his four companions (as distinct from the young students) was the pursuit of philosophy. The philosopher and Renaissance culture 23 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 notion of sprezzatura was derived, via the humanists, from the moral philo- sophical teachings of Aristotle and Cicero, who had portrayed the comport- ment of the ideal and well rounded citizen. Il cortegiano also contained a famous treatment of Platonic love, based on Plato’s Symposium as reinter- preted by the Florentine Platonists, as well as a debate about the best con- stitution, based on Aristotle. Castiglione’s work served to popularize the ideas of humanist moral and Platonic philosophy not only in Italy but throughout Europe with its translations into English, French, Spanish, and Latin.40 The transmission of philosophical thought In the Middle Ages, the principal media for philosophical discussion had been formal and abstract treatises (often in the form of disputations putting one side of a question, then the other, and ending with a definite conclusion by the author) or commentaries on texts, usually by an ancient authority such as Aristotle. In the Renaissance, these forms of philosophical discourse continued and thrived, but another genre came into fashion too. Philosophical dialogues had been composed in the Middle Ages (e.g. William of Conches’s Dragmaticon philosophiae), but these were abstract works, lacking verisimilitude or a flavor of genuinely spontaneous conversation. Such abstract dialogues continued to be written in the Renaissance (a famous example is Petrarch’s Secretum, where the interlocutors are simply identified as Franciscus and Augustinus, presumably Petrarch himself and his favorite author St. Augustine). Beginning in the fifteenth century, however, realistic dialogues, modeled on works such as Cicero’s De oratore, came into vogue. These humanist, neo-Ciceronian dia- logues aimed to depict credible conversations in realistic settings. Like genuine conversations, humanist dialogues often lacked clear-cut conclusions (unlike scholastic disputations).41 Scholars today still debate the genuine authorial voice in moral philosophical dialogues such as Poggio Bracciolini’s De avaritia (1429) or Lorenzo Valla’s De vero bono (1432). Almost all dialogues were modeled on Cicero’s conversational dialogues, where authorities exchange views in extended speeches, rather than on the Socratic dialogues of Plato, with their rapid give and take and their careful cross-examination of hypoth- eses; a rare exception is the little-known De comparatione reipublicae et regis (c. 1490) by Aurelio Lippi Brandolini.42 In the Renaissance, the greatest technological change affecting the disse- mination of philosophical ideas and texts was, of course, printing. Texts and ideas had circulated rapidly in the Middle Ages too, especially with the emergence of the universities and the development of the so-called pecia (piece) and reportatio systems: the former was an organized and controlled method of copying works section by section, while the latter involved groups R O B E R T B L A C K 26 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 of students informally reproducing texts read by masters. Such methods ensured the rapid dissemination of works such as Aquinas’ commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics or Ethics; indeed, such procedures persisted into the Renaissance, several philosophical texts surviving today in reportatio copies – for example, the writings of Pietro Pomponazzi (d. 1525). Printing obviously facilitated the even more rapid circulation of texts, but it had other results too. Scholars and students now had standardized and uniform ver- sions of texts available, thus facilitating discussion, dialogue, and debate over long distances. New philosophical schools and approaches could be quickly disseminated: there is little doubt that the rapid success and impact of the Platonic revival – hardly touching institutions of formal education such as universities – were due to the press; the magisterial voice was no longer the only or even principal medium for spreading new philosophical texts and ideas. The Greek revival too was given a special boost by printing: the lack of skilled Greek copyists meant that Greek texts had spread slowly in the West during the fifteenth century, but once a leading printer such as Aldus took on Greek publishing in a serious way, versions of Greek philosophy in the original language were quickly disseminated throughout Europe.43 Context – institutions, social customs, technological innovations – can shed abundant light on philosophical developments, but it can never tell the whole story. Many of the greatest Renaissance philosophers had limited support from contemporary society or institutions. Ficino taught perhaps only for one year at a university; Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (d. 1494) was refused an institutional venue for his proposed disputation on the renowned 900 theses; Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600 for his heretical teachings; Tommaso Campanella (d. 1639) was censured, tortured, and repeatedly imprisoned for his heresies; the public lectures of Galileo Galilei (d. 1642) covered the traditional Aristotelian natural philosophical syllabus: his innovatory physics was dis- seminated through his extensive private lessons. Indeed, the most famous Renaissance political philosopher – Niccolò Machiavelli – composed his treatise De principatibus (The Prince) – arguably the most original piece of political theory ever written – as an outcast from his native Florence, denied the patronage of the dominant Medici and even the support of close friends such as the Florentine aristocrat Francesco Vettori. The Renaissance was an age of famous patrons, but, in philosophy, genius counted the most. NOTES 1. De Ridder-Symeons 1992–6; Black 2001; Grendler 2002. 2. Black and Pomaro 2000; Black 2001, 275–300, esp. 304–7. 3. Percival 2004. The philosopher and Renaissance culture 27 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 4. Grondeux 2000. 5. Peter of Spain 1972; Paul of Venice 1472. 6. See below, chapter 10. 7. Schmitt et al. 1988, chs. 6 and 7. 8. See below, chapter 7. 9. Schmitt 1983a and below, chapter 4. 10. See below, chapter 13. 11. Lines 2002a and below, chapter 16. 12. Grafton and Jardine 1986; Black 2001. 13. Lowry 1979; Yates 1947; Bentley 1987; Kidwell 1991. 14. Hankins 1991, 445; see also Hankins 1990b, Hankins 1994, and Hankins 2002a, all reprinted in Hankins 2003–4, I I : 187–218, 219–72, 273–316, and 351–95. 15. Ibid., 446. 16. Ibid., 458. 17. Field 2002, 365; Hankins’ reply is in Hankins 2002a. 18. Colucci 1939. The date of the action of the Declamationes is 25, 26, 27 December 1473, not 1474; the date of their redaction by Colucci is between February and September 1474. Cf. ibid., x–xiii. 19. Ibid., 47: ‘‘Vos autem Achademici animadvertistis, quanta arte haec iuventus usa sit . . .’’ 20. There is no doubt, philologically, that Ficino is here addressing the Academicians, not the youths: subsequently, the latter are referred to only in the third person (‘‘His optimi adolescentes’’); the rest of those present are referred to in the first person plural when Ficino is included (‘‘imitemur et aemulemur,’’ ‘‘prosequamur’’), and in the second person when Ficino is addressing the other Academicians (‘‘vester’’). The last use of the second person plural had been applied to the Academicians and so here it must also refer to them. 21. Colucci seems here to be using the term ‘‘socius’’ to translate the vernacular ‘‘socio’’ (member) rather than in its strict classical Latin sense of friend or comrade; otherwise, its pairing with ‘‘princeps’’ would jar. 22. Ibid., 3. 23. Ibid., 14. 24. Ibid., 14–15: ‘‘Sed ubi Ficinus graviore nos teneri dolore sensit, quam eos qui philosophiam profitentur deceat, seque etiam aegerrimum sublevandum cen- seret, subridens, ut sibi mos est, nos aspexit: Catenas, inquit, barbaras cervicibus nostris iam impositas esse arbitramini.’’ 25. Ibid., 15. 26. Ibid., 15–19. 27. Ibid., 19. 28. Ibid., 19: ‘‘Tum Michelotius ad nos conversus: Videte, inquit, de magnis quid sit viris orationem habere.’’ 29. Ibid., 19. 30. Ibid., 32. 31. Ibid., 39. 32. Ibid., 46: ‘‘Postquam tribus diebus quinque praesantes iuvenes declamationes suas habuere, Marsilius omnes pro contione laudavit sicque eos est exhortatus. Virtus, o generosi iuvenes, cum aetate crescat. Timete immortalem omnium R O B E R T B L A C K 28 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 entity formed as the result of an evolutionary process, without an immaterial spiritual nature. This philosophical sense of humanism begins essentially with the ‘‘humanistic realism’’ of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), but later included Marxist humanism (Antonio Gramsci), existentialist humanism (Jean-Paul Sartre), humanist pragmatism (F. C. S. Schiller, following William James), ethical humanism (Irving Babbitt), as well as the odd brew of Enlightenment rationalism, utilitarianism, scientific positivism, evolution- ary biology, and pragmatism concocted by the American Humanist Association. In twentieth-century scholarship on Renaissance humanism a great deal of confusion was caused by mixing up these two broad meanings of humanism. Thus a ‘‘humanist philosophy of man’’ was imposed upon Latin writers from Petrarca to Castiglione by means of selective quotation, hermeneutical forzatura, and by adding professional philosophers like Marsilio Ficino and even Pietro Pompanazzi to the ranks of ‘‘humanists.’’ The confusion of terminology has now largely subsided, at least in the Anglo-Saxon academic universe, thanks to the influence of the great Renaissance scholar P. O. Kristeller (1905–99). Kristeller argued cogently and with immense learning that the humanism of the Renaissance could not be construed as a ‘‘philosophy of man’’ but was rather best seen as a move- ment, rooted in the medieval rhetorical tradition, to revive the language and literature of classical antiquity. Humanists were not philosophers, but men and women of letters.1 Though the term ‘‘humanism’’ can trace its origins only back to the nine- teenth century, the term ‘‘humanist’’ is attested in Latin and Italian (hum- anista, umanista) as early as the second half of the fifteenth century, where it refers to university teachers of humanities lecturing on the ancient authors.2 By that date, the sort of literary figures called ‘‘humanists’’ in modern Renaissance scholarship had been around for more than a century, most commonly referred to by their contemporaries as literati, poetae, or oratores. Such figures discharged several professional roles in Italian society. Chiefly they served as teachers of the classics in schools and universities, political secretaries and chancellors, court poets, diplomats and bureaucrats – language specialists in other words. The language they specialized in was Latin. Latin was still the most important medium of communication in the Church and the university as well as in international diplomatic, legal, scientific and scholarly exchange; it was the most prestigious language of record-keeping and memorials of all kinds, especially in the case of records and memorials meant to last far into the future. In addition to professional humanists there were many amateurs, generally members of social and political elites, who had enjoyed a humanistic education and formed an audience for the writings and oratory of contemporary humanists as well as Humanism, scholasticism, and Renaissance philosophy 31 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 for Graeco-Roman literature. Such amateurs were interested in improving their own knowledge and powers of communication and wanted to acquire the social prestige that had begun to accrue to persons with literary accom- plishments. The center of the humanists’ interests, both as professionals and amateurs, was traditional language arts such as grammar and rhetoric as well as the literary genres of history and biography, lyric and epic poetry, comedy and tragedy, letters, orations, novels, moral treatises and dialogues, and antiquarian studies of all kinds. Most of these genres had been relatively neglected in the medieval period, especially in Italy. The humanists tried to write their own literary works in a new kind of Latin, consciously distin- guished from medieval Latin, that aimed to revive the precision, eloquence, and beauty they attributed to the ancient authors. In other words, the Italian humanists of the Renaissance created a new form of culture, inspired by Graeco-Roman literature, which they referred to with names like the studia humanitatis (the humanities), studia humaniora (more humane studies), studia honestarum artium (the study of honorable arts), bonae litterae (good letters), bonae artes (the good