 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, Town and Gown, Italian Universities. You're probably aware that there are university league tables, which students can use to compare the places they might go to study. Believe it or not, there are also league tables for philosophy, which list philosophy departments, or at least the ones in the English-speaking world, for overall quality and within a given discipline. The departments take this very seriously, looking to hire famous names that will bump them up the league table. It's comparable to the way people talk about summer transfers in soccer or other sports. Just as that new striker may help Arsenal compete for the title again, that new metaphysician will help Harvard gain ground on Princeton. If you find it vaguely unseemly for philosophers to be competing in this fashion, a sign of modern-day corruption in what should be a disinterested inquiry into truth, then you're at least half wrong. It may be unseemly, but there's nothing modern about it. Though they didn't literally have league tables, as far as I know, the scholars at universities in the Italian Renaissance would find the rivalry and competition of today's academia entirely familiar. A good example would be the contest over the services of Pietro Pomponazzi, a leading Aristotelian scholar around the turn of the 16th century. He mostly taught at Padua, with brief stints at Ferrara, but was then enticed to join the University of Bologna in 1511 or 1512. Bologna worked hard to keep him, pulling political strings in Florence to stop them from bringing Pomponazzi to Tuscany. He also enjoyed a generous salary, and he was not the only one. The best and the brightest were paid well at the leading Italian universities. Like modern-day soccer teams, these institutions looked beyond their borders to find talent, as when Bologna tried to hire Justus Lipsius, a scholar of Stoicism from modern-day Belgium, the German philosopher and master of the occult sciences Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was persuaded to teach at Pavia and Turin. To keep the scholars on their toes, universities also fostered competition within their own ranks. It was standard practice for lectures on the same topic to be scheduled at the same time, forcing students to vote with their feet as to who was the best instructor, which makes today's teaching evaluations seem pretty gentle. Pomponazzi was at various times put up against so-called concurrent lectures by Alessandro Artellini, Nicolatto Vernia, and Agostino Nifo, with students presumably agonizing over the choice between these stars of early 16th century Aristotelian philosophy. In the absence of teaching evaluations, the university officials kept a close eye on their teaching staff, visiting classes to make sure that lectures were not ended too early and levying fines for absenteeism. Padua even imposed fines on professors who read from a prepared text, since students then, like students today, preferred the spontaneity of an improvised delivery. Of course, the professors chafed under such measures. Later in the 16th century at Bologna, the botanist and zoologist Ulisse Aldrovandi wrote up a list of measures for reforming his university, complaining that his colleagues were reluctant to allow concurrent lectures despite their beneficial effect. Aldrovandi was in favor of this system and the competition it fostered, but he did make an exception for his own lectures. All students should be able to hear these because they were so important. Even dress code became a bone of contention. When Galileo Galilei, who taught at Padua, was fined for not wearing his professor's gown, he responded with a satirical poem, arguing that this long garment was unnatural since it inhibited urination and the visiting of brothels. Now that is the voice of a modern academic. But the universities of this era also maintained a significant degree of continuity with their medieval forebears. Bologna had been the first university in all of Europe, with the founding date traditionally put in 1088, but in fact probably carrying out the expected activities of a university only in the 1180s or so. In the 15th and 16th centuries, it had the largest faculty of Italy's 16 universities. Bologna set the tone for the rest of Italy. Founded by a collective union or university of students, it had a bottom-up organization that may be contrasted to the top-down structure used at Paris, Oxford, and their many imitators. In practice, this meant not so much that students called the shots in Italy as that there was constant jockeying for power between the students, instructors, and civic administrators. If he noticed this, Machiavelli no doubt approved, since it was the educational equivalent of the productive class tensions he so admired in the Roman Republic. Italy's universities were also distinctive in focusing on law and medicine, the traditional strengths of Bologna. Theology, so important at Paris and Oxford, was mostly taught outside the universities in Italy, at separate schools run by religious orders. So, for example, Savon Arrola, who initially studied at the University of Ferrara, intending to learn medicine, left the university system once he became a friar and taught scripture and scholastic curriculum in Dominican convents. One shouldn't exaggerate the gulf between the scholastic and theological