The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy

by James Hankins (Editor)

The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, published in 2007, 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.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Renaissance, Reference

450 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

About the author

James Hankins is an American intellectual historian specializing in the Italian Renaissance. He is the General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library and the Associate Editor of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum. He is a professor in the History Department of Harvard University. In Spring 2018, he is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture.
In 2012 he was honored with the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award of the Renaissance Society of America.

Reviews

[IWB]

Professional philosophers largely neglect the history of philosophy from the late 14th century to the end of the 16th century, the so-called ‘renaissance’. This is due in part by the fact that most scholars of the history of philosophy, as well as most intellectual historians, agree that the ‘real’ philosophical renaissance occurred in the 12-13th centuries, and that the exciting stages of modern mechanistic philosophy are to be found in Descartes and his predecessors. Even if these notions are plausible (and I think they are), the contributors of this volume show that renaissance philosophy is both philosophically interesting, engaging, and important in itself. This edition is thus a welcome contribution to the sparse field of renaissance philosophy, being an excellent survey devoted to a wide range of thinkers, topics, schools, and movements.

The aim of this volume is twofold: to situate renaissance philosophy within the broader intellectual and cultural milieu, and to examine various philosophical topics and movements of the period. Thus, there is a two-part division of content. The first part outlines the fact that more so than most other times in history, philosophizing in the renaissance was inextricably influenced by various extrinsic historical factors; namely, the general cultural revival of ancient learning, the rise of Humanism and the transformation of the Scholastic Aristotelian and Arabic philosophical traditions, and the indelible impact of the Reformation. The second part considers the shift toward modern conceptions of natural philosophy and gives an account of the original contributions of renaissance thinkers in areas such as philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics, philosophical theology, cosmology, psychology, ethics, and political philosophy.

There is a good discussion of Aristotelianism and its dominance during the renaissance, and hence, scholasticism, throughout the period, showing that universities all the way up until the mid-seventeenth century were mostly populated by scholastic Aristotelians, not humanists. A Number of other aspects of renaissance Aristotelianism are also discussed capably, but there is only a brief mention of renaissance Platonism, and even less treatment of various other ancient ‘isms’. So, for instance, almost nothing is said about the revival of, and attitude towards, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Phyrronism, and so forth. This is a peculiar omission given that revivalism was so prominent in the renaissance. This book would have been much better had it included an essay or two on the ways in which these schools of thought influenced renaissance thinkers. As a bonus, it would also have been nice to see something about aesthetics—how medieval theories of perspective, space, and dimension led to the technical advances of the realist school of painters and sculptors, for instance. But this is probably a bit obscure.

Two aspects of Renaissance philosophy that are often neglected in survey books are the influences of Arabic philosophy, and European magic. This volume includes informative contributions on each subject. One concerns the role of Arabic philosophy, with an emphasis on the extensive reach that Averroes’ philosophy gained throughout Europe, especially in Italy, since the Middle Ages. The other concerns the role that magic played as an integrative feature of natural philosophy, including its practical merits as an area of medicine. As an area of inquiry, medicine, along with alchemy, was quickly distancing itself from abstract speculation and moving closer to concrete investigation.

The second part of the book concerns the shift to modern philosophical conceptions, and begins with a contribution on Nicholas of Cusa. In this essay, it is argued that Cusa is a significant link between the medieval and the modern conception of science, via his notion of “learned ignorance.” Now, allow me a slight digression. In history courses, undergraduates (dare I say even in grad seminars?) are often taught (wrongly) that Nicholas of Cusa is an outstanding figure of the time because he espoused the notion of “learned ignorance,” which, it is argued, is an essential feature of what we--us now-- think of as science; but the notion of learned ignorance often presented in upper-division courses is conflated with an ancient notion with which we are all familiar; namely, the Socratic maxim to know that one does not know. This would seem to diminish the claim that he was an outstanding figurehead who laid the conceptual foundations of modern objective science. Cusa’s notion of learned ignorance, if it is just a reiteration of the Socratic tradition, is not novel. But Cusa is an outstanding figure, and his notion of learned ignorance was an important contribution to the conceptual foundations of modern science. This is a different claim than the one in which he is an outstanding figure in virtue of espousing a Socratic maxim, albeit a modified one.

So, where have all the well-intentioned history profs gone wrong? They go wrong by failing to give an account of the role of mathematics in natural philosophy during the medieval period. Cusa’s philosophy of mathematics, and the way it differed from the received scholastic view of mathematics, is the context in which his notion of learned ignorance becomes novel.