arts), eruditio legitima et ingenua (noble and legitimate learning). This culture occupied a middle ground between purely practical studies such as law, medicine, or the mechanical arts on the one hand, and purely theoretical studies such as natural philosophy, advanced logical theory, metaphysics, and theology on the other. The scope of humane studies was to improve the quality of human beings qua human. The humanists claimed that study of good letters made people better, more virtuous, wiser, and more eloquent. It made them worthy to exercise power and made them better citizens and subjects when not exercising power. Humane studies embellished life, brought pleasure, and nourished piety. The humanities did not save souls, but living a good life would bring men favor in the eyes of God and strengthen piety, or at least not damage it. The fundamental assumption of all humanists, as of the Renaissance movement in general, was that the remains of classical antiquity constituted a great reservoir of excellence – literary, intellectual, artistic, and moral – to which debased and decadent modern times could turn in order to repair the damage wrought by the barbaric and corrupt medium aevum that had followed the fall of the Roman Empire.3 The culture of scholasticism To understand the significance of these claims for Renaissance philosophy, and especially for the questions of just what philosophy was and ought to accomplish, it is necessary to grasp the ways in which this new Renaissance form of elite culture differed from its chief rival, namely the scholastic culture J A M E S H A N K I N S 32 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 that had dominated European universities since their founding in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. Scholasticism as a form of education and intellectual discipline in fact predates the founding of universities by almost a century.4 In the twelfth century, a period when the economy and society of Western Europe was increasing rapidly in size and complexity, new forms of political order – ecclesiastical, princely, and communal – were emerging and elaborating systems of law and administration. These required a new kind of official, trained in the application of written authorities and in methods of dispute resolution. The chief ideological resources for the new political order were provided by the jurisprudence of the old Roman Empire and the doctrinal and disciplinary norms established by the Roman Church. The new modes of argumentation were derived primarily from the logical writings of Aristotle, whose complete Organon was available by the middle of the twelfth century. The reorganization of traditional authorities into legal codes and textbooks, combined with the logical technique of reconciling apparently incompatible authorities with each other, was at the heart of the new scholastic method. Debate too was central to scholastic method: students were taught to identify significant problems and find solutions to them that could resist refutation and bear up under the weight of critical scrutiny. The goal of the new education, as a great modern authority on canon law put it, was to create ‘‘harmony from dissonance’’: to use the disparate authorities inherited from the past as a normative foundation for systematic sciences of law, theology, and medicine. These sciences could then be used to bring order to state and society.5 From the time of Peter Abelard (1079–1142) onwards schools teaching the new intellectual skills flourished in the environs of government and admin- istrative centers such as Paris, Oxford, and Bologna. These informal and lightly regulated schools, normally under the headship of one or two masters and their assistants, multiplied rapidly and were eventually organized by papal and royal authorities into self-regulating corporations. This occurred roughly between 1190 and 1230 – not, coincidentally, a period of crack- down on heresy and deviant behavior of all kinds.6 The new corporations of masters and students, known as studia generalia or universities, were allowed to govern themselves, under the mostly nominal authority of a bishop, in return for an undertaking that licentious behavior by students and dangerous speculation by masters – what we would call ‘‘intellectual freedom’’ – would be reined in.7 Thought-control was indeed the chief aim of the new corporations, at least initially. The university made sure that every matriculating student was placed under a master who would be responsible for his ‘‘life and science,’’ his good behavior and attendance at prescribed Humanism, scholasticism, and Renaissance philosophy 33 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Neoplatonism via (Pseudo) Dionysius the Areopagite, Proclus’ Elements of Theology, Arab philosophers such as Algazel and Avicenna, as well as ancient Latin accounts of Platonism in authors like Cicero, Seneca, Apuleius, Augustine, and Boethius.13 The doctrines of the Stoics, especially their moral teachings, were also well known via indirect sources.14 Academic skepticism was familiar from Cicero and Augustine’s Contra Academicos. The names and a few key doctrines of the Presocratics and of Socrates himself could be found in Aristotle’s reports of their teachings.15 Yet the great bulk of medieval commentary on ancient philosophy remained focused, understand- ably, on the Aristotelian school texts. And Aristotle’s works proved quite able all by themselves to provoke heated commentary. The problem of ‘‘Averroism’’ The most intractable issue turned out to be how the teacher of Aristotelian philosophy, above all in arts faculties, should conduct himself when the conclusions of philosophy seemed to conflict with the dogmas of Chris- tianity. In the medieval and Renaissance period a certain stigma was still attached to the idea that a master might expound views that he did not himself believe. To do so was regarded by many as immoral, putting the teacher in the despised class of hypocrites, along with actors, members of religious orders who feigned a vocation, and frauds of all kinds. This attitude put pressure on masters to avoid conflicts between Christianity and Aristotelian philosophy, or (like Albert the Great and Aquinas) to minimize the differences between the two, or even (like a number of Franciscans) to argue explicitly against Aristotle and for the Christian position. These strategies were easier to adopt in theology faculties than in arts faculties, as in the latter case the master of arts was obliged in effect to teach against his own textbook, and in so doing to undermine his own authority as well. Thus from the later thirteenth century onwards it was not uncommon in arts faculties to find masters who sought other ways to adjust the claims of reason and faith. Though all masters ultimately had to defer to religious revelation and authority, some masters urged acceptance of the fact that natural reason could lead in directions incompatible with doctrine. The classic position was that adopted by John of Jandun (c. 1285/9–1328), usually regarded as a key figure in the transplantation of ‘‘Averroism’’ from northern Europe to Renaissance Italy. John’s view was that the methods and principles of philosophy are different from those of theology; human reason necessarily begins from the senses (ex sensibilibus) and so inevitably reaches conclusions, such as the eternity of the world, that conflict with what is known from faith. Theology is based on the ‘‘testimony of prophecy’’ J A M E S H A N K I N S 36 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 (testimonium prophetiae) and teaches truths that are ‘‘above the senses’’ (supra sensus).16 John distinguishes repeatedly between what can be learned by philosophy from the senses and what is known from revelation and the saints. He argues that if the truths of faith were demonstrable by philosophy we would derive no merit from belief. He even maintains that theologians harm the faith by attempting to use the methods of natural philosophy to demonstrate religious truths; this practice ends in sophistry and ulti- mately undermines belief. In Jandun’s view, religious truths such as the immortality of individual souls, the omnipotence of God, the creation of the world by God, transubstantiation and the resurrection of the body are not demonstrable by philosophical reason and should be accepted on the basis of faith alone.17 Jandun’s position on faith and reason, adopted by numerous arts masters in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was a direct challenge to the raison d’être of arts faculties as it had developed in the thirteenth century. Implicitly, it claimed autonomy for the discipline of philosophy. It chal- lenged the Dominicans’ idea that philosophy was the handmaid of theology, most famously espoused by the chief theologian of their order, Thomas Aquinas. Since the Dominicans formed in effect a kind of ‘‘think-tank’’ to advise the papacy on questions of orthodoxy, Jandun’s was a dangerous position for arts masters to adopt. The view of Jandun and other arts masters, not all of them identifiable as ‘‘Averroists,’’ that philosophy had its own form of highest, godlike felicity, distinct from religious beatitude, did not increase confidence in the orthodoxy of the arts faculty as a whole.18 It is no surprise that Jandun himself was condemned for heresy by John XXII in 1327 (even though the specific doctrines condemned were political rather than philoso- phical), and that teachers of philosophy in the arts faculties of Italian uni- versities could be condemned sweepingly by outsiders like Petrarca and Marsilio Ficino as ‘‘Averroists’’ and atheists, dispensers of impiety, destroyers of faith. This raises the issue of just what an ‘‘Averroist’’ was and how to define the concept of Averroism.19 The evidence admits of no simple answer. Like ‘‘humanism,’’ the abstract noun ‘‘Averroism’’ is a modern coinage. But the adjective ‘‘Averroist’’ was certainly used in the Renaissance, usually by opponents of the philosophers in question, men such as the Platonist Ficino or the Scotist Antonio Trombetta.20 It is open to doubt whether any of those accused of ‘‘Averroism’’ would have accepted the label for themselves. An Averroist is not a philosopher who simply used one of the Arabic philoso- pher’s commentaries on Aristotle, since most scholastic philosophers and theologians did that without bringing their own orthodoxy into question. Nor is an Averroist identifiable as someone who recognized that some of Humanism, scholasticism, and Renaissance philosophy 37 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Aristotle’s conclusions in philosophy were incompatible with Christian doctrine, since any honest reader of Aristotle would have to admit, at the very least, that Aristotle did not believe in creation ex nihilo. In fact almost all interpreters of Aristotle admitted this, including inveterate harmonizers such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.21 Positions that contempor- aries at various times and places identified as ‘‘Averroist’’ include the follow- ing: (1) Averroes’ notorious reading of the De anima that sees Aristotle as the champion of the view that there is only one intellect for all mankind (and hence no personal immortality); (2) the belief that the eternity of the world is a necessary conclusion of philosophy; (3) the belief that viri speculativi have their own godlike felicity which sets them apart from the rest of mankind; (4) the belief that God, according to Aristotle and philosophy, does not know singulars and thus has no knowledge of men as individual beings; (5) the belief that philosophy is based on reasoning from sense experience and comes to conclusions different from the truths of faith. The difficulty with defining Averroism is that if we use these criteria to identify particular individuals as ‘‘Averroists,’’ exceptions, ambiguities, and qualifications seem to multiply indefinitely. Some figures like Nicoletto Vernia and Agostino Nifo, both arts masters at Padua, took Averroist posit- ions early in their careers, but later moved in more orthodox directions. Others like Gaetano da Thiene and his student John Argyropoulos accepted Averroes’ view of Aristotle but thought that philosophical arguments could be mounted for some Christian doctrines that were regarded by other pro- fessors purely as matters of faith. Others like Marcantonio Zimara engaged in an internal critique of Averroistic psychology without moving towards a Christian position. Philosophers like Paul of Venice and Alessandro Achillini tried to combine Averroism with Ockhamism, while Biagio of Parma accepted the ‘‘Averroist’’ separation of philosophy and religion but espoused a materi- alist psychology. Still others, like Pietro Pomponazzi, argued for positions that were incompatible with Christianity but not indebted in any