worlds, since university students in a given city might attend lectures put on by the orders. Still, it meant that there was a rather secular approach at the universities, something we'll see clearly in coming episodes on Aristotelian scholarship and the sciences. In fact, one might tentatively suggest that the minor role played by theology at the universities was one reason 16th century Italy anticipated the scientific developments of the Enlightenment. It was this climate, oriented more towards natural philosophy than theology, that produced men like Pompa-Nazi, Zabarella, Vesalius, and Galileo. Another striking and unusual feature of the Italian university scene was what we might call Second City Syndrome, in which a major civic power ran a university in a smaller nearby city. The template was set by the Duke of Milan in 1361, when he founded a university in the subject town of Pavia, rather than Milan itself. He and his advisors handpicked the members of the faculty there. Likewise, the Medici moved the school of Florence to Pisa in the 1470s. The University of Siena was also beholden to the power of Florence, with the Grand Duke of Tuscany approving its professorial roster. In 1581, a mendicant friar was stopped from teaching philosophy, since Florence deemed this inappropriate. Rome also came to exert considerable control over Bologna, with the Pope meddling in professorial appointments, and Padua, which has already been mentioned several times and will be important in our story to come, was overseen from Venice. The city even tried to force all Venetian citizens who wanted to obtain a degree to do so in Padua, and made it a condition of state employment that one's degree be from this home university. University cities are never completely free of conflict between town and gown, and the Italian Renaissance certainly had its share of unruly students and disputes between civic and academic authorities. But for the most part, city authorities thought that higher learning was a good investment. It brought honor and renown, as recognized by Guigardini in his history of Florence, when he praised Lorenzo de' Medici for his university policy, through which he sought glory and excellence more than anyone else. At a more pragmatic level, professors of law often helped as advisors for city regimes, while teachers of medicine pursued private practice or attended on aristocratic clients. Students complained about this, because these literally extracurricular activities were a distraction for their teachers. With the coming of the Protestant Reformation, another kind of political issue arose at the universities. Many students were visitors from other countries, with Germans often making up one of the largest factions apart from the Italians. Foreigners were attracted by the excellence of the teaching and also the distinctive Italian curriculum, with its focus on natural science and law. For a time, Protestant students were still welcome, something that was not reciprocated in Protestant lands where Catholics were generally barred from studying. But eventually, in 1564, a decree by the Pope demanded that all candidates for a degree explicitly profess the Catholic faith. While this was sometimes ignored, in 1570, German students at Siena were arrested for heresy, showing that the threat to Protestants was a real one. The Catholic response to the Reformation also left its mark on intellectual activities at the university. For instance, a logic professor at Padua named Bernadino Tomitano translated a work on the Bible by the northern humanist Erasmus and saw it placed on the index of proscribed books. He escaped further censure, but only after being made to declare his opposition to Erasmus's teachings. Tomitano's specialty, logic, gives us another point of continuity with medieval teaching practices. As had been the case in previous centuries, indeed, as far back as late antiquity, logic was a young student's first encounter with philosophy. Logic was also standard preparation for studies in non-philosophical fields like law and medicine. This suggests that it was considered a fairly introductory discipline, and for many students that was no doubt the case. But under the heading of logic, challenging problems like the status of universals were also debated. A nice example is provided by Alessandro Accilini, who taught at Padua around the turn of the 16th century and was one of the aforementioned concurrence who competed with Pompanazzi. We have detailed records of the disputations he held at the university. Of 238 such events, 75 were on natural philosophy and another 53 on logic. Confirming the lack of activity in theology, only six disputations fell under this heading. A similar story is told by faculty members at Ferrata in the latter half of the 16th century, when the 30 professors in the arts and medical faculty included six logicians and only two theologians. It was part of Padua's excellence in Aristotelian philosophy that they had a long-standing strength in logic. This went back at least as far as Paul of Venice, who taught at Padua Siena and Perugia in the 1420s and wrote influential textbooks on this subject. For his so-called small logic, we have no fewer than 80 surviving manuscripts, and it was already printed in 1472. A statute from Padua in 1496 makes Paul's writings set text in the curriculum, alongside contributions by