Widely recognized as one of the main characteristics of Latin Aristotelianism, the 'Christianisation' of Aristotle from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century has received as yet little attention. Aiming to answer the need for a more systematic investigation, the articles here collected approach Christian readings of the Stagirite|s works from different perspectives. Setting aside abstract discussions about |degrees of orthodoxy|, they address a few specific questions: which |images| of Aristotle were offered by Medieval and Renaissance interpreters, and in particular (...) how did some of them argue that - far from being a pagan or even an impious thinker - he did not contradict the truths revealed by Holy Scripture? (shrink)

Historians have recently paid increasing attention to the role of the disputation in Italian universities and humanist circles. By contrast, the role of disputations as forms of entertainment at fifteenth-century Italian courts has been somewhat overlooked. In this article, the Milanese "scientific duel" described in Luca Pacioli's De divina proportione is taken as a vantage point for the study of the dynamics of scientific patronage and social advancement as reflected in Renaissance courtly disputes. Pacioli names Leonardo da Vinci as (...) one of the participants in the Milanese dispute. In this paper I argue that Leonardo's Paragone and Pacioli's De divina proportione are likewise the outcome of the Milanese "scientific duel." By challenging the traditional hierarchy of the arts, they both exemplify the dynamics of social and intellectual promotion of mathematicians and artists in the privileged setting of Renaissance courts, where courtly patronage could subvert the traditional disciplinary rankings. (shrink)

Historiography of Renaissance philosophy and science has long been characterized by tendencies to minimize the influence of medieval Arabic philosophy and science. According to the standard narrative, the humanists successfully eliminated Arabic writers, along with their Latin scholastic interpreters. Against this background, Dag Nikolaus Hasse calls for a "sober historical approach" in order to "assess the factual influence of Arabic sciences and philosophy in the Renaissance". His narrative is summarized by the title of his impressively erudite and well-documented...

This paper is a review of the book "Philosophie des Humanismus und der Renaissance (1350–1600)" by Thomas Leinkauf.

Especially after 1530, Italy was so fragmented that a national historiography was impossible. Florence, Rome, and Venice were the chief regional centers. In Florence, the utility of history for the statesman was increasingly denied. Historians lacked self-confidence, and the republican tradition faded out in the excessive empiricism of Ammirato. In Rome, the Counter-Reformation rejected the historiographical achievements of the Renaissance; historians were deflected from research into rhetoric and justification of the Church replaced disinterested inquiry. Only in Venice, formerly backward, (...) did historiography thrive, perhaps in response to Venice's declining power. Venetian historiography was enriched by theories emanating from Padua and by close contact with political reality. Only Venice could have produced Sarpi. (shrink)

ArgumentFrom the time of al-Khwārizmī in the ninth century to the beginning of the sixteenth century algebraists did not allow irrational numbers to serve as coefficients. To multiply$\sqrt {18} $byx, for instance, the result was expressed as the rhetorical equivalent of$\sqrt {18{x^2}} $. The reason for this practice has to do with the premodern concept of a monomial. The coefficient, or “number,” of a term was thought of as how many of that term are present, and not as the scalar (...) multiple that we work with today. Then, in sixteenth-century Europe, a few algebraists began to allow for irrational coefficients in their notation. Christoff Rudolff was the first to admit them in special cases, and subsequently they appear more liberally in Cardano, Scheubel, Bombelli, and others, though most algebraists continued to ban them. We survey this development by examining the texts that show irrational coefficients and those that argue against them. We show that the debate took place entirely in the conceptual context of premodern, “cossic” algebra, and persisted in the sixteenth century independent of the development of the new algebra of Viète, Decartes, and Fermat. This was a formal innovation violating prevailing concepts that we propose could only be introduced because of the growing autonomy of notation from rhetorical text. (shrink)

In _The Beginning of the World in Renaissance Jewish Thought_, Brian Ogren deeply analyzes late fifteenth century Italian Jewish thought concerning the creation of the world and the beginning of time. Ogren examines uses of philosophy and Kabbalah in the thought of four important fifteenth century thinkers.

