Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 401 - Word Perfect - Logic and Language in Renaissance France.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Word Perfect, Logic and Language in Renaissance France. The clash between humanism and scholasticism, which looked like it would be the defining battle of intellectual life in the 16th century until the Reformation came along, is often seen in institutional terms. The schoolmen worked at universities, the humanists outside them. This impression is supported by humanists complaining about the pedophagory offered up as philosophical instruction at Paris and elsewhere, and it seems to be confirmed by the fact that scholastics accused humanists of lacking proper credentials. Thus, we find Noël Béda, executive officer of the theology faculty at Paris and a determined defender of scholasticism and Catholicism, accusing Erasmus of lacking the proper expertise to interpret scripture. In fact, though, many of the humanists did study at the universities, as I mentioned when we looked at Erasmus, he in fact studied theology at Paris for a time, though he dropped out. We also saw how the impact of Melanchthon transformed teaching at Wittenberg, Tübingen, and ultimately across Protestant Europe, precisely by modifying the traditional curriculum in light of humanist values. In France, there was no better example of a humanist schoolman than Jacques Lefebvre d'Étopie. Béda complained about him too. In 1526, he attacked Lefebvre by name for his presumption in offering a new Latin version of the Psalms and New Testament, translating the Bible into French, and daring to comment on scripture as if he were a properly trained theologian. Though Lefebvre never officially broke with the church, Béda depicted Lefebvre as being at least a Lutheran sympathizer. As a modern scholar has put it, it was the heaviest stick with which to beat him and the one that lay nearest to hand. Béda himself put the point as follows, The heretical forebears he had in mind included such familiar names as Abelard, Marcilius of Padua, John Wycliffe, and Jan Hus. But while Béda was right that Lefebvre was not a professor of theology, neither was he an outsider to the world of the schoolmen. He taught at Paris himself for almost two decades, spanning the 15th and 16th centuries. He composed influential textbooks on Aristotelian philosophy, for instance his 1496 Introduction to Logic, which became a bestseller. He was eclectic and creative in his use of pedagogical techniques, such as tables offering an overview of the treatise that he would then go on to summarize, catechistic dialogues to help the student remember the main points, and more traditional full commentaries. It's been remarked that this range of epitomizing formats or genres defined a Renaissance philosophical style which Lefebvre's works remodeled for Northern universities. His methods were inspired by Italian Humanist scholars, whom Lefebvre contacted during several trips across the Alps. In Italy he met, among others, Ficino, Poliziano, and Pico. The Humanist Johannes Reuthen thus said, Marcilio Ficino gave Plato to Italy, Lefebvre restored Aristotle to France. Elsewhere he was lauded as the one glory of all France. A group of like-minded scholars gathered around him, including the philologian Beatus Venanus and the philosopher Charles de Beauvall. Lefebvre's student Jose Klichtow wrote commentaries on his epitomes, suggesting that these had effectively replaced Aristotle as the works that students must consult. The group had interest ranging across the Aristotelian curriculum, but focused particularly on two disciplines that had been central for arts masters back in the 14th century, mathematics and logic. He and his group applied mathematics to physics in a way reminiscent of the Oxford calculators who flourished in that earlier period. But in logic, Lefebvre took distance from the concerns of the late medievals, commenting that scholastic discussions were full of novelties and lifeless matters like so much hay. By this he meant treatises and debates about sophisms and dialectical games like the practice of obligations. Nowadays, historians of philosophy find this to be one of the most exciting and fruitful areas of medieval work on logic. For Lefebvre though, it was at best a harmless bit of entertainment. This didn't stop his student Klichtow from offering a solution to the most famous sophism, the liar paradox. The problem is raised by sentences like, this statement is false, which is false if it is true and true if it is false. Klichtow's solution departs from the observation that asserting a proposition implicitly involves asserting the truth of that very proposition. So if I assert giraffes are tall, I'm obviously saying something about giraffes, but I'm also simultaneously asserting that this very sentence is true. Thus, we can take the liar sentence to be a concealed conjunction. It means this statement is false and this statement is true. But that is a straightforward contradiction, so it turns out that there is no paradox. The liar sentence is simply false. It's just a contradictory assertion like, this giraffe is tall and not tall and contradictions are always false. Pretty smart, but as I say, Lefebvre wouldn't really care. For him, the value of logic is to be found not in this sort of game playing, but in the part of Aristotle that deals with statements and arguments that are productive of knowledge and explains how language hooks up to reality. This means that he did need to take seriously at least one long-standing