 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 historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode... Old News. Introduction to the Italian Renaissance. If you want to be reborn, the first thing you need to do is die in the first place. In Latin Christendom, ancient civilization and culture met their doom around the time the Western Roman Empire itself passed away at the end of the 5th century AD. This ushered in the so-called Dark Ages, initiating a period we still call the Middle Ages, middle because the medieval's had the misfortune to live between the time of the Romans and the time of the Renaissance. We usually picture it as a sudden falling away from a high plateau of culture, followed by a trough of about 1,000 years, with a sudden ascent to previous heights in the 15th and 16th centuries. Ancient culture was reborn, and modernity and the Enlightenment were right around the corner. It's this way of thinking that leads people to skip over almost half the history of philosophy in their reading and teaching, vaulting from antiquity straight to the 17th century with perhaps a brief stop at someone like Aquinas in the middle. You've heard me complain about this often enough, about how much gets missed when people ignore medieval philosophy in the Islamic world, Latin Christendom, and Byzantium. What I haven't yet pointed out is that this dismissive attitude towards the Middle Ages itself has a history. It was born at the same time that ancient culture was supposedly being reborn in the Renaissance. Ancient literature, including philosophy, was rediscovered and reevaluated. It was out with the crabbed, overly technical, and reliably barbarous Latin of the schoolmen in with the elegant Latin of Cicero. Unreadable translations of Aristotle were old news, and the very latest thing was something even older, as Greek texts were studied in the original. But was this really new? There had already been a major recovery of Greek thought during the late 12th and 13th centuries thanks to scholars who got access to the manuscripts of Constantinople. Way back in the first half of the 12th century, James of Venice traveled there and translated Aristotle into Latin. His example was followed in the 13th century by men like Robert Grossetest, who produced a Latin version of Aristotle's ethics, and William of Murabeca, who strove to produce a complete Latin Aristotle. In a parallel development, Arabic philosophical works were rendered into Latin too, providing invaluable guidance to the works of Aristotle and into the bargain the innovative and influential ideas of figures like Avicenna. So, if you must picture the history of philosophical culture as a kind of elevation chart, you should at least think of it as a high plateau plunging to a low level then thrusting up again around 1200 with a further jump during the Renaissance that brings things back to the heights of late antiquity. But the real story is more complicated still. The term Renaissance has been bestowed upon the Carolingian period when John Scodas Ariugina grappled with the works of Greek fathers in the original, and on the 12th century when figures like John of Salisbury were already cherishing Cicero. And that's to say nothing of the revivals of ancient wisdom that were a regular feature of Byzantine culture. So why is it that when we hear the word Renaissance we think first and foremost of the 15th and 16th centuries, which we take to mark a decisive shift away from the medieval period? Did these centuries just have a better public relations team? Yes actually, we call them the humanists. It was they and not Enlightenment figures like Descartes and Hume who first complained about tedious scholastic philosophy and sought to replace it with a new philosophical paradigm. This new way of doing philosophy was modelled on antiquity, as the pursuit of linguistic refinement led to a revival of Greek Platonism and Latin rhetoric. Though the humanist endeavour was indeed anticipated in medieval times, it was also bound up with other changes going on at the period. Changes that went well beyond the world of philosophy. It was a time of upheaval in economics and politics, of developments in family life, the sciences, and awareness of the world beyond Europe. Perhaps most famous is the change in the visual arts. For a vivid sense of the cultural shift, just take a stroll through any museum with a decent historical collection. When you walk from the medieval section into the Renaissance rooms, you'll be in no doubt that these few steps have brought you to a new age. If you were growing up in 15th century Italy, you could have experienced this cultural transformation in your early education. Already back in the 14th century, cities like Genoa, Turin, and Venice began organizing communal education by appointing teachers of Latin. The offspring of wealthier families might instead be taught at home. A standard curriculum would include mathematical training with the abacus and gaining literacy in at least the vernacular and often in Latin as well. Even girls, especially from the nobility, could acquire a high proficiency in Latin, something encouraged by the humanist Leonardo Bruni, who emphasized the power of classical literature to instill virtue in both men and women. For boys, the study of classics was a route to effective citizenship. As another humanist educator, Pier Paolo Vergiero, put it, For those with noble minds and those who must involve themselves in public affairs and the community, it is useful to study history and moral philosophy. Just such study was put to use by the greatest political mind of the era. Niccolò Machiavelli could never have written The Prince, or his historical works, without his initial formation. This began at age 7, with attendance at a school of Latin grammar, followed by mathematics to the age of 12, and then reading of the classics with a communal master. Such small details give us an insight into the way that the rise of humanism reflected changes in Italian political life. Rather ironically, the 14th century had seen both a precipitous decline in population as a result of the plague, and the political ascendancy of the so-called Popolo, literally