Routledge Companion to Sixteenth Century Philosophy

Henrik Lagerlund, Benjamin Hill, Henrik Lagerlund, Benjamin Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367367107
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317672616
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Sixteenth century philosophy was a unique synthesis of several philosophical frameworks, a blend of old and new, including but not limited to Scholasticism, Humanism, Neo-Thomism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism. Unlike most overviews of this period, The Routledge Companion to Sixteenth Century Philosophy does not simplify this colorful era by applying some traditional dichotomies, such as the misleading line once drawn between scholasticism and humanism.

Instead, the Companion closely covers an astonishingly diverse set of topics: philosophical methodologies of the time, the importance of the discovery of the new world, the rise of classical scholarship, trends in logic and logical theory, Nominalism, Averroism, the Jesuits, the Reformation, Neo-stoicism, the soul's immortality, skepticism, the philosophies of language and science and politics, cosmology, the nature of the understanding, causality, ethics, freedom of the will, natural law, the emergence of the individual in society, the nature of wisdom, and the love of god. Throughout, the Companion seeks not to compartmentalize these philosophical matters, but instead to show that close attention paid to their continuity may help reveal both the diversity and the profound coherence of the philosophies that emerged in the sixteenth century.

The Companion's 27 chapters are published here for the first time, and written by an international team of scholars, and accessible for both students and researchers.

Part I
INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND

1
PHILOSOPHY AS DESCARTES FOUND IT

Humanists v. Scholastics?

Brian Copenhaver

Les philosophes n’ont, ce me semble, guère touché cette corde

(Montaigne)¹

Introduction

Philosophy as Descartes left it, to be debated by the experts, was taking shape by the new year of 1641, when he began to send his Meditations out for criticism. But philosophy as Descartes found it had been in place well before 1637, when he released his work on method anonymously in Leiden, where Franco Burgersdijck, an eminent professor of philosophy, had died shortly before. Writing his little book in French, not Latin, titling it a “discourse,” not a “treatise,” and calling the texts introduced by it “essays,” not “tractates,” Descartes speaks less formally in the Discourse to a larger audience than he would address more rigorously in the Latin Meditations.²

Before 1637, the more celebrated philosopher—by far—was Burgersdijck. When Descartes went to study at Leiden in 1630, he was rector there, famous for books also written for a wide readership—though for different purposes: they were textbooks for teenagers and young adults studying in the best Dutch schools. The publication in 1626 of his Elements of Logic, commissioned by the government, was a state occasion: Cunaeus, Heinsius, and Vossius, three of Leiden’s stellar classicists, wrote poems to introduce it. Burgersdijck’s books, especially his logic, give us a window into what Descartes repudiated, which Burgersdijck himself wanted to reform: philosophy as it emerged from the sixteenth century. What it emerged from is my topic. A common way of representing this piece of the past makes it a fight between ‘humanists’ and ‘scholastics’: there was no such fight about philosophy, as far as I can see.³

From Petrarch to Descartes

In 1911, Joseph Vrin founded the publishing house that is still the most important in France for philosophy: the Librairie philosophique J. Vrin. Starting in 1971, this distinguished firm, after producing the standard edition of the works of Descartes and a number of books by Étienne Gilson, began to advertise a series called ‘From Petrarch to Descartes.’ The new collection was to focus “on Renaissance authors—both philosophers and scholars—and on debates about ideas, literature and the history of the transmission of knowledge characteristic of the humanism reborn at the dawn of modernity.”⁴

Judah Abravanel, Leon Battista Alberti, Dante Alighieri, Jean Bodin, Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, Girolamo Cardano, René Descartes, Marsilio Ficino, Francesco Guicciardini, Niccolò Machiavelli, Michel de Montaigne, Thomas More, Francesco Petrarca, Francesco Patrizi, Guilliaume Postel, and Bernardino Telesio: those are the 17 figures studied by the Vrin series since the turn of the millennium. Seven are philosophers by anyone’s reckoning. Only one of the 17 was English, however, whereas 12 were Italian by birth or residence. Because all 17 are of philosophical interest, and since 11 lived and worked in the sixteenth century, Vrin seems to have meant its series for readers of this book.