controversy from scholastic logic, the problem of universals. In his notes on Aristotle's categories, Lefebvre adopted what might be called a moderate realist position on this issue. While there is nothing outside the mind that is genuinely universal, neither are universals simply conventional or arbitrary fictions that we devise to categorize things. Rather, there are genuine similarities between things out in the world. When we notice the similarities between, say, giraffes, our minds take the properties common to all the giraffes and add the notion of universality to them to form a general idea of giraffes. As these examples show, Lefebvre was himself something of a contradiction, both a humanist and a scholastic, until he wasn't. Increasingly, Lefebvre got interested in applying his philological skills to the Bible and to texts that enriched his diet of Aristotle with Platonist and mystical ideas from authors like the Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa. Again, this may show the influence of Italian humanists like Pico della Mirandola. In an early work on natural magic, Lefebvre was already exploring a method inspired by the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, which had so fascinated Pico, deriving meaning from the numerical values of the names of God. He retained this idea when he turned to the project of writing about Scripture, saying in a work on the Psalms that God's names are full of mysteries useful to our religion and worth knowing. In 1499, we find him commenting on the works of the Pseudo-Dionysius and thrilling to the negative theology he finds there. These two ideas, the rejection of the application of language to God and the search for the secret meanings of divine names, may seem to be a contradiction. What would Klichtow say? But in fact, they are two sides of the same coin. Lefebvre is moving towards the idea that God cannot be grasped through normal language or normal reasoning. He contrasts rational and intellectual philosophy and says that whereas reason can go astray, pure intellection is unerring. That's what we're after, and to help us along, Lefebvre healthfully supplies a reading list that will lift students gradually to the heights of true contemplation. It does include Aristotle, but then moves on to the Church Fathers before culminating with Cuzanus and Dionysius. Notice that Cuzanus is the only modern author listed. With that notable exception, the truths of religion and philosophy are for Lefebvre to be sought in antiquity. This is in stark contrast to the view of a man like Beetha, for whom the medieval scholastics were valued authorities, not to be disdained just for their lack of literary flair. As Beetha wrote in a letter to Erasmus, the scholastics crude style had been inspired by God himself, and their teachings had been, truly needed by the Church at a period when it was in decline. Erasmus, ever the master of tasteful and refined rhetoric, responded by calling Beetha, the most stupid of bipeds. Here we come back to that other defining clash of his times, the one between Reform and the Church. You can see why Beetha thought that Lefebvre was effectively a Lutheran. Here was a man who was translating the Bible into French and encouraging people to read it without guidance from trained theologians, thus implicitly rejecting the principle that it is the Church that understands and interprets Scripture. It was an attitude exemplified by his refusal to accept the traditional teaching that three women mentioned in the Bible were all one and the same person, named Mary Magdalene, the Mary who anointed Christ's feet, the sister of Lazarus, and the first to see Christ upon his resurrection. Beetha wrote a refutation of Lefebvre on this score. The two also clashed over the number of husbands that had been married to Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary. These debates are not of obvious philosophical relevance, but they do epitomize the contrasting worldviews that also shaped philosophy in this period. To put it bluntly, Lefebvre depended on philology, Beetha on religious authority. When they disagreed about the meaning of terms, Lefebvre would apply his classical humanist training, whereas Beetha's criterion for usage was the Latin idiom of contemporary Paris clerks, as one modern scholar has put it. On theological issues of greater moment, Lefebvre was not implausibly accused of reformist beliefs. He de-emphasized the real presence of Christ and the Eucharist and rejected the worship of saints. He developed these views in the 1520s after Beetha and the Sorbonne started trying to stamp out the Lutheranism in Paris. Lefebvre moved to the town of Meaux to join the circle of Bishop Guillaume Brissonnet, whom we already met as a confidant and correspondent of Marguerite de Nevevart. Under increasing pressure for his reformist sympathies, Lefebvre moved on to Strasbourg in 1525, and then wound up at the court of Marguerite herself, where he served her as chaplain until his death in 1536, by which time Beetha had graduated from agent of oppression to victim of oppression. He was imprisoned by King Francis in 1534. As we can see from the role played by Marguerite and Francis here, the larger battle over reformist ideas included skirmishes between secular royal authority and religious figures who dared to speak the truth, or what they considered the truth, to power. That will continue to be a theme of 16th century French history, except that soon it will be Protestants defying the crown. It bears repeating that Lefebvre never went so far