straightforward way to Averroes. Then there were those like Paul of Venice (in his latest period) who maintained that the Averroist unicity thesis and other theses inconsistent with Christian teachings were merely probabilis (i.e. arguable), not demonstrable.22 Finally, there were some masters, even at institutions famous for ‘‘Averroism’’ like the University of Padua, who were bitter oppon- ents of those who taught doctrines incompatible with Christianity.23 So it does not seem to be the case that a school of anti-Christian philosophy was taking shape, at Padua or elsewhere, espousing a common set of doctrines derived from Averroes. What was happening from the first half of the fourteenth century onwards was that the intellectual and moral justification for philosophy in a Christian culture was shifting, becoming J A M E S H A N K I N S 38 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 true happiness. Aristotle had only a dim understanding of such matters; he was like an owl looking at the sun.33 Even Plato, the philosopher ancient Christians thought to be closest to Christianity, was not a true philosopher, in the sense of someone who invariably spoke the truth (103). Plato is Petrarca’s prime example of how narrow and blinkered his Aristotelian opponents are. If they knew anything about ancient philosophy and the Church Fathers they would know that Plato was generally consi- dered a more sublime thinker than Aristotle. In their ignorance they assume that doctrines like the eternity of the world and the mortality of the soul are necessary conclusions of reason and philosophy. But if they had studied Plato’s Timaeus they would see that the greatest of ancient philosophers had argued both for the creation of the world by God and for immortality (87, 97–101). It should be noted that Petrarca’s argument here (unlike Ficino’s in the next century) is not that Plato should be substituted for Aristotle as the handmaid of Christian theology, but that no one philosopher should be followed in all things, since all philosophers err in some things. To seize upon any single pagan philosopher and follow all his views slavishly is thus a guarantee that one will end up believing false, impious, and heretical doctrines. That explains why, according to Petrarca, his Aristotelian oppon- ents secretly despise the name of Christian and Catholic, why ‘‘when there is no threat of punishment and no witnesses they attack truth and piety and in their private dens they secretly mock Christ. They worship Aristotle, whom they don’t understand; and they accuse me for not bending my knee before him, ascribing to ignorance what stems from my faith’’ (87). By inquiring pridefully and curiously into the secrets of nature and the hidden things of God, they have ignored the words of Ecclesiasticus to ‘‘seek not what is above you, search not what is beyond your strength’’; that is why they bracket the faith in the search for truth. ‘‘Isn’t this the same as seeking what is true while rejecting the truth?’’ (89). Philosophical arguments are strong enough to shake religious beliefs, especially when bolstered by pride and arrogance, but they are never strong enough by themselves to compel belief (131–3). Since philosophy cannot be trusted as a source of truth, there is no point in elaborating systems of thought, no point in seeking a single, coherent philo- sophical position. This is not to say that philosophy is without value; but its value depends on how it is used. Used rightly, it can be a source of wisdom and inspiration. It can even strengthen faith to read a philosopher like Plato and see that truths of the faith have been defended by great philosophers. But to cling to a single authority when all authorities are unreliable is simply foolish; one is depriving oneself needlessly of other possible sources of wis- dom. Quoting Horace (Epistles, 1.1.14), Petrarca says that he himself is ‘‘not bound to swear by the words of any master’’ (104). In effect he is arguing that, Humanism, scholasticism, and Renaissance philosophy 41 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 as a Christian, he already has a theological position, which makes a philo- sophical one strictly unnecessary. His choice of which philosophical opinions to accept is governed by an antecedent commitment to Christianity. His perspective as a Christian already in possession of revealed truth shows him that no philosopher is an adequate guide to that truth. Hence his choice of which philosophers to study, and how to study them, is dictated by a different set of concerns: concern for acquiring general knowledge, eloquence, and virtue. Petrarca’s eclectic approach to philosophy, perhaps not surprisingly, is similar to his approach to literary style and imitation. One reads many great authors to acquire taste and power of expression, but in the end one’s style is a sovereign choice, mixing many influences, that expresses one’s own dis- tinctive character. In the same way, one reads many great philosophers but becomes a disciple of none; one’s philosophical outlook is ultimately a form of self-expression and a ‘‘taste in universes.’’ It is a meditation on experience, a personal search for coherence and meaning, not a systematic body of propositions based on true, primary and necessary first principles nor a search for truth. Despite his love of antiquity, Petrarca’s view of philosophy is wholly inimical to the ancient idea of the philosophical life, which neces- sarily involves discipleship, submission to a master, the readiness to engage in long study, and spiritual discipline in the hope of acquiring an esoteric vision of reality not shared by the generality of men.34 As in the case of Augustine, Petrarca’s master is Christ, and the grounds of his belief are ultimately external to the philosophical enterprise. Petrarca’s indifference to the philosophical search for truth is symptomatic of his wider moral vision regarding the purpose of philosophy and literary culture. His other great objection to scholastic Aristotelianism, beyond its triviality, uncertainty, and impiety, is that it is useless and ineffective in achieving the good life, the life of happiness and virtue. Its probing into obscure corners of natural philosophy shows its unconcern with the moral life of human beings. Even when scholastics lecture on Aristotle’s Ethics – and Petrarca claims to have heard such lectures (107) – they fail to bring about moral improvement. Aristotle’s ethical writings are brilliant analyti- cally, but they address only the intellect, not the will.35 They do not move, they do not persuade, they do not make us better. For it is one thing to know, and another to love; one thing to understand, and another to will. I don’t deny that [Aristotle] teaches us the nature of virtue. But reading him offers us none of those exhortations, or only a very few, that goad and inflame our minds to love virtue and hate vice . . . What good is there in knowing what virtue is, if this knowledge doesn’t make us love it? What point is there in knowing vice, if this knowledge doesn’t make us shun it? J A M E S H A N K I N S 42 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 By heaven, if the will is corrupt, an idle and irresolute mind will take the wrong path when it discovers the difficulty of the virtues and the alluring ease of the vices (108). The contempt of scholastic philosophers for the moral welfare of mankind as a whole is shown by the very language they use: crude, stiff, jargon-ridden, hermetic – a language unconcerned to communicate with and persuade persons outside their narrow sect (heresis). The contrast of will and intellect Petrarca invokes here is of course taken from Augustine, particularly his Confessions, which was a key text in Petrarca’s own spiritual odyssey.36 Augustine’s account of his conversion presents his journey as a dialectic between will and intellect, between his desire for the true God and his understanding of God’s truth. Platonism was Augustine’s guide to truth; it removed the purely intellectual obstacles to belief; but conversion only came when his will was converted by God’s grace – when he was given a new will to believe. In late medieval thought the issue of whether the will or the intellect was the higher human act became a disputed question in scholastic theology, and it was common for Franciscan theologians and other critics of Aristotelian intellectualism to maintain the superiority of the will to the intellect in terms similar to those used by Petrarca in the De ignorantia.37 But the key point to be grasped is that, in describing how the will may be moved, Petrarca argues, in striking contrast with Augustine, that humane letters and eloquent philosophy can have a subsidiary role in preparing the soul for God’s grace. They do this by inculcating virtue. ‘‘Although our ultimate goal does not lie in virtue, where the philosophers placed it, yet the straight path toward our goal passes through the virtues, and not through virtues that are merely known, I say, but loved’’ (110). Of course Petrarca has no intention of giving humanistic letters a direct role in Christian conversion. His aim is to argue for the superiority of humanism to scholasticism by showing its superior effectiveness in changing the heart. The critique of scholastic Aristotelianism in effect defines by negation what Petrarca considers true culture, the culture of humane studies (humana studia). Students of the humanities admit ex ante that the highest, theological truths about God, creation, and the soul are to be sought from Christian sources. Implicitly, these truths belong to the studia divinitatis, not the studia humanitatis.38 Human studies seek only what is appropriate to the limited human intelligence, situated as it is in its middle rank in the chain of being, between animal and angelic natures. The best human studies can hope to achieve is a modest, limited sort of knowledge: knowledge of the virtues, of how to conduct our life in this world with prudence, decorum, and moral Humanism, scholasticism, and Renaissance philosophy 43 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 professional caste of specially trained experts with its own technical lan- guage, but the ruling classes of the city-state: men and women who had studied humanistic Latin but had no special qualifications for philosophical study.47 Elegance and urbanity became more important than originality or power of thought. If philosophy had been humbled in the medieval schools by being made to dance attendance on theology, the humanists insisted that she learn good manners and sit decently at table with other courtiers of the prince. The humanist movement greatly enriched the study of philosophy in the Renaissance as it did many other aspects of European culture. It helped broaden and civilize the Christian religion which even in the Renaissance still retained something of its ancient rigor and exclusivism.48 But it did not produce great philosophers. At its best, in the case of writers like Valla, Machiavelli, More, and Montaigne, it produced witty subversives and incisive provocateurs who, in Cassirer’s phrase, ‘‘determined the problem’’ to be considered, ‘‘[handing] it down in a new form to the following centu- ries, the centuries of exact science and systematic philosophy.’’49 As we have seen, the failure of the humanists to produce great philosophy is perfectly comprehensible, given that the humanist movement had from the beginning bracketed the deepest questions about nature and human existence in the desire to make its peace with religious authority. Some might say that the humanists did not produce great philosophy simply because they were men and women of letters and not professional philosophers. This is true, but it ignores the more basic question of the kind of literature and moral philoso- phy the humanists chose to write and why they chose to define literature in the way they did. In the ancient world Plato and Lucretius and Seneca – and yes, Augustine – wrote what today we would certainly call great philosophy as well as great literature, but they did not foreclose consideration of the deepest questions about God, nature, and human destiny as the Renaissance humanists generally did. True libertas philosophandi would have to await a later age. NOTES 1. Giustiniani 1985; Hankins 2003–4, I : 573–90; on Voigt see Grendler 2006; on Kristeller see Monfasani 2006. 2. Kristeller 1945; Kristeller 1956–96, I ; Campana 1946; Rüdiger 1961; Billanovich 1965. 3. The best treatment of the character and goals of humanism as a movement is Rico 1998. 4. On scholasticism in general see Southern 1995–2001 and Murray 1978, chs. 9–12. 5. Kuttner 1980. 6. Moore 1994. J A M E S H A N K I N S 46 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 7. On the founding of universities see Ferruolo 1985, Southern 1984; De Ridder- Symoens 1992–6, I . 