Studies in the History of the Renaissance is a highly influential defence of aestheticism. Pater redefined the practice of criticism through his readings of some of the paintings, sculptures, and poems of the Renaissance, and shocked contemporaries for sponsoring a hedonistic ethic with his infamous 'Conclusion'.

The article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the political views of the philosophers of Montaigne circle. The ideas put forward by Charron and La Boétie were important not only for the period of religious wars of the 16th century, but also for various aspects of the genesis of modern philosophy. If autocracy is unacceptable in principle for La Boétie, then Charron is a supporter of a monarchical state structure, although he condemns tyrannical rule. La Boétie justifies his position (...) with references to the need to protect political free­dom. Autocracy, he believes, is inseparable from arbitrariness, illegal and gross violation of the interests of the country’s residents. People can refuse freedom only voluntarily, from force of habit of obeying tyrannical power, once established by deception or violence. He considers it possible to end religious strife by a revival of the Church and a moral re­newal. La Boétie’s political ideal is a republic. Charron, by contrast, considers the king a true sovereign. But rulers often have both shortcomings and vices, sometimes giving rise to tyranny, expressed in disregard for the laws and traditions of the country. Charron, like La Boétie, sees the reason for the religious wars in the damage of morals. He also sees a compromise as the best solution; to withdraw compatriots from the state of civil con­frontation is possible peacefully. For Charron, as for La Boétie, social inequality, class hi­erarchy seems to be an invariable condition of social existence. For both, violence is an unacceptable form of implementing social improvements. Both see religion as an im­portant pillar of social life. In the coordinate system of the two thinkers of the Montaigne circle, religious considerations are not taken beyond the general contours of their political reflections. It is noteworthy that for the philosophical landscape of the late Renaissance, the problem of religious confrontation turns out to be closely associated with the question of the best form of social structure. Discussions about it continue in our time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 17-35 [Access article in PDF] Late Antiquity and the Florentine Renaissance: Historiographical Parallels Christopher S. Celenza Aulus Gellius, at the end of the second century, shows us the type of writer who was destined to prevail, the compiler. In his Noctes Atticae he compiles without method or even without any definite end in view.... After him there is only barrenness. (...) The third century is a literary Sahara.... Thoughtless admiration for mathematics keeps up or reintroduces the mentality of magic.... In the fourth century ad Iamblichus had his brain almost turned by the science of numbers. 1 --Ferdinand Lot The rapid progress of humanism after the year 1400 paralyzed native impulses. Henceforth men looked only to antiquity for the solution of every problem, and consequently allowed literature to sink into mere quotation. 2 --Jacob Burckhardt Various aspects of late antiquity in western Europe and the Florentine Renaissance bear certain similarities which, if properly examined and contextualized, can lead to a deeper understanding of both periods--of their social as well as intellectual significance, of the manner in which politics relates to culture, and [End Page 17] of the relationship between urban life in a specific sort of milieu to the mechanisms of religious and philosophical dynamism. 3 The parallels are not always exact, but various underlying patterns are present. Here the main line of argument will be that a number of aspects of late ancient thought and of Renaissance thought (especially Renaissance Latin literature of all genres) went ignored by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars, thanks to certain underlying assumptions concerning what was appropriate to investigate. These assumptions were themselves related to the combination of two major factors: romantic essentializing ideas about the nature of language, inherited from the Enlightenment, and the development in the nineteenth century of nationalist, evolutionary historiographies. The results of these developments persisted into the twentieth century and can be seen to an extent even today. Nationalist Historiographies and the Problem of Language "Gentlemen, nations are thoughts of God." So Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) used to begin his history courses in Berlin, as Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97) later remembered. 4 While Ranke himself was concerned primarily with documentary history and the evolution of the modern state, he was also part of a larger trend in the German speaking world which sought to identify, in the study of the past, the spirit, or Geist, of a given era or people, a project which had been theorized by Hegel. Ranke and others, like Johann Gustav Droysen and August Böckh, taking their point of departure from Barthold Niebuhr and, more immediately, from Wilhelm von Humboldt, saw themselves as self-consciously transcending Hegel, basing their ideas on documentary sources as opposed to a priori theorizing. 5 But certain assumptions were similar, none more so than presuppositions relating to the Volksgeist. It is not that Ranke was relentlessly teleological; [End Page 18] history was made in the process of the unfolding of events. His primary mission was the documenting and understanding of modernity, a task which, despite their later divergences in practice, Burckhardt shared. 6 The goal was, following Niebuhr's approach in classical studies, to present history in an appealing way and in a manner useful to modernity. 7 This was bound up with a larger set of movements, encompassing the search for national identity and a tendency toward locating essential characteristics of a "people." 8 One of these characteristics was language, and a central preoccupation of scholars became the manner in which culture expressed itself through language, even as philology was becoming "the first historical discipline, the model for all other historical sciences" and the general view of scholarly fields as separate, specialized entities was growing. 9In their concern with language as a vehicle for cultural transmission and as a defining characteristic of a people, nineteenth-century scholars were the heirs of the Enlightenment. Ideas of a plurality of cultures had flourished; as it was put in the Encyclopédie, language expressed the "genius of a people." If... (shrink)