various medieval logicians. Particularly striking is the presence here of works by the so-called Oxford calculators like William Hatesbury and Roger Swineshead. Their habit of applying logical and mathematical analysis to problems of natural philosophy, like the dynamics of motion, was a natural fit for the combination of disciplines taught in the arts faculty at Padua. Thus we see Pompanazzi writing a treatise on a problem discussed by the calculators back in the 14th century, the intention and remission of forms, which concerns rates of change in motion and other physical alterations. One of the Aristotelian professors of Padua, Agostino Nifo, shows us how Renaissance logicians continued to draw on medieval sources. E. Jennifer Ashworth, writing in the 1970s, pointed out the surprising extent to which Nifo was aware of medieval terminus logic. But she also pointed out that Nifo was not really in sympathy with the older approaches, in part because he preferred the even older approach of Aristotle himself. Determined to reduce the entire discipline of logic to the theory of the syllogism, as laid out by Aristotle, Nifo wound up presenting a stripped-down version of medieval theories, which, as Ashworth put it, diminished their value and hence made them easier to abandon. Building on this study, Lisa Jardine has observed that Nifo was also aware of discussions of logic within the humanist tradition, in particular by Lorenzo Valla. As you may recall, Valla was a bitter critic of scholasticism and, accordingly, directed withering criticism and disdain at university logic. Jardine used this as context for understanding Nifo's minimalist approach to logic, suggesting that he wanted this discipline to focus on its goal of syllogistic perfection by outsourcing all other aspects of argumentation to rhetoric, the specialty subject of Valla and other humanists. This is just one example, but we can take an important lesson from it, namely that the denizens of the universities were far from being unaware of what the humanists were doing. Conversely, the humanists were deeply engaged with university culture. True leading heroes of the movement, like Petr, Salutati, Bruni, Alberti, and Manetti, were independent scholars, but Bruni, for one, studied law and dialectic in a scholastic setting. He knew enough about law to declare, with customary wit, that it should be called the yawning science. Alberti, too, studied law and found it boring because it involved too much memorization. A number of prominent humanists held university positions. Even the aforementioned scourge of scholastic thought, Lorenzo Valla. He taught at the University of Pavia, but predictably enough, caused uproar when he complained about the poor Latin skills of a degree candidate and impugned the intellectual credentials of the law faculty. The Renaissance scholar David Lyons has nicely captured the way that humanism was co-opted by university culture, writing that, professors and university officials were well aware of the significance of the humanist challenge. Jointly, they paid it the ultimate compliment of stealing its ideas and hiring its proponents. Beginning in the middle of the 15th century, the humanist study of rhetoric increasingly came into the teaching curriculum. The professors in these disciplines did philological work, editing and translating works of ancient literature, and taught a wide range of texts to their students, with the curriculum in humanism being far more open and flexible than that of fields like logic, law, and medicine. A good example here would be Angelo Poliziano, who at Florence in the 1490s offered courses on authors like Virgil and Homer before moving into the teaching of Aristotelian logic. We discussed the backlash against this in episode 339 and mentioned Poliziano's work Lamiya, where he claimed the right to deal with such topics as a true philologist. As that episode shows, the specialists in philosophy were happy to have humanist colleagues around, so long as they stayed in their lane. The Aristotelians could not deny that the humanist movement had done great good for their own studies by establishing better editions of Greek texts, including those of Aristotle, and also by bringing back into circulation the ancient commentaries on his works. Or rather, bringing them into circulation in the Latin West, since as we know, these commentaries had been studied in Byzantium for centuries and inspired new commentaries, like those executed in the circle around Anna Comlinna. The humanist expertise put them in a good position to contribute to the philosophy of language, which as in the medieval period was still considered to fall into the domain of logic. Bala wanted to sweep away the Aristotelian approach and replace it with a more philological enterprise, inspired by ancient rhetoricians like Quintilian. But other humanists adopted a less radical attitude, seeking to improve Aristotelianism rather than discard it. Giovanni Pontano, for instance, agreed with Bala that careful attention to real Latin usage was vital. But he presented a broadly Aristotelian account of language and its origins, seeing linguistic signs as conventional in nature. Words do not fall from heaven, he said, but are invented by humans to describe things in their immediate environment. This explained the relatively limited vocabulary that Pontano assumed to be in use