8. For intellectual freedom in the medieval university as a question mal posée see Thijssen 1998, 90–112. 9. For medieval and Renaissance scholastic criticisms of Aristotle as ‘‘only a man, who could err,’’ see Bianchi 2003, 102–24. 10. Olivi 1941, 37–8. 11. Dales 1990, 132–40. 12. See chapter 5 below. 13. Hankins 2003–4, I I : 7–26; for the Latin tradition of Platonism see Gersh 1986. 14. Verbeke 1983; Colish 1985; Strange and Zupko 2004. 15. Laarmann 1995. 16. The phrase testimonium prophetiae seems to disclose the influence of Arabic philosophy, especially Avicenna; see D. L. Black 2005, 320–1. 17. South 2003, 373; MacClintock 1956; for attitudes to faith and reason in the Parisian arts faculty see ibid., ch. 4; for Jandun’s influence in Italy see ibid., 7–9, and Mahoney 2000, article I , 176. 18. Bianchi 2003, 41–61; Mahoney 2000, article XI I . 19. On this question see now Martin 2007. 20. Mahoney 2000, article IX; Poppi 1989, 63–113. 21. Dales 1990. 22. In general see Kessler 1988 and chapters 7 and 11 in this volume. 23. Poppi 1989. 24. Lorenzo de’ Medici’s attempt to hire Nicoletto Vernia to teach at the Florentine Studio, opposed by Ficino, is instructive; see Hankins 2003–4, I I : 288–91. 25. See chapters 4 and 7, below, as well as Mahoney 1982a and Hankins and Palmer 2007 for the study of the Greek commentators. 26. For the humanist critique of scholasticism in general, see Ingegno 1995. 27. Witt 2000, 240: ‘‘Perhaps Petrarch’s greatest contribution to humanism was his clear formulation of its ethical commitment.’’ 28. Petrarca 2003. References are to the paragraph numbers of this edition; the translations are David Marsh’s. 29. Ronconi 1976; Witt 2000. 30. The Invectives against a Physician (Invectiva contra medicum) can be found in Petrarca 2003, 2–179; see also Petrarca’s Epistulae seniles 9.1. 31. Kristeller 1956–96, I I : 209–16. 32. See Bianchi 2003, 101–24 for the topos that ‘‘Aristotle was only a man and could err.’’ 33. An allusion to Aristotle’s Metaphysics 2.1, 993b10–11, where Aristotle himself compares human reason’s attempt to grasp the divine to a bat looking at the sun (the Greek word for bat being often confused with the word for owl in medieval translations). 34. Hadot 2002. 35. See Macintyre 2006, who similarly blames Renaissance Aristotelians believing that technical analysis of ethical issues could stand in for genuine moral edification. 36. Witt 2000, 249f. 37. Hankins 2003–4, I I : 335–7, 343–7. Compare Petrarca’s arguments in x111 with those of Henry of Ghent 1979, Quodlibet I , qu. 14. Humanism, scholasticism, and Renaissance philosophy 47 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 38. As is pointed out in Witt 2000, 246f., this involved Petrarca in scaling back the claims of earlier humanists regarding the divine inspiration of the pagan poets. 39. See Witt 2000, 248. 40. Quillen 1995 argues persuasively that Petrarca ‘‘invent[ed] an Augustine who not only sanctioned but insisted upon the use of classical literature in the human search for spiritual health,’’ that he misunderstood (willfully?) the historical Augustine’s cultural program. 41. See especially De doctrina christiana 1.31 and 2.39–40. 42. The canonical group, as established by Kristeller 1956–96, I : 573, consists of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy, but see Kohl 2001, essay VI I I , for a less static view. 43. See chapter 10 in this volume. 44. See chapter 4 in this volume. 45. See Hankins 2003–4, I I : 187–395, and chapter 2 above. In any case, many scholars, including Paul Oskar Kristeller, regard Ficino as a professional philo- sopher rather than a humanist. 46. See Hankins 2000a for some recent interpretations of ‘‘civic humanism.’’ 47. That rhetoric is a part of philosophy and that philosophy therefore pertains to civil science, of which rhetoric is a species, is maintained by Ermolao Barbaro in his famous controversy with Pico della Mirandola. See Barbaro and Pico della Mirandola 1998, 76, with Francesco Bausi’s remarks in the introduction, 23–4, 29–31. 48. Hankins 2006b. 49. Cassirer 1972, 191. J A M E S H A N K I N S 48 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 the more significant since, after a youthful flirtation with Averroism, Nifo had opened himself to the influence of Platonism. Although not conceding the theoretical superiority of Aristotle’s philosophy over Plato’s, Nifo was ready to recognize the historical reasons for its perennial success.4 New translations and the ‘‘renaissance’’ of Aristotle A multiplicity of different causes, discrete but partially interdependent, underlay the great impulse given to the study of the Corpus Aristotelicum during the Renaissance. Important were the influx of Greek scholars into Italy and Europe, the broadening knowledge of classical languages, the foundation of large libraries both public and private, and the invention of printing. The principal cause, however, was that not only scholastic profes- sors of philosophy but also many humanists dedicated their energies to Aristotle and his followers. Both Italian humanists and their Greek teachers, recently arrived in Italy from Byzantium, undertook new Latin translation of their works, often accompanied by glosses and commentaries. These efforts diverged sharply from the medieval approach to the texts, and thus it is right to speak of a ‘‘renaissance’’ of Aristotle. This rebirth, however, differs pro- foundly from the contemporary ‘‘renaissance’’ of Plato, atomism, and ancient skepticism, all of which were sparked by the rediscovery of previously inaccessible texts. To be sure, some writings of, or attributed to, Aristotle, unknown or only partially known to the Middle Ages, returned to circulation during the Renaissance, such as the Eudemian Ethics, the Magna moralia, and the Quaestiones mechanicae. Nevertheless, in the great majority of cases the ‘‘renaissance’’ of Aristotle consisted not so much in the rediscovery of unknown texts as in the renewed interest in texts long translated into Latin but little studied, and especially in the ‘‘restoration’’ of well-known texts which were now to be read in a new way in order to recover their authentic meaning. First and foremost, the humanists endeavored to dignify the writings of Aristotle with the literary elegance which, following a belief going back to Cicero and Quintilian and revived by Petrarch, they presumed to charac- terize the original Greek. Their project to retranslate the entire corpus of the Stagirite was born, therefore, from the conviction that to present Aristotle in elegant Latin dress would be equivalent to resuscitating the true Aristotle. Thanks to the work of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti, Francesco Filelfo, Giorgio Valla, and Ermolao Barbaro, as well as Greek scholars like John Argyropoulos, George Trebizond, Theodore Gaza, and Cardinal Bessarion, this fruitful misconception would evolve into a grand translation movement that would lead, already in the fifteenth century, to the substitution Continuity and change in the Aristotelian tradition 51 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 of humanistic translations for the putatively ugly and inaccurate medieval translations.5 Under the patronage of princes and popes this movement experienced an extraordinary expansion during the subsequent century. Its center of activity was also transferred across the Alps to the able care of French and Swiss humanists such as Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, François Vatables, Joachim Périon, Denis Lambin, Jacques d’Estrebay, and Isaac Casaubon, as well as of Italian scholars working abroad, such as Simone Simoni, Francesco Vimercati, and Giulio Pace.6 According to the humanists, word-for-word translation (verbum e verbo or ad verbum), a technique employed in a wide variety of ways by medieval translators, suffered from three grave defects: it insisted on fidelity to the original Greek to the point of distorting Latin grammar and syntax; it compensated for the supposed lexical poverty of Latin with neologisms, hybrid words, and transliterations; it thereby transformed Aristotle’s prose – which, as we have seen, was believed to be highly elegant – into a barbarous language intolerable to the ears of anyone initiated into the mysteries of the Latin classics. To avoid such infelicities the translator must force him- self to reproduce in Latin both the content (rerum doctrina) and the style (scribendi ornatus) of Aristotle by means of a complex rendering ad sensum (or ad sententiam). The ad sensum method was theorized around 1420 by Leonardo Bruni in his treatise On Correct Translation (De interpretatione recta), which formed part of his bitter polemic against the detractors of his new version of the Nicomachean Ethics.7 In practice it was applied in quite different ways. While some admired beautiful style above all, even at the cost of producing inaccurate translations, others attempted an equilibrium between readability and accuracy. Nevertheless, the medieval translations, although widely scorned, endured throughout the entire fifteenth century as standard texts, and humanist translators often did little more than embellish, revise, and correct them. The work of humanist translators was heavily conditioned by their class- icist prejudices, which caused them to consider words not sanctioned by authors like Cicero and Quintilian to be stylistically defective. This tendency can be seen already in Bruni. Although he was still willing to admit the sixth- century neologisms of Boethius, he rejected the terminology developed by the great translators of the thirteenth century like Robert Grosseteste and William of Moerbeke. Not only did he reject their rougher transliterations like eutrapelia or bomolochia, but he also eschewed terms which had already entered into common usage in Latin and the vernacular languages. Thus politica was replaced with the awkward circumlocution scientia gubernandarum rerum publicarum and democratia with the misleading popularis potestas. Other Italian and Byzantine translators, Argyropoulos L U C A B I A N C H I 52 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 and Barbaro among them, moved in an analogous direction, stirring up confusion about the meaning of many technical terms in philosophy. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, even the titles of Aristotle’s works were changed to accord with the new classicizing sensibility. De generatione et corruptione, for example, was rechristened De ortu et interitu in 1519 by Vatable.8 With his monumental effort to translate nearly all of Aristotle’s works into pure Ciceronian Latin, the French Benedictine Joachim Périon revealed the devastating effects which the methods pioneered by the humanists could have. Going well beyond Bruni, Périon argued in his De optimo genere interpretandi (1540) that a literal adherence to Aristotle’s texts was impos- sible, and not only due to the profound dissimilarity between the grammar and syntax of Latin and Greek. In his view, a different sentence structure was needed to accommodate the relative lexical poverty of Latin. Since many Greek words have no exact counterpart in Latin, it was necessary to resolve them into long paraphrases. And, since only context can determine the meaning of words, it was necessary to find new Latin renderings each time a given term occurred rather than mechanically plugging in a standard translation. This exacting focus on the concrete use of language, combined with a rigid classicism, caused Périon to reject the entire lexicon which the Latin West had used for a thousand years to discuss logic, metaphysics, physics, and psychology. Having purged key terms like homonymum, ens, substantia, generatio, reminiscentia, and intelligibile, Périon sought to replenish the lexical storehouse with expressions as elegant as they were jumbled and – far too often – ambiguous. Although a commercial success, his versions were unusable by scholars of philosophy. The few who did attempt to make use of them, like the Spaniard Pedro Nuñez and the Italian Agostino Faba, were forced to furnish their readers with glossaries to indicate which terms of the traditional jargon corresponded to Périon’s Ciceronianisms.9 Périon’s translations gave rise to bitter polemics (in which Jacques Louis d’Estrebay and Denis Lambin, among others, participated) and provoked a round of new translations of Aristotle’s works in the second half of the sixteenth century. Francesco Vimercati, Simone Simoni, Michael Sofianos, Antonio Riccobono, and Giulio Pace reacted against Périon’s excesses by reintroducing postclassical terms ultimately judged essential, such as ens and substantia, and by promoting a prudent return to word-for-word transla- tion.10 High quality was a hallmark of most of these translations, but their number, their rapid circulation (made possible by a highly