as to embrace Lutheranism explicitly. Like Marguerite, he presented himself as a promoter of reform from within Catholicism, and adopted what he no doubt understood to be moderate positions on the theological controversies of the day. For example, he argued that humans are saved through a combination of faith and good works, not faith alone, and when the Peasants' Revolt broke out, he went out of his way to assure his readers that good Christians always remain subject to their temporal masters. Just as he had one foot in the scholastic world and another in the world of humanism, so he at least tried to push forward the reform agenda with one hand, while using the other to hold fast to the church. A man like Beetha was never going to admire this sort of doctrinal gymnastics, but it was far from unique. Similar mental and spiritual flexibility was shown by his younger contemporary, Julius Caesar Scaliger. One of the most famous humanists of the first half of the 16th century, Scaliger never broke with the church either, but he did have Protestant sympathies, as would be emphasized by his son Joseph, a convinced Calvinist. For instance, the elder Scaliger may have been involved in efforts to have Andrew Melanchthon, nephew of Philip Melanchthon, freed after he was jailed for his attempts to spread Lutheranism in France. Scaliger wasn't actually from France, though his scholarly career was mostly spent at the small French town of Argen, where he lived for the last 30 years of his life up to his death in 1558. He hailed from Italy, and claimed to come from a noble family of Verona. This turns out to have been a fib, or actually an outrageous lie. His real name was Giulio Bordoni, and his father was a miniature painter from Padua. As this begins to suggest, Scaliger was a master of self-promotion, who sought out intellectual battles with luminaries of the time, like Gerolamo Cardano, Rabelais, and even Erasmus. These were daunting opponents, but Scaliger was unfazed by such conflict, having spent his early career engaged in more literal warfare as a soldier in the imperial army. After almost being killed in battle, he retired from military life to devote himself to humanist scholarship. In fact, he bid to be a better humanist than the greatest humanist of all by attacking Erasmus after the latter wrote his work mocking the Ciceronians, slavish imitrators of the great Roman author. Erasmus satirically described how these pedants refused to use any Latin not found in Cicero. It would take them six nights to write six lines of Latin, since they had to double check that every word they used was genuinely Ciceronian. If Cicero used a certain verb, they would even avoid using any conjugations of that verb not found in his writings. And all this out of fanatical devotion to a pagan. Scaliger was outraged, or at least he pretended to be. He penned a furious reply, which Beta helped to get published as part of his own vendetta against Erasmus. Scaliger framed the dispute as an attack on his own Italian culture by a so-called German, though Erasmus was of course Dutch, and defended the more usual humanist idea of deploying Ciceronian rhetoric in the cause of Christian religion. Unwittingly confirming that Ciceronians, like him, did indeed tend towards pedantry, he corrected Erasmus on minor points, and then triumphantly told him he should be ashamed to be bested by a mere soldier like himself. Scaliger's pugnacity and fascination with language stayed with him. He wrote a brief defense of poetry, which responds to the parts of Plato's Republic where poets are exiled from the ideal city. Scaliger points out the apparent hypocrisy of this, given the literary nature of Plato's own dialogues, and then takes a swipe at the work's notorious proposal to institute collective sexual relations, we'd rather live outside your republic with our modest wives and children. A work from 1540 addressed to his son is tellingly entitled On the Causes of the Latin Language. I say tellingly because Scaliger's project here is to present Latin grammar as a proper science, and a fundamental tenet of a versatile epistemology is that proper sciences must inquire into causes. With typical immodesty, he declares that until he came along, grammar was far from being a true science, lacking rules and precepts. One striking feature of his approach is that he thinks of Latin as a written phenomenon, no less than a spoken one. Thus he denies that the subject of grammar is the audible utterance, it's just any articulate expression of thoughts in the mind, so that the material cause of grammar is letters, the elements of words, whether they are written or spoken. In this respect, Scaliger's grammatical theory fits a culture in which Latin was less a living language than a legacy of antiquity being rediscovered in books. That ancient legacy is confronted directly in yet another work on language devoted to poetics. It is a late work published only posthumously in 1561. Here, Scaliger dared to challenge an authority even greater than Erasmus, Aristotle himself. Aristotle's Poetics was of course standard reading on the subject, but Scaliger argues that it got things wrong on as basic a question of what poetry is for. Where Aristotle said that the aim of the poet is imitation, Scaliger has a moralizing conception of literature. Its goal is in fact, delightful instruction by which the habits of human minds are brought to right reason, so that through them the human may achieve perfect action, which is called beatitude. Indeed, Poetics is subordinated to politics, because its