among the newly discovered peoples of the Americas. With the advance of civilization, words would come to be used for more abstract meanings, so that, for example, the Latin verb serrere, to sow seeds in agriculture, became the root for words like sermo, meaning speech. It seems then that neither institutional nor disciplinary boundaries neatly severate the humanists from the scholastics in our period. If we still want to contrast them, a better criterion would be the fetishizing of Latin. As we've seen, the social standing of eloquent Latin was very high, which is why female humanists were able to break into the circle of respected intellectuals by mastering this language, despite being excluded from the universities. We've also seen how authors felt the need to justify writing in their native tongues, something that goes back as far as Dante, and that we encountered most recently with Benedetto Cottrulli, who elected to write his work on the art of the merchant in Italian, despite the fact that it might, as he admitted, be judged less worthy of consideration. But if vernacular languages were generally considered inferior to classical ones, hardcore Aristotelians were increasingly deciding that they didn't care. They adopted the view of the barbarian from Pico della Mirandola's letter to Barbaro, in which Pico ironically used elegant Latin to defend the use of inelegant language. What matters is the truth of the ideas expressed, not the way they are expressed. The Aristotelians made the same point, but without the same irony. One of them was Sperone Speroni, a student of Pomponazzi who was no linguist. Pomponazzi's Latin and Greek skills were so rudimentary that Speroni said he knew no language outside of Mantuan, and Pomponazzi himself insisted that truth needs no adornment by eloquence. Speroni made him a character in a dialogue on language which promoted the use of vernacular languages. For Speroni, it was not the scholastics with their clunky Latin who were the barbarians, but rather the humanists who barbarously call non-Latin philosophy barbaric. He considered humanists as scholars of the most inept sophistry ever to exist in the sciences. Philosophy would flourish not through the cultivation of fine writing, but the use of straightforward vernacular language so that intellectuals could concentrate on rigorous thinking rather than wasting years of their life mastering Latin grammar and Sisaronian style. Not coincidentally, around this same time, scholars did indeed seek to capture Aristotelian philosophy in Italian, as when Antonio Tridapale published the first logical textbook in this language in 1547. Speroni and Tridapale were both connected to the Academia delli Infiamati, founded in 1540 as an organization committed to the use of vernacular language in scholarly activity. It ran into the problem that scholars visiting from other countries could not participate in its activities. Whatever your attitude towards Sisaronian eloquence, you had to admit it was useful to have Latin as the universal European language of scholarship. Still, the Aristotelians thought the language was accidental to the scholarship. The aforementioned logician Bernardino Tomitano, who was a friend of Speroni, stated that the words of different languages are merely shells for ideas that are the same for everyone. This itself was a genuinely Aristotelian idea, since Aristotle had said, in a much-discussed passage of his logical writings, that spoken words are only outward symbols of affections in the soul. So specialists in scholastic Aristotelianism like Tomitano, Speroni, Pomponazzi, and Nifo can, after all, be contrasted to the humanists. They might have appreciated the way these philologists helped establish better editions of Aristotle's works, but for them, the right way to do philosophy was not to become expert in rhetoric or the languages of antiquity, it was to pursue the perfect knowledge envisioned by Aristotle himself, which would take the form of syllogistically structured arguments that come together to constitute demonstrative science. Philosophers should focus on thinking thoughts like that, and not care so much about the words they use to express those thoughts. While these attitudes can be described as scholastic and associated with the study of philosophy at the university, they should not be seen as a mere holdover of medieval Aristotelianism. Of course, the writings of Aristotle had been studied in detail since the 13th century, so they did not need to be recovered and brought back to light, the way that the humanists revived the study of Hellenistic philosophers like Lucretius and Platonists like Plotinus and Proclus. But in the Italian Renaissance, the study of Aristotle too was in a sense reborn, as his works were printed for the first time, made available in improved Latin translations and in the vernacular, and expounded with the help of late ancient commentaries, and above all, the commentaries of the great Muslim exegete of Verruese. Just as happened in the late 13th century in Paris, the rise of a Verruism and radical Aristotelianism caused upset even as it made space for philosophy as an independent and often daring field of research. This is the story we'll be telling over the next few episodes as our wanderings in the Italian Renaissance become truly peripatetic. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.