But only one of the 17—Descartes—is a fixture in the Anglophone canon of philosophy’s past. What canon? Officially, there is no such thing. For current and common practice, however, see Philosophy 101: From Plato and Socrates to Ethics and Metaphysics, published in 2013 by Paul Kleinman. The book’s title proclaims its banal aims, making it a least common denominator for an Anglophone canon. Of the 23 philosophers chosen by Kleinman, starting with Socrates and ending with Wittgenstein, none worked in the three centuries between the death of Thomas Aquinas and the birth of Francis Bacon.⁵

Kleinman’s book promotes a canon of the crudest kind. There is nothing crude about the New History of Western Philosophy in four volumes by Anthony Kenny, a distinguished philosopher and an expert on its history. Kenny describes the period between 1100 and 1800 in two of his volumes. The part of that period that matches the Vrin series covers about three centuries: Petrarch was crowned poet laureate in 1341; Descartes died in 1650. To that whole era—which includes the Renaissance and the sixteenth century and takes up nearly half the time between 1100 and 1800—Kenny gives less than a tenth of his space.⁶

The sixteenth century gets little attention—sometimes none at all—from an Anglophone canon, whether in a manual like Kleinman’s or in an elegant history like Kenny’s. Why should that be? The Vrin series has focused on that century for almost fifty years: lack of opportunity has not made it a desert in Anglophonia. From other perspectives, the same terrain is fertile. Sheer neglect is the problem. But what motivates the neglect and sustains it? Answering that question requires a look at patterns of periodization as frames for philosophy’s past.⁷

One such pattern was settling out by 1716, when Leibniz denounced Newton’s notion of force as “inexplicable, unintelligible, precarious, groundless and unexampled … a chimerical thing, a scholastic occult quality.” Speaking for progressives of that time and the previous century, Leibniz charged Newton with apostasy and recidivism: His rival had betrayed philosophy and science by reverting to an unenlightened past—to scholasticism, the philosophical correlate of medieval decadence in politics and culture: the ‘middle age’ (media aetas) that came after Greek glory and Rome’s grandeur had been lost, but before their recovery. The word ‘scholasticism’ might suggest a doctrine or a method. But, in the history of philosophy known to Leibniz, it was becoming a label for a partition of chronology.⁸

Anachronism aggravated these complications when the modern ideology called ‘scholasticism’ took shape in the nineteenth century. By reviving the study of medieval thinkers in order to propagate their own views, scholastics of that period contaminated what they studied—a theology from the past—with current affairs. Their propaganda was aggressively polemical, aimed at materialism, modernism, secularism, and humanism as threats to Christian faith. Such dangers of humanism were plain enough in the earliest English uses of its name. For Coleridge, in 1812, humanism was the view that Christ was merely human. Usage broadened by 1853, when a critic of Feuerbach called humanism “a system which finds everything in man … [and is] intolerant of the existence of religion.” Sometimes, when Roman Catholics joined the conversation, loathing humanism and lauding scholasticism went hand in hand.⁹

No such alliance was possible in 1600, near the end of the passage from Petrarch to Descartes, when there was no ‘humanism’ and no ‘scholasticism.’ Though students of the period are now aware of that absence and alert for anachronisms, they draw on a tradition that has treated humanism as a ray of light breaking through medieval gloom. This “enlightened spirit of humanism,” in the words of a nineteenth-century observer, gained energy from “knowing Greek and Roman antiquity”—Matthew Arnold’s explication of ‘humanism.’ That vague thought, or something like it, has been formative for the periodization of Western culture, including philosophy. But the thought had to be invented—most famously by Petrarch, though not in the form now recognized as the “humanist–scholastic debate.”¹⁰

Erasmus started the sixteenth-century round of the fight, and, for philosophy, Descartes ended it, after the Society of Jesus, Peter Ramus, and Michel de Montaigne had intervened— to mention only the most resonant voices in the long controversy that Petrarch instigated. Given the poet’s celebrity in the sixteenth century, we should note that, in the polemics studied here, he never calls anyone a ‘humanist’ or identifies any movement as ‘humanism.’