Cet ouvrage propose une approche globale des reconstructions érudites et des utilisations polémiques de la philosophie de la Renaissance dans la France du XIXe siècle en centrant l’attention sur une relecture politique de la pratique historiographique à l’époque de Victor Cousin. This book offers a comprehensive approach to scholarly reconstructions and polemical uses of Renaissance philosophy in nineteenth-century France by focusing on the political implications of historiographical practice in Victor Cousin’s time.

European intellectuals diagnosed the end of the nineteenth century as “the sickness of an age.” Schopenhauer's pessimistic books suddenly became popular; Nietzsche announced the “death of god”; and Max Nordeau's Degeneration was an international best seller. To be sure, this mood of despair was initially limited to a handful of poets and philosophers. But once the outbreak of World War I revealed what “the treacherous years were all the while making for and meaning,” the sense that the West had somehow (...) been betrayed by its own most fundamental accomplishments and beliefs was globalized. Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain captured the idea neatly by describing Europe as a tuberculosis sanatorium behind whose walls splendid accomplishment rapidly rotted toward calamity. Spengler's Decay of the West and the early volumes of Toynbee's Study of History argued that decline was inevitable. As Europeans lost faith in their ability to erect The Heavenly City Of The Eighteenth Century Philosophers [Becker, 1932], the era of “enlightenment optimism” gave way to Auden's “Age of Anxiety.” If, as T.S. Eliot put it in East Coker, “the quiet-voiced elders” bequeathed us “merely a receipt for deceit,” then, to cite again W.B. Yeats’ famous poem, it became increasingly obvious that “things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” “[F]ollowing some rough beast” that “slouches toward Bethlehem to be born,” modern civilization began a desperate search for new values that could orient society in an unexpected world. (shrink)

The notion of subjectivity with which the argument will be carried out may be defined as our ability to reflect critically, to think creatively and to act resolutely in our relation to society and nature. Some essential marks of subjectivity are illustrated through an example taken from rescue operation conducted in the fall of 2010 for the miners trapped in deep underground at the San Jose mine site in Chile for 69 days. With the science and technology applied in constructing (...) the drilling rigs and making the capsule which lifted up the trapped miners to freedom, ingenuity, the resilient sense of mission and perseverance of the rescue personnel, and the purposeful solidarity among the trapped miners are among the decisive factors contributing to the successful accomplishment of the rescue undertaking.At this critical juncture of the current global economic downturn, it is consequential for us to bring ourselves to reflecting on the seriousness of the predicament which all humanity is in. It is indeed time for the intellectuals to rise up to share responsibility in keeping our world sustainable by setting purposive and resolute subjectivity before themselves and coming forward to tenaciously find ways toward renewing ourselves as well as toward the continuing betterment of humanity. (shrink)