competitive print- ing industry), and the practice of publishing two or three in rapid succession or even at the same time in parallel columns, created many problems. To take Continuity and change in the Aristotelian tradition 53 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 and critical evaluation – were not, and could not have been, applied to the Corpus Aristotelicum in the absence of rigorous techniques for dating, comparing, and establishing the relationship among a great multitude of manuscripts. Even the greatest Aristotelian scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often distinguished with little clarity among the various codices and employed vague chronological terminology (antiquus, vetus, vetustissimus). They had only an approximate knowledge of the history of Greek handwriting and availed themselves of paleography for dating pur- poses to a much lesser degree than was being done contemporaneously with Latin manuscripts. Yet, with rare exceptions such as Vettori, they retained an excessive faith in the reliability of older manuscripts; they did not collate systematically and reported readings at second hand; they did not develop rigorous and coherent techniques for judging the value of conflicting wit- nesses; and they introduced numerous conjectural emendations, often plaus- ible but sometimes without any textual basis whatsoever.16 It would obviously be anachronistic to judge Renaissance scholars accord- ing to the methodological standards of modern philology, developed as they were in the nineteenth century by Lachmann. It is nevertheless well worth noting that these scholars at least attempted to describe the procedures they used, thereby often highlighting and explaining the choices they made. Not only did they cause to flourish a genre of Aristotelian literature – philological glosses – of which the Middle Ages has left few specimens, they played a decisive role in bringing about a new awareness of the inevit- able subjectivity of textual reconstruction, and thus of the necessity of inter- subjective cooperation. It is no surprise that it was someone intimately acquainted with the Renaissance editorial work on Aristotle, Pedro Nuñez himself, who was among the first to develop an embryonic understanding of the apparatus criticus. Convinced that the ‘‘variety of the Greek text’’ constituted the primary cause for the ‘‘obscurity of Aristotle,’’ he proposed to invest a group of experts with the task of examining and comparing the ‘‘various exemplars’’ of the writings of the philosopher. They should estab- lish in every controversial locus, ‘‘using arguments and conjectures,’’ which was the ‘‘most correct reading,’’ but all of the variants, even those considered ‘‘less probable,’’ must ‘‘be written down in a separate notebook so that each reader should be free to follow the reading he thinks right.’’17 New hermeneutical principles and the search for the ‘‘historical Aristotle’’ In 1499 a statute of the University of Pisa required teachers ‘‘to read and inter- pret the texts of the books of Aristotle, but not to explicate commentaries L U C A B I A N C H I 56 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 on such books,’’ and permitted commentaries to be used as aids to learning only ‘‘after the presentation of the text in question.’’ Twenty years later a statute of the University of Leipzig invoked the authority of Seneca to criticize those ‘‘sophists’’ who had neglected to study the texts of Aristotle and claimed ‘‘to know him only through commentaries,’’ and enjoined them to make use of the new humanist translations.18 These orders show how, between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, even the universities had finally heeded one of the commands issued by Bruni, Barbaro, Poliziano, and Lefèvre d’Étaples: to read neither commen- taries nor paraphrases but the works of Aristotle themselves in order to drink of his thought ‘‘directly from the spring.’’19 In and of itself, the call to reestablish direct contact with the texts of Aristotle, bypassing the multiple layers of traditional exegesis, was less original than it might seem. The humanists, however, endowed it with a precise polemical meaning against the scholastic commentators. These they accused of reading his texts in order to identify a set of doctrines to be judged according to a criterion of metatemporal truth, or even as a pretext for raising issues that had little or nothing to do with Aristotle. They were convinced for their part that every past work must be studied as documenting a different way of conceiving man and the world, comprehensible only if considered in its precise historical context. They harshly criticized the schol- astic question-commentary which had been standard in universities since the middle of the thirteenth century, seeing it as emblematic of a historically insensitive and ‘‘sophistic’’ approach to the thought of Aristotle. Barring rare exceptions, these criticisms were not aimed at the commentary as a genre. Instead they sought to redefine its sense, its scope, and its methods according to new hermeneutical principles. The most important of these was undoubt- edly that every author is his own best interpreter, and thus that ambiguous statements and corrupt passages must be understood in the light of other passages by the same author. Originating with the Alexandrian grammar- ians, this principle was taken up again in the fifteenth century and was openly applied to the Stagirite by Pedro Nuñez and by his student Bartolomé Pasqual, who in orations delivered in 1553 and 1565 at the university of Valencia explained how one could ‘‘interpret Aristotle through Aristotle.’’20 Whether or not they appealed to this principle, all Aristotelians of human- ist background believed that the ideal commentator must adopt a simple, clear, but elegant style. He must therefore avoid rarefied philosophical jargon while freely illustrating the doctrinal content of the passages in quest- ion with exempla from literature, history, and the visual arts. He must study the whole corpus of Aristotle’s works, preferably in the original language. He must verify the accuracy of the numerous translations and readings, Continuity and change in the Aristotelian tradition 57 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 identify corrupt passages, and distinguish authentic from spurious works. Finally, he must privilege the Greek interpreters, considered the most trust- worthy guides both for their chronological and cultural proximity to Aristotle. Despite encountering strong resistance, especially from some scholastics, this new approach became ever more widely diffused, until by the end of the fifteenth century it was domesticated in the universities. This happened first in Italy. Niccolò Leonico Tomeo’s appointment at Padua in 1497 to give lectures based on the Greek text of Aristotle is often considered the symbol of the triumph of ‘‘humanist Aristotelianism.’’ This may not have been a real innovation, however, since some years earlier Angelo Poliziano had begun to do the same at the Florentine studium.21 Whether or not they indicate the beginning of the teaching of Aristotle based on the Greek text, Poliziano’s courses on the Philosopher constitute a turning point. Having previously commented on the Ethics, Poliziano inaugurated his courses on the Organon with two celebrated orations, the Introduction to Logic (Praelectio de dialectica) of 1491 and the Lamia of 1492. In these he outlined an approach that, beyond sounding the dominant motifs of the humanist polemic against scholastic commentators – rejection of the method of quaestio disputata, criticism of specialized jargon, the goal of elegance and expository clarity – insisted that the Corpus Aristotelicum had to be treated using the same philological methods successfully employed in the case of other ancient texts. Poliziano knew well that his proposal would not please those who continued to view the Stagirite as a timeless thinker to whom one could pose contemporary problems, and were hostile to seeing him as a ‘‘classic,’’ an author to be situated in his historical context. Foreseeing their reaction, in the Lamia he ironically refuses the title of philosopher and calls himself instead a philosophaster, a mere dilettante philosopher, who is content to interpret Aristotle after the manner of the Hellenistic grammarians – i.e. to combine philological expertise with a solid knowledge of Greek language and culture.22 The echo of Poliziano’s methodological recommendations sounded far and wide. As the teaching of Aristotelian philosophy by way of Greek texts spread outside of Italy (beginning in Paris, where it was the common practice of the lecteurs royals), scholars of Aristotle paid growing attention to recon- structing the text, evaluating variant readings of the codices, discussing the correct spelling and exact meaning of Greek terms, and comparing the many Latin translations. At the same time, problems relating to the development, structure, and transmission of the Corpus Aristotelicum acquired great importance. Were the works circulating under the name of the Stagirite truly his? What were their original titles? How were they divided internally and what was their logical order? What was their chronological order? What L U C A B I A N C H I 58 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The fate of the great Latin interpreters of Aristotle like Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, John of Jandun, Walter Burley, and John Buridan was analogous. In the second half of the fifteenth century, their commentaries continued to be printed, studied, and used, and not only by scholastic Aristotelians. Humanists too, despite their invectives against the university ‘‘barbarians’’ of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, often had recourse to their ideas, generally without attribution. It is striking, for example, that a great Greek scholar like George Trebizond would solve one of the few problems examined in his scholia to the Physics – that of motion in a vacuum – with a paraphrase of Thomas Aquinas’ views on the matter.28 F. Edward Cranz has emphasized that the printing of medieval Latin commentaries suffered a marked contraction after 1535,29 but the significance of this phenomenon must not be overstated. On the one hand there were notable exceptions to the trend, like the enduring success of the commentaries of Thomas Aquinas and John of Jandun. On the other hand, the decline in the printing of medieval expositiones and quaestiones is more likely due to a saturation of the book market than to lack of interest, given that the great Aristotelian philosophers of the sixteenth century demonstrate an excellent knowledge of medieval exegesis. The profound transformation of the ‘‘Peripatetic library’’ in the Renaissance should not be seen as tantamount to an overthrow of the medieval tradition, as Poliziano delightedly predicted while gazing at his bookshelves lined with Theophrastus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Ammonius, Simplicius, and Philoponus.30 It led, rather, to an enrichment of the exegetical environ- ment. The various interpretive traditions produced in the span of fifteen centuries in different cultural, linguistic, and religious contexts became accessible and comparable. If some were bewildered by the wide differences that emerged from this multiplication of critical perspectives, others (like the Jesuits of Coimbra) resolved to reconcile and unite them, while still others (like John Case) were determined to cull the most essential sources for a representative synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy, thus taking an important step on the commentary’s evolution into the textbook.31 Competition with other philosophical traditions The superabundance of materials made available by the energetic printing of Aristotle certainly offered marvelous opportunities, but it also presented unforeseen difficulties. Already, hardly one hundred years after the invention of the printing press, the number of works dedicated to Aristotle – translations into both Latin and vernacular tongues, commentaries, paraphrases, comp- endia, and florilegia – amounted to many thousands of titles. Only the Continuity and change in the Aristotelian tradition 61 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 growing practice of compiling ‘‘Aristotelian bibliographies,’’ which reported, sometimes with fine discrimination, the principal editions, translations, and commentaries of the various works of the Philosopher, enabled professional philosophers, scholars, booksellers, and amateurs to orient themselves in the mare magnum of Aristotelian literature.32 It is noteworthy that these ‘‘Aristotelian bibliographies’’ often included texts written by authors who had little in common with, or were even openly hostile to