On His Own Ignorance

Petrarch’s main contribution to the controversy is an invective—a form that he mastered— On His Own Ignorance and That of Others, written toward the end of his life. By his lights, the polemic was anti-French, anti-urban, and anti-modern, but from our perspective it is anti-medieval. His targets are naturalist Aristotelians in Paris, Padua, and elsewhere, whose views he distinguishes from the teachings of Aristotle.¹¹

Doubting that reason has much to say about “nature’s secrets and God’s deeper mysteries,” he accuses his opponents of arrogance, dogmatism, and obscurity. They are the “insane and raucous mob of scholastics.” But that is the only phrase in Petrarch’s harangue on ignorance where scholasticus shows up: aristotelicus, used more than twenty times, is his chosen term of abuse. The Aristotelians are “noisy” and “contentious,” but it is not their logic or dialectic that exercises him. What enrages Petrarch is a dogmatic manner and a naturalist doctrine—not a method, though such a thing might (or might not) be indicated by scholasticus in its solitary appearance. The later fortunes of the term make Petrarch’s skimpy use of it noteworthy: he said too little to give the word a stable sense.¹²

Although he attacks the “mob of scholastics” as deranged Aristotelians, Petrarch notes Aristotle’s errors without savaging him: “he was a great man who knew much, yet he was human and capable of ignorance.” The old pagan sage could not really know God, but his theology was on the right path, though sidetracked by polytheism and the pernicious claim that the world is eternal: Petrarch’s dislike of that doctrine is fierce, if not well argued. His critique of Aristotle’s ethics has more weight: The philosopher went wrong by valuing the theory of virtue more than the practice. Plato also fell short of the true Good but came closer than his student.¹³

As for authentic philosophy, its goal is Christ’s truth, not Plato’s or Aristotle’s. As stewards of truth, philosophers need high standards of clarity, coherence, and consistency, and yet they are bad judges of their own abilities. Boasting about the little they know, they forget that “vain deceit” is scripture’s description of philosophy. Naturalism and materialism are their most corrosive errors. Their worst vices are impiety and arrogance. Windiness and obscurity disqualify them as teachers. Talking mainly to other philosophers, “they have told many lies—the ones called ‘philosophers,’ I mean, since truth-telling is always the way of real philosophers.”¹⁴

Some philosophers do better than others. Both Aristotle and Plato are experts on nature, for example, but Plato outdoes his student in theology. In moral philosophy, Cicero has the advantage of Latin, the language of Western Christendom, and the Latin of Augustine’s teaching is just as eloquent. But Petrarch could study Aristotle’s pagan ethics only in a crude Latin that he despised. He owned copies of Plato’s dialogues in Greek but could not read them—decades before Leonardo Bruni and others began to translate Plato. Yet, by measuring Aristotle against Plato, Cicero, and Augustine, Petrarch anticipated the turn that philosophy would take in the next century, when classicists like Bruni put Platonic, Epicurean, and Stoic texts into circulation and challenged Aristotle’s authority.¹⁵

Petrarch grants little authority to any philosophy: all of it, said Solomon, is “vanity in disputing.” The sages know less than they claim, and their ignorance is no great loss—least of all the wise men of Petrarch’s own century. In the time of Ockham and Buridan, the poet had little time for experts or innovators. Since God has revealed what we need for salvation, we can do the rest “without much learning—or any, in fact.” Later, when Erasmus dug deeper in soil that Petrarch had cultivated, such lessons from Paul’s letters, where the wise “have become fools,” would produce a more robust fideism. The spiritual program of The Praise of Folly—based on a subtle moral psychology—was a more thoughtful response to problems called out by the invective On His Own Ignorance.¹⁶

The ethical and epistemic grounds of Petrarch’s manifesto are thin and shaky: near the end of his tirade, he conflates Socratic ignorance with Academic scepticism. In language inspired by Cicero, a statement attributed to Socrates rebukes the absurd vanity, arrogant sophistry, and sectarian confusion of the philosophizing that Petrarch saw—superficially— at Bologna and Padua. But the Academic sceptics went too far, he adds, trapping themselves in a circle: “look at this vaunted philosophy that either claims to be ignorant or forbids even ignorance to be known.” Petrarch spots a problem: Claiming to know nothing—not even knowing that nothing is known—eliminates ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Intellectual Background
• Part II Philosophical Movements
• Part III Philosophical Controversies
• Part IV Philosophical Topics
• Index