function is to bring people to a good and happy life. Here we might notice another point of continuity with his earlier diatribe against Erasmus. Scaliger is assimilating the function of Poetics to that of rhetoric, since he sees it as a form of moral exhortation. And if Cicero was Scaliger's paradigm for rhetoric, another Roman author was for him the greatest of poets, namely Virgil, whom Scaliger places above Homer in the pantheon of classical literature on the grounds that Homer was merely inspired, whereas Virgil combined inspiration with a conscious grasp of art. To compose literature artfully is, for Scaliger, above all to show good taste. He thinks that Virgil's perfection is shown above all by his selectivity. Where Homer simply gives the reader all that comes to him thanks to his literary gift, Virgil crafts his poetry by eliminating anything even slightly discordant. The result is word perfect. Only fools would want to add anything, only insolent men to change anything. Like the poets of the Pleiade, Scaliger encourages modern authors to learn from their classical forebears. He would have agreed with Dubélé that artfulness is in large part imitation. Scaliger was in fact close to Ronsard, to whom he dedicated one of his books, and it has been argued that Ronsard saw himself as trying to carry out the agenda outlined by Scaliger. He would be inspired by Homer and disciplined like Virgil. Another constant of Scaliger's career was his taste for polemic, whose most extravagant issue was aimed at a fellow Italian, Cardano. As I mentioned back in episode 363 when we looked at Geradamo Cardano, Scaliger composed a sprawling work in refutation of Cardano's onsutelty, called Exoteric Exercises, in 365 sections, one for each day of the year. It attacks Cardano from every conceivable angle, from his theory of the mind to his lapses in Latin grammar. How am I supposed to understand if you write incorrectly, Scaliger fulminates? In general, and despite his own critiques of Aristotle elsewhere, as on the topic of poetry, Scaliger mounts a defense of Aristotelianism against Cardano's innovative scientific ideas. In fact, one contemporary complained about people who would simply cite Scaliger as the authority on Aristotle's thought, as if his remarks were oracular answers coming from the Lyceum. Scaliger is at pains to make Aristotelianism compatible with Christianity, as when he draws on late ancient Platonists to argue that Aristotle's God is an efficient cause of the universe, though he does admit that Aristotle wrongly endorsed the eternity of the universe. An interesting part of Scaliger's Exercises, which brings us in a roundabout way back to logical concerns, asks whether the universe could be better than it is. He describes the natural arrangement of the cosmos in scholastic terms as the ordained dictate of God. The irregularities that are described so well in Aristotle's natural philosophy are set down through an act of voluntary will by God. His absolute power could have produced a different world, but God chose to make this one. Scaliger, however, rejects the notion that God could have made a better world. Of course, the universe is not infinitely good, like God is, but it is as good as it can be given the limitations of finite being. The variety we see in nature shows how God was seeking to realize every possible form of goodness. Even such humble creatures as insects are part of the grand divine plan. So, to spell this out in more technical terms, the features of the universe are in themselves merely possible, or contingent. They could have been otherwise. But given God's providential decision to create the universe in its maximal perfection, at least its general features become necessary. This, by the way, makes for a nice contrast to Aquinas' position on the same question. From the same premise that the universe can be only finitely perfect, he argued that it makes no sense to say that this is the best of all possible worlds, for a finite thing can always be improved indefinitely. For Scaliger, we can instead say that this universe is the best that any universe could be, despite the inevitable limitation of its goodness. He cites another classical text to support his claim, namely Hippocrates' On the Nature of the Human, which states, If one thing were absent, everything would slide and collapse. It's telling that Scaliger would appeal to a medical authority here. As a young man, he studied medicine at Bologna, and once in France he kept up his interest in the field and disciplines adjacent to medicine like botany. Medicine was apparently the reason for yet another feud, in this case with Rabelais, whom he considered to be insufficiently deferential to the two greatest ancient doctors, Hippocrates and Galen. References to medicine, illness, and health are pervasive in the literature we've been discussing in this and the last few episodes. Beta compared Lutheranism to a plague, while Scaliger likened those who defamed poetry to medical charlatans. Less metaphorically, Rabelais and Scaliger were only two of the many intellectuals in Renaissance France who devoted themselves seriously to the study of medicine while also pursuing wider interests, including philosophy. Next time, we'll meet others who fit this description, as we hear about Sinfouren Champier, Jean Fernell, and the spread of Paracelsin medicine to France. But don't let the talk of spread worry you, because the only thing that will be infectious in the next episode will be my enthusiasm for The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.