Aristotle’s thought. This perhaps surprising fact provides an excellent example of how Renaissance Aristotelianism was able to incorporate heterogeneous elements. Although not a novelty – since late antiquity the Aristotelian tradition had absorbed many ideas arriving from foreign philosophic terri- tory, above all from Neoplatonism – this phenomenon definitely accelerated beginning in the fifteenth century, when Aristotle’s thought acquired a different status. Despite its enduring predominance in arts education, it could no longer be identified with the whole of philosophy. As Crisostomo Javelli would write during the controversy over Pomponazzi’s treatise on immortality, ‘‘the philosophy of Aristotle and philosophy qua philosophy no longer coincide [non convertuntur]. In fact, philosophy in itself is the knowledge of pure truth and perfection, while the philosophy of Aristotle is not perfect.’’33 Javelli, a Dominican theologian of Thomist persuasion, authored comm- entaries on the major works of the Stagirite and was certainly no anti- Aristotelian; he was uttering sentiments which by that time were widely diffused. When set beside Plato, the Atomists, the Stoics, and the skeptics, Aristotle lost the status he enjoyed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the Philosopher and returned to that of one ancient philosopher among many. There is no need to dwell on the bitter controversy over the compa- ratio between Plato and Aristotle, born of a tract issued in Florence in 1439 by Gemistus Pletho, carried on over several decades, revived in the later sixteenth century, and involving figures of the caliber of George Trebizond, Bessarion, and later Francesco Patrizi of Cherso.34 Instead it is useful to remember that Petrarch, when declaring his preference for Plato, had harshly criticized the conception of happiness elaborated in the Nicomachean Ethics, which he judged incompatible with Christianity. The notion that Aristotelian morality, and even classical ethics generally, had been completely surpassed by the teaching of the Gospels was taken up by eminent humanists, Valla and Vives among them.35 The chief target for them, however, was not Aristotle’s ethics but his logic. In the Elegantiae and the Dialecticae disputationes, Valla maintained that the value of this discipline had been largely overestimated. Since language can be persuasive or even compelling, even when it is not formally valid, L U C A B I A N C H I 62 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 attention had to be shifted from the study of correct inferential mechanisms to that of effective communicative strategies. On the other hand, Valla was convinced that a good portion of the logical problems considered by Aristotle and the scholastics were actually pseudo-problems solvable by means of grammatical and syntactical analysis of language and current usage. Rudolph Agricola, Juan Luis Vives, Peter Ramus, and Mario Nizolio deve- loped this proposition and transformed it into a pedagogical project, trying and partially succeeding in replacing the teaching of Aristotelian logic with rhetorical and dialectical logic.36 If detailed criticisms were leveled against individual teachings of Aristotle – not only ethical and logical but also physical and metaphysical – there were also many attacks launched directly against his authority and the actual or presumed dogmatism of his followers. Authors like Petrarch, Valla, Rudolph Agricola, Girolamo Cardano, and Ramus denounced the Aristotelians’ over- reliance on their master’s authority, exhorted them not to deify Aristotle, and stressed that he, like every other human being, was fallible. These polemics enjoyed enduring success. Picked up by skeptics like Gianfrancesco Pico and Francisco Sanchez, they were consecrated in the hallowed pages of Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, and Gassendi. Effective against a small number of obtuse and dogmatic Aristotelians, of whom there was no lack in the seventeenth century, these invectives are more original in their form than in their substance, and they appear paradoxically to be debtors to the very tradition of thought against which they were directed. Aristotle himself had insisted on the superiority of truth to personal feelings and had criticized the Pythagoreans for worshiping their master’s statements. Accordingly, many Aristotelians openly defended the right of each person to think for himself. Even the adage according to which ‘‘Aristotle was a man and could err,’’ repeated by generations of anti-Aristotelians from Petrarch to the Enlightenment thinkers, was borrowed from Aristotelians, who had formulated it in the thirteenth century (with Albertus Magnus and Siger of Brabant) and were still defending it in the sixteenth (with Pomponazzi and Nuñez).37 Challenged by critics and subjected to the competition of other philoso- phical schools, Aristotelianism evolved in many different ways during the Renaissance. It always, however, displayed a great capacity to modify its categories and teachings based on new problems and new discoveries. On the one hand, recent theoretical and material advances, especially in disciplines like mathematics, astronomy, physics, geography, and natural history, were integrated into a worldview that remained substantially Aristotelian. Emblematic was the Philosophia magnetica (1629), in which Niccolò Cabeo reformulated Aristotelian ontology to make room for the quality of Continuity and change in the Aristotelian tradition 63 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 and theological concepts much more than the commentaries of Thomas Aquinas.45 Obviously, the precise image historians have today of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Aristotelianism differs remarkably from that sketched by its contemporary opponents. When offering Platonism as the only valid antidote to the heterodox tendencies of Aristotelianism, Ficino maintained that the whole of philosophy in his age was dominated by ‘‘Averroists’’ and ‘‘Alexandrians,’’ opposed in their interpretations of the Stagirite’s psychol- ogy but united in their denial of the immortality of the soul.46 This was undoubtedly a polemical simplification and not a faithful description of reality. Nevertheless it has long contributed to the ever-broadening and still more simplistic conviction that Renaissance thought was characterized by the effort to substitute Platonism for a senescent Aristotelianism, exhausted by its extended controversy over the nature of the soul. It is indisputable that this controversy, with its interweaving of exegetic, philo- sophic, and religious problems, played a central role and witnessed the participation of some of the sharpest minds of the age, like Cardinal Cajetan (Thomas de Vio), Pomponazzi, Nifo, and Zabarella.47 It is also indisputable, however, that the vitality of Renaissance Aristotelianism did not exhaust itself here. For some time much has been made of the debate among Paduan Aristotelians, from Paul of Venice in the fifteenth century down to Jacopo Zabarella at the end of the sixteenth, over the notion of regressus found in the Posterior Analytics, whose object was to establish how demonstrative knowledge could be increased by combining induction and deduction. Although it is debatable whether the origin of Galileo’s scientific method is to be found in these discussions (as Randall believed), or in their continuation at the Collegio Romano (as William Wallace would have it),48 this doubt in no way diminishes their importance. Indeed, it calls for their reconsideration within a broader context. Many Aristotelians, and not only Paduan Aristotelians, reflected deeply on the methodological and epistemological issues central to the emergence of early modern science, issues such as the certainty of mathematics and its relationship to natural philosophy.49 Also notable were the discussions brought forth by the dialogue between Aristotelian teachings and problems resulting from the evolving cultural and social context. The prestige of the studia humanitatis conferred a greater emphasis on works little studied in the Middle Ages like the Poetics, which dominated literary criticism throughout the sixteenth century and was adapted to literary genres nonexistent in Aristotle’s time.50 On the other hand, a text like the Politics, intensely studied since the end of the thirteenth century, not only continued to furnish a conceptual framework for thinking L U C A B I A N C H I 66 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 about different regimes but was also used to confront questions of immediate relevance. Emblematic was the polemic that developed between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and the Dominican theologians Francisco Vitoria and Bartolomé de Las Casas, who used Aristotelian categories to discuss the morality of subjecting Amerindians to Spanish colonization.51 Even Aristotelian physics and cosmology experienced noteworthy changes. Since the middle of the sixteenth century they had been the object both of violent attacks by anti-Aristotelians, like Telesio, Patrizi, and Bruno, and of ever more thorough and specialized study. Despite the humanists’ philological scruples and the rediscovery of the Greek commentators, which fostered a tendency to recover Aristotle’s genuine worldview, the most important innovations of late medieval natural philosophy were rejected by only a minority of professional philosophers. To take only one example, medieval contributions to mechanics remained a focus of attention for Parisian masters at the Collège de Montaigu like John Mair and Johannes Dullaert. Unconcerned with the abuse heaped by humanists on the ‘‘British barbarians,’’ they continued to make use of logico-mathematical techniques for describing motions devised at the beginning of the fourteenth century by the English Calculatores of the so-called ‘‘Merton School.’’ One of Mair’s students was Domingo de Soto, in whose commentary on the Physics (printed in its entirety in 1551) the theory of the so-called ‘‘mean speed theorem’’ (i.e. the theorem giving the measure of uniform acceleration in terms of its medial velocity), which had been formulated by the Calculatores as a mere mathematical model, was finally applied to falling bodies.52 An analogous attention to empirical reality is seen in the numerous comment- aries on the De caelo, the Meteorologica, and the De animalibus, where Aristotle’s conclusions based on astronomical, geographical, zoological, and anatomical observations, now clearly superseded by empirical observations of modern explorers and natural philosophers, were refuted and corrected.53 Once again, Renaissance Aristotelians defied the polemical caricatures of their adversaries, the most famous of which was offered in the character of Simplicius in Galileo’s Dialogue of Two World Systems. If in Galileo’s literary fiction the sole preoccupation of Aristotle’s champion was to save the teachings of his master from the barrage of logical and empirical object- ions launched by his interlocutors, in reality many philosophers continued to appeal to Aristotle, not to insist with obstinate dogmatism on a fractured worldview, but rather to defend a way of conceiving of philosophy and its work. Certainly they retained a rather bookish notion of knowledge, which they proposed to advance by subjecting the Aristotelian corpus to complex interpretative procedures, a corpus they believed had provided a foundation or at least a stable theoretical synthesis for the encyclopedia of philosophic Continuity and change in the Aristotelian tradition 67 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 knowledge. Nevertheless, some of them laid great stress on empirical obser- vation and on the limits of human knowledge. The word ‘‘naturalism’’ has often been used to characterize this approach. An ambiguous expression, it has fed the misunderstanding that Aristotelianism, in the radical form it assumed especially at the universities of Padua and Bologna in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, anticipated modern science, rationalism, and atheism. Yet it remains true that from Pomponazzi to Zabarella Italian Aristotelians were able to defend, in a Europe torn by religious conflicts, the methodolo- gical and deontological ideals that had been elaborated by their Parisian predecessors in the thirteenth century. These included a ‘‘scientific’’ approach to the investigation of reality, in the Aristotelian sense of reasoning from effects to causes; the practice of speaking ‘‘as natural philosophers,’’ ‘‘as physicists,’’ prescinding from consideration of supernatural hypotheses and phenomena; and the practice of distinguishing demonstrable knowledge from the postulates of revelation, thus avoiding confusion between the truths of reason and the truths of faith. [Translated by Patrick Baker] NOTES 1. Bianchi 1999, 129–62. 