The scholastics conceived of mathematics as the measure of magnitude, determining the ‘more or less’. According to the scholastics, real knowledge concerns only substances and its essences; moreover, the scholastics employed hylomorphic descriptions of natural phenomena: all individual things and their respective activities were reduced to explanations of composite entities consisting of matter and form. Consider the following. In every man, the form “man” is wholly instantiated and without magnitude—there is no degree to which it is instantiated more or less. Scholastic mathematics in this case, therefore, is solely an abstract issue. But if mathematics is conceived as the measure of the infinite, suddenly mathematics measures more than just the abstract because, Cusa thinks, infinity participates in the divine essence, and since finite objects, like a man, can participate in the divine essence, the infinite is present in the finite, it is mapped onto the finite. This significantly differs from the scholastic conception of the process of knowledge. Cusa’s notion of learned ignorance is claim about the limits of finitude, specifically man’s cognitive faculties, in understanding absolute truth. Inquiry yields true knowledge of the divine essence, yet the mind is incapable of fully comprehending this divine essence. Cusa’s ‘knowing-without-full-comprehension’ or learned ignorance, is in accord with his biblical views of the mystery doctrine as taught in Rom 16:25 and I Cor 2:7. (Well, this is at least what some scholars have argued.)[This Cusa stuff really needs its own 15 page essay to be coherent:]

The next section that follows consists of particular chapters devoted to various areas of philosophy; e.g., ethics, natural philosophy, so forth. We then get three essays on pertinent historical factors that affected renaissance thinkers. The first of these details the sorts of practical problems that arose for Renaissance scholars as they attempted to organize the ever-increasing bits of knowledge. For instance, from the mid 16th century to the mid 17th, the number of botanical classifications grew from 500 to over 6000. Next is an interesting essay whose argument is that the early modern philosophical preoccupation with epistemology is partly the result of numerous renaissance debates about the nature of religious authority. The last essay in this section is about philosophy on the Iberian Peninsula, and the ethical questions that arose amongst its philosophers as a result of the discovery and conquests of the “New World.”

The book concludes with a summary essay extolling the virtues and importance of renaissance philosophy. It is an essay whose aim is to justify the philosophical study of the renaissance period. And it, indeed, does need justification because, as I said, this period is greatly neglected. Until it can be shown that renaissance philosophers are hitting philosophical pay dirt, this period will continue to be studied by historians of various stripes, but not philosophers. This editor hopes that this book will help change this fact.

I highly recommend this book. If you are interested in the history of philosophy, intellectual history, or just of renaissance thought in general, this book is for you.

[Massimo Pigliucci]

This book, like most academic collections, is not for the faint of heart. If you are after an engaging treatment of Renaissance philosophy then you should look elsewhere. For instance at Peter Adamson’s Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy, part of his ongoing series, A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Nevertheless, this volume edited by James Hankins for Harvard Press has its moments, and it will certainly be useful to anyone seriously interested in the topic. It is divided into two major sections: Continuity and Revival (seven chapters) and Toward Modern Philosophy (ten chapters). The first section highlights the links between Medieval-Scholastic and Renaissance philosophy; it also documents the renewed interest of Renaissance humanists in the Greco-Roman classics. Because of my practice of Stoicism I was particularly taken by the chapter by Jill Kraye, on the revival of Hellenistic philosophies. The last entry in this group, Brian Copenhaver’s “How to do magic and why: philosophical prescriptions,” made for a fun read. The second section is concerned with how the Renaissance foreshadowed the onset of modern philosophy (you know, people like Descartes, Spinoza, and so forth). Several of these chapters are well worth the effort, including but not limited to Peter Harrison’s “Philosophy and the crisis of religion,” Miguel Granada’s “New visions of the cosmos,” and Eric Nelson’s “The problem of the prince.” Surprisingly, though, I found that the whole book is worth it even just for the final chapter, “The significance of Renaissance philosophy” by the editor, James Hankins.

[Truls Ljungström]

En grupp artiklar om hur man bör tolka och använda renässansfilosofin. Det finns guldkorn i den, men de är för få för att bemöda sig. Jag rekommenderar den hågade att hitta något annat, för även om denna onekligen ger en bred översikt, så innehåller inte boken några större mervärden utom att sammanföra dem.

[Marks54]

This is a wonderful volume of essays about Renaissance philosophy. It is meant to complement reading some actual texts and also helps in working through the history of the period. The editor is especially good and provides needed background above and beyond the basic works that most readers know about.