2. For these data see Schmitt 1983a, 14; Kraye 1995b (who emphasizes the diffi- culty of establishing the number of incunables of Aristotle, 189–93); Lohr 1988, xiii; Hankins 1990a, I : 3, n. 1; I I : 739–44; and Hankins and Palmer 2007. 3. For this last point see the documentation offered by Soudek 1968 and 1976. 4. Nifo 1559a, praefatio [folios unnumbered]. 5. Garin 1947–50, 57–8. 6. For a general presentation of Aristotelian translations in the fifteenth and six- teenth centuries, see Garin 1947–50 and Schmitt 1983a, 64–88; Copenhaver 1988a thoroughly examines the impact of humanistic views about terminology and style on Renaissance philosophical translations. 7. Indispensable references on Bruni, his conception of translation, and the related polemics are Harth 1968, Gerl 1981, Hankins 1990a, I : 42–8, 2001, and 2003–4, I : 193–239. 8. Schmitt 1983a, 20, 86–7. 9. On Faba, see Cranz 1976a, 363–4; for Nuñez, Bianchi 2003, 154–5, 176–9. On Périon, among others see Stegmann 1976, 378–9, 383–4 and Schmitt 1983a, 72–6. 10. See Schmitt 1983a, 76–85, Bianchi 2003, 152–60. 11. See below, p. 65. 12. I take this statistic from Argyropoulos and Caras 1980, 9–11, where it is shown that of a total of 2,773 manuscripts no less than 1,263 are datable to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 13. Minio-Paluello 1972, 489; but for a more precise evaluation of the quality of the Aldine edition, Sicherl 1976 is fundamental. On the role of Linacre and Cavalli, see Schmitt 1984a, article XI I , 68–70 and article XI I I , 307–12. L U C A B I A N C H I 68 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 52. Among others, see Murdoch 1990, Lohr 2002a (which highlights the growth in this period in the number of commentaries on the libri naturales) and Lines 2001 and 2002b (which document the tendency of teachers at universities like Padua and Bologna to specialize in natural philosophy). For de Soto, see Clagett 1959, 555–6. 53. Having received reliable reports confirming the presence of humans in the ‘‘equinoctial’’ zones, Pomponazzi declared to his students that the contrary arguments in Aristotle and Averroes had no worth whatsoever, since ‘‘against the truth demonstrations cannot be given’’ (see Nardi 1965b, 41–3, 83–4, 377–8). Continuity and change in the Aristotelian tradition 71 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 5 CHRISTOPHER S. CELENZA The revival of Platonic philosophy 1 ‘‘Plato is praised by greater men, Aristotle by a greater number.’’ This pithy statement by Petrarch (1304–74) in his work On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others is best read in context. Petrarch goes on in the same passage: ‘‘each of them is worthy of praise both by great men and by many – by all, really.’’2 On the one hand, Petrarch reflects here a medieval common- place, inherited from St. Augustine (354–430): that of all the ancient pagan philosophies, Platonism came the closest to Christian truth. Even more precisely, Augustine said: the ancients who had believed things about the creator that were close to ‘‘us’’ were represented by ‘‘Plato and those who had understood him correctly.’’3 This process of ‘‘understanding’’ a past thinker is significant. It is primarily exegetical, and those who embraced it – as many adherents of Platonism in the Renaissance did – assumed that it was their responsibility as interpreters to bring out the truth of the ancient thinker or school that they were investigating. On the other hand, Petrarch gives voice here to a historically specific sentiment which in the late fourteenth century was finding expression not only in the nascent humanist movement but also in other areas of spiritual and intellectual life, even in the realm of scholastic philosophy: that there was something about institutionalized forms of learning that was not responding to contemporary needs, that there existed a restrictive manner in which knowledge was being channeled, and that institutional structures of higher learning were lending themselves to a sometimes unhelpful social reproduc- tion.4 The result of this social reproduction was that certain key questions associated with ‘‘philosophy’’ from the days of Socrates were becoming more difficult to answer satisfactorily. What is the purpose of philosophy, one might ask. Am I becoming a better person through philosophy? Am I growing wiser, as opposed to more informed? Do I know what I know and do what I do in a way that is self- reflective; or are my life and the things I do in it unexamined, repetitive, conditioned more by my training than by the exigencies of the moment? Is 72 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 my place in the world meaningful? If one asks these questions, one asks the questions that make philosophy what it really is, what it aspires to, and what it means in an ethical sense. Though educational channels might not reflect it, these questions are at the heart of what keeps us intellectually alive. Education is an inherently conservative enterprise. By Petrarch’s day the number of universities was growing, and the two standard written forms of treating philosophical problems – the quaestio or ‘‘question’’ (related to the classroom practice of the scholastic disputation) and the commentary (related to the classroom practice of the lectura) – were not suited to addressing these larger questions. This is not to say that many humanists did not profit from the time they spent at universities or even that universities were not, eventually, amenable to incorporating humanist trends.5 Still, during Petrarch’s lifetime, even members of the scholastic world felt this sense of the inadequacy of the written culture of institutionalized learning. Some of them began to compose their work in a new genre of scholastic writing, the ‘‘tract,’’ or tractatus, a treatise written in a more generalized fashion than the question or commen- tary and suitable for circulation outside the university world.6 In any case, the types of general questions alluded to above do not have definitive, unchallengeable, and timeless answers. Their importance lies in being asked anew by every generation; these questions have as much to do with one’s style of life as with the acquisition of information. When philo- sophy becomes institutionalized, in other words, its practitioners begin to address questions because they are in the curriculum, not because they necessarily have value in contemporary life. In Petrarch’s case, as in that of many who followed him, the shorthand for ‘‘institutionalized learning’’ was ‘‘Aristotle,’’ or better, ‘‘Aristotelians.’’ Petrarch realized that his quarrel was not so much with Aristotle as a historical figure or as a philosopher, but rather with institutions that placed Aristotle at the center of philosophical life at universities, practices that had made Aristotle ‘‘The Philosopher’’ instead of ‘‘a philosopher.’’ Petrarch’s own knowledge of Plato remained vague. Although he never managed to learn Greek thoroughly enough to read it fluently, he was nevertheless proud to own a Greek manuscript of certain of Plato’s dia- logues.7 Partial versions of Plato’s Timaeus had been available early, trans- lated by Cicero and later by Calcidius; the latter’s translation and commentary were widely diffused and found in many medieval libraries. Plato’s short dialogue Meno and the Phaedo were available in the Latin translation of the twelfth-century Sicilian Henricus Aristippus; and William of Moerbeke, who did yeoman work translating for Thomas Aquinas, rendered into Latin Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, in which a part of Plato’s Parmenides was preserved. The rest remained to be translated.8 The The revival of Platonic philosophy 73 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 virtuous souls (that is, the true philosophers who have in life purified them- selves) will find willing guides to lead them to the superior regions of the world, to dwell among gods. Those less virtuous will come back (Socrates had said earlier) as bees or wasps, if they are socially adept, for ‘‘No one may join the company of the gods who has not practiced philosophy and is not completely pure when he departs from life, no one but the lover of learning’’ (82a–b). The worst will be cast into the river Cocytus – to return to the end of the Phaedo – never to be heard from again. These staples of what are now considered, academically, commonplaces of the Platonic tradition (immortality of the individual soul, reward and punish- ment after death for conduct on earth, and a form-based ontology) would have been obvious to Bruni, in the sense that they had been to Petrarch, since they formed part of the stock of Platonic commonplaces. More dangerous would have been the Phaedo’s treatment of a recollection-based epistemo- logy, depending as it did on the notion that souls preexisted in the realm of the forms. Other aspects of the Phaedo might have seemed more noteworthy to Bruni, not only those sections of the dialogue that pointed to Socrates as an ethical example, but also those that highlighted a consciousness of the some- what open-ended nature of the Platonic form of inquiry. The dialogue is framed by a conversation between Echecrates and Phaedo, with Echecrates learning the events of Socrates’ last day from Phaedo, who had been present. At one point, Phaedo breaks from his narration of that fateful day’s con- versations, and he tells Echecrates how struck he was by Socrates’ conduct (88c–89a): ‘‘What I wondered at most in him was the pleasant, kind and admiring way he received the young men’s argument, and how sharply he was aware of the effect the discussion had on us, and how well he healed our distress and, as it were, recalled us from our flight and defeat and turned us around to join him in the examination of their argument.’’ During what he knew to be his last day alive, Socrates maintained his humanity, ‘‘healing’’ his companions’ distress. He functioned as a moral exemplar, and, importantly, he demonstrated by practice an abiding faith in the power of ‘‘logos,’’ which we might render here as ‘‘rational argument’’ or, to put it more Socratically, ‘‘inquiring conversation.’’ Echecrates then asks Phaedo how Socrates did these things, and immedi- ately thereafter Phaedo resumes his narration of the day. Phaedo relates that Socrates’ most important advice to them was that they should not become ‘‘misologues’’ (89d–e), or ‘‘haters of inquiring conversation,’’ since whoever hates conversation will wind up hating humankind. The open-endedness of the dialogue form as exemplified by Plato’s works must have struck Bruni here. Unless we impose anachronistic mental conditions on Plato, we must C H R I S T O P H E R S . C E L E N Z A 76 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 admit that Plato was not so concerned with transmitting systematic, intern- ally coherent doctrines, at least not in a published format. What was impor- tant to him, instead, was living a ‘‘philosophical’’ way of life, so that the purpose of any given dialogue is as much to stimulate thought in the reader as it is to examine a single issue; as much to present interlocutors as moral exemplars – good, bad, and in-between – as it is to tally up their verbal arguments in search of a false coherence. This dialogical aspect of Plato’s work paradoxically represented what was newest about Bruni’s initial con- tact with the original texts of Plato. Immortality of the soul, rewards and punishments after death, a nonmaterial yet ‘‘real’’ world that superintends our own: these were part and parcel of Christianity. Bruni could well say, as he did in the dedication of his translation of the Phaedo directed to Pope Innocent VII, that the dialogue could be seen as ‘‘a confirmation of the true faith’’ and that Plato agreed with the true faith not only in the matter of the immortality of the human soul but ‘‘in many others as well.’’17 Christian and Platonic commonplaces were not new: what was new was the idea that the search for wisdom could be pursued – if, that is, one were not to become a ‘‘misologue’’ – in a way that was consonant with the tradition of learned but humane conversation that was central to Bruni’s generation of humanists. This love of group dialogue and discussion, often about ethical concerns, among humanists represented a real ‘‘culture of the disputation’’ in Bruni’s day, a culture in which thinkers rejoiced in the fact that different opinions could and should be aired by a select elite, if human souls, as Plato had it, were to be ‘‘cared for’’ adequately.18 It would only be later in the fifteenth century, when more of Plato’s works were recovered, that attempts would be made to use them to create a Platonic system. Also, the more Plato’s works were recovered, the more he came to be seen, in some camps, as a rival to Aristotle. By the middle decades of the fifteenth century, controversy over this topic began to break out. Controversy I have hated Plato since I was a young man . . . I was seized with indignation at his ingratitude, temerity, impudence, and wicked impiety. (George of Trebizond, 1458)19 Whether he was dealing with subjects that were divine and thus separated from matter, with natural science, ethics, religion, the state, or with the power of logical discourse or prayer or with any other thing, Plato maintained the character of a philosopher, and he never shied away from the philosopher’s duty . . . For this especially is the function of one who philosophizes: the investigation and the discovery of truth. This is true philosophy. It was due to The revival of Platonic philosophy 77 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 the love and eagerness for investigating and discovering truth that the name ‘‘philosopher’’ was invented. (Cardinal Bessarion)20 The two key protagonists in the Plato–Aristotle controversy hailed from the Byzantine world. The unstable but brilliant George of Trebizond came to see Plato and the possibility of a Platonic revival as harbingers of the coming of the Antichrist; whereas the equally gifted, though temperamentally more conservative Cardinal Bessarion saw in Plato the ancient Greek philosopher closest to Christian truth, as indeed had many before him – though for the first time in the Latin West Bessarion could draw on centuries of late ancient and Byzantine commentary to make his arguments. Behind their debate lay educational traditions, the politics of Byzantine emigration to Italy, and the ongoing search by Renaissance people to delimit the boundaries of what was acceptable in current understandings of Christianity.21 As to educational traditions, there was no viable possibility for anyone in the Renaissance to present Platonism as a rival to Aristotelianism. Even in late antiquity, the heyday of what Friedrich Schleiermacher called ‘‘Neoplatonism,’’ it was understood, by thinkers like Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and later Proclus, that one began with Aristotle. Aristotle’s writings, based on lecture notes, were systematic, organized, and hence teachable. Only after thoroughly learning Aristotle could one graduate to Plato’s teachings, since only then would one possess the philosophical armature on which to hang the diverse and contradictory doctrines found in Plato’s writings. Even before the ‘‘Neoplato- nists,’’ Plato’s dialogues had been deemed a unitary corpus that could be taught, as one can see from the imagery of the middle Platonist Albinos (active around AD 150), as he suggested that Plato’s dialogues should be read as if in a circle.22 They and others believed, probably rightly, that Plato had taught a set of ‘‘unwritten doctrines’’ in the Academy.23 Still, the dialogues were what Plato had chosen to make public, and they demanded the kind of interpretive reading that simply was not possible to include in an elementary curriculum. Later Platonism, from the period of the middle Platonists through the Neoplatonists, in one sense represented a scholastic phase in the history of the reception of Plato, since thinkers then tried to make systematic precisely what was unsystematic, Plato’s dialogues, using a small group of core texts as a basis for interpreting the rest. All of them had Aristotle as primary back- ground. It is a telling fact that the most important introduction to Aristotle’s Categories (one of his six foundational logical works) was written by Porphyry, Plotinus’ student, editor, and biographer.24 It is no less impor- tant that the preponderance of late ancient Platonists and a number of other commentators did not believe that Plato and Aristotle disagreed C H R I S T O P H E R S . C E L E N Z A 78 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 in his Comparatio philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis (‘‘A Comparison of the Philosophers Plato and Aristotle’’) and Cardinal Bessarion, in his In calumnia- torem Platonis (‘‘Against the Vilifier of Plato’’).35 In general terms, each side presented the opposing philosopher as deficient with respect to Christian mor- ality and dogma. Plato was painted as advocating pedophilia, the common ownership of wives, and the transmigration of souls (the latter notion implied their preexistence and was thus heretical); Aristotle as arguing that the world was eternal (a heresy since God was supposed to have created it ex nihilo), and that the individual human soul was mortal. In any case, one of the most fruitful aspects of the cultural interchange between East and West was the greater availability of Greek manuscripts. Not only Plato’s dialogues but also a host of other relevant interpretive material made its way into these manuscripts, including works of Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus, and the Hermetic Corpus. Marsilio Ficino Plato, the father of philosophers . . . considered it just and pious that, as the human mind receives everything from God, so it should restore everything to God . . .. Whatever subject he deals with, be it ethics, dialectic, mathematics or physics, he quickly brings it round, in a spirit of utmost piety, to the contemplation and worship of God.36 (Marsilio Ficino) The Plato–Aristotle controversy, especially as it manifested itself among Byzantine émigrés, represented as much a struggle among personalities for patronage and prestige as it did a philosophical conflict. Yet it would be a mistake to reduce the controversy to a patronage game, and an equally dama- ging mistake to forget that from late antiquity onward, most Platonically oriented thinkers believed that it was necessary to study Aristotle first before moving on to the truths hidden in Plato’s writings ‘‘beneath the outer shell,’’ or sub cortice, as so many thinkers expressed it. As the Plato–Aristotle controversy was in play in and around the environment of the papal court, in Florence, the most important Renaissance Platonist, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), accom- plished the most for the Renaissance study of Platonism, for the most part steering clear of controversy. He provided authoritative Latin translations and commentaries on Plato’s dialogues, wrote a major synthetic work with Platon- ism as its centerpiece, and through a Europe-wide correspondence network created enthusiasm for his style of Platonism.37 To understand Ficino’s style of Platonism, two factors should be fore- grounded: first, that he was the son of a doctor, had medical training, and The revival of Platonic philosophy 81 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 considered himself a doctor; and second that, at least from 1473 onward, he was an ordained Catholic priest, who considered everything he did to be in the service of Christianity. Ficino in his medical and priestly aspect first of all saw a society around him that needed healing. After a fractious decade in the 1450s, with an averted anti-Medici conspiracy among other problems over- come, the time seemed right for just such a person. The Medici supported a variety of cultural orientations through their lavish patronage, from Aristotelian philosophy at the Florentine University, revived in 1473, to the careers of vernacular poets.38 Still, for a time, Ficino had the ear of Florence’s civic leaders, especially of Cosimo de’ Medici, who asked that Ficino read to him certain newly translated dialogues of Plato as he was dying.39 One of Ficino’s most consistent lifelong emphases was a concern for educating the elites, the men he believed to be society’s natural leaders.40 After Cosimo’s death in 1464, Ficino continued to associate himself with civic leaders, and this impulse toward education expressed itself in two prominent ways. First, Ficino maintained throughout his life a far-flung correspondence network, writing like many Renaissance figures semi-public letters, later to collect them into individual books suitable for dedication to patrons. Ficino corre- sponded with Florentine leaders like Lorenzo de’ Medici; princes of the Church, like Bessarion who after converting to Roman Catholicism became a cardinal; foreign leaders and patrons, like Matthias ‘‘Corvinus’’ Hunyadi, king of Hungary from 1458 to 1490; as well as fellow scholars and friends, like Angelo Poliziano, Cristoforo Landino, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.41 Second, Ficino was an active educator on the local level. He taught only a short time at the Florentine studio or university, and precisely what he taught is uncertain.42 Yet he did teach, often in the Camaldolese church of Santa Maria degli Angeli.43 In a letter to a German correspondent, Ficino went through a catalog of his friends, among whom he included: first, patrons; second, ‘‘familiar friends – fellow conversationalists, so to speak’’; and third, auditores or ‘‘students.’’44 Among the people listed, we find some of Florence’s most prominent citizens, from various members of the Medici family, to Cristoforo Landino, Benedetto Accolti, and Giorgio Antonio Vespucci (a relative of the famous explorer), and Niccolò Valori, Carlo Marsuppini, and Bindaccio dei Ricasoli, among a number of others.45 Ficino’s modesty in describing his teaching activities to his German friend is striking, and it is apparent from reading this letter why he appealed to so many people. When describing the second category, for example, he says that if the people he lists are ‘‘almost pupils [discipuli], still, they aren’t really pupils, since I wouldn’t want to imply that I had taught or am teaching any of them, but rather, in a Socratic fashion, I ask them all questions and C H R I S T O P H E R S . C E L E N Z A 82 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 encourage them, and I persistently call forth the fertile geniuses of my friends to bring about birth.’’46 Ficino saw his teaching in the classic Socratic manner as midwifery of knowledge, an image made famous in Plato’s Theaetetus. This loose sort of intellectually fertile association among presumed social equals recalls the ‘‘culture of the disputation’’ so popular also with Bruni’s generation, and it reminds us why Plato’s dialogues remained so popular among learned elites. The final category, he says, ‘‘are in the order of students,’’ and we can presume that he had some formal responsibility for their elementary education.47 The Platonic ‘‘Academy’’ traditionally associated with Ficino (though notoriously difficult to document) represented in an ideal sense a real phe- nomenon, but it was one in accord with contemporary meanings familiar to Ficino.48 Plato’s dialogues themselves could be referred to as an ‘‘academy,’’ rich with precious teachings as they were; an ‘‘academy’’ could be a private school organized to teach youths, though not necessarily located in one specific place; and the word ‘‘academy’’ could refer to ‘‘any regular gathering of literary men.’’49 Ficino’s ‘‘academy’’ seems to have been more associated with the first two meanings of the word. Rather than leading a regular gathering in a specific place, Ficino preferred to teach Florence’s elite youth when he could and, as a Socratic, philosophical friend, to try as best he might to draw out of his associates the better part of their natures in conversation. Through his medical training and background he would have had expo- sure to Aristotelian philosophical traditions, which included not only argu- mentation but also style of writing. With respect to style, by Ficino’s day the gold standard for humanist prose was basically Ciceronian Latin. Ficino, however, never employed cultivated humanist Latin, partially because of his early education, partially by choice.50 Though he does employ scholastic formulations, he does not sound like a scholastic philosopher, shunning for the most part the ‘‘question’’ and ‘‘commentary’’ formats. He developed, in short, an independent Latin style, suitable for recreating ‘‘in Latin what Plotinus had achieved in his Greek: that is, to approach sublimity in an unadorned and apparently artless way that is nonetheless syntactically and rhetorically challenging.’’51 His medical training, in addition to creating a certain independence of style, also made Ficino sensitive on a basic level to the problem of the physical: that is, he had an instinctive understanding of the fact that, as human beings, we are – regrettably perhaps, from a Platonic point of view – embedded in and affected by matter.52 One of his most lasting and influential works, his De triplici vita (‘‘On the triple life’’) offered recipes, rituals (astro- logical and otherwise), and contemplative practices all toward the end of helping those of a scholarly temperament stay healthy.53 Throughout the The revival of Platonic philosophy 83 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007