meaning the people. The term refers to a middle class whose wealth and social influence pete with the establishment of Republican governments around Italy. Humanism was in part an expression of the Popolo, who were highly literate merchants and lawyers, and who looked back to Roman history for a model of Republican institutions. This is why you might have an association in your mind between humanist thought and republicanism. Yet, when elite families emerged to dominate some city governments in the 15th century, they continued to celebrate and support humanist scholarship. The most famous example would be the Medici of Florence. Cosimo de' Medici in particular was patron to the Platonist thinker Marsilio Ficino, and endowed an important public library at San Marco. Humanism was not only, not even primarily, a philosophical movement. The intellectual ideal of the period, as still remembered today in our phrase Renaissance Man, was the scholar who mastered a forbiddingly wide range of disciplines. Take for instance Fabio Paolini, who lived at the end of our period, dying in 1605. He took degrees in both philosophy and medicine in Padua and went on to teach both Latin and Greek literature. He wrote commentaries on Cicero, Avicenna, and Hippocrates, treatises on medicine and about the nature of humanism itself, and even a translation of Aesop's fables. Much as we saw with the humanists of Byzantium, for instance Maximus Planudes and other scholars of the so-called Palaeologan Renaissance, the humanists of the Italian Renaissance were interested in philosophy simply because it formed a part of ancient literature. Carrying on the philological labors of the Byzantine humanists, these Italian scholars devoted themselves to the collection and preservation of Greek manuscripts. Most eye-catching here are the texts that were rediscovered and red for the first time since antiquity. A famous case occurred in 1417 when the humanist Poggio Bracciolini found a manuscript of the Latin poem On the Nature of Things written by Lucretius, an Epicurean philosopher of the Roman Republic. Lucretius was only one of numerous Greek thinkers to attract newfound attention. Sextus Empiricus, the most significant ancient skeptic, had not been totally lost in the Middle Ages, but he became a much more important source in the Renaissance, cited by such figures as Angelo Poliziano and Gianfresco Pico della Marandola. The most important single text for disseminating knowledge of the Hellenistic schools was Lives of the Philosophers, originally written by Diogenes Laertius in the 3rd century AD. Alongside summaries of the teachings of many ancient thinkers, and it must be said a lot of rather dubious biographical material, this work contained such gems as two short works by Epicurus himself, which Diogenes had inserted into his report of Epicurus's life and teachings. A Latin version of the Lives was made at the behest of Cosimo de' Medici, and it enjoyed wide diffusion in manuscripts before appearing in a first printed edition in 1472. As a result of these and other findings, Renaissance readers were in an unprecedented position. In all three medieval cultures, the legacy of antique philosophy had largely been Aristotelianism laced with Platonism. Only in the 15th century did ancient philosophy re-emerge in full with skepticism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism given their proper due. Yet, the humanists also made great strides in understanding Aristotelianism and Platonism, which remained dominant. We tend to think of Italian humanists as abandoning Aristotle for Plato. This is not entirely unjustified. The father of Italian humanism, Petrarch, complained in the 14th century of scholastic contemporaries who, "...worship Aristotle whom they don't understand, and accuse me for not bending my knee before him." But notice his suggestion that it would be better to understand Aristotle properly, unlike the schoolmen. This presupposed a better grasp of his Greek texts, a project pursued from early in the 15th century with improved Latin translations by Roberto Rossi and Leonardo Bruni. Over the next two centuries, there would be nearly 300 translations of Aristotle into Latin, produced by about 70 translators. And that's not to mention renditions of his works in various European vernacular languages. Meanwhile, the original Greek of Aristotle was finding new readers. Almost half our surviving manuscripts for Aristotle date from the 15th and 16th centuries, and the history of printing him in Greek goes back to the five-volume edition produced by Aldus Manutius and his team at the end of the 15th century. We also find humanists lecturing on the Aristotelian corpus, as did Angelo Poliziano in Florence and Niccolò Tomeo in Padua. But we should not underestimate the continuing vitality of the scholastic approach to Aristotle, a tradition that the humanists rejected. Medieval commentators were widely read, and given early printings. For instance, there were printed editions of Aquinas's commentaries on Aristotle, and in the middle of the 16th century, Pimasso Giunta printed Ivaroese's commentaries in Venice, along with the works of Aristotle on which Ivaroese had been commenting. Giunta did this as a corrective to the humanists' enthusiasm for Greek sources, which led them to neglect the riches of the Arabic tradition. As we'll be seeing, Ivaroese will be a significant source for Renaissance of the Sicilians, and also a significant source of controversy, just as he had been back in the 13th century when Aquinas was attacking members in the arts faculty at Paris for their excessive devotion to the commentator and his doctrines. If the story of Aristotelianism in the Renaissance is fairly continuous with the medieval tradition, the revival of Platonism was really something new, at least in the Latin Christian sphere. True, Plato had inspired philosophers throughout the Middle Ages, his influence peaking in the 12th century with the so-called Schule of Schacht. But for the most part, Plato was known only through a partial translation of his cosmological dialogue, the Timaeus. Now in the Renaissance, the whole collection of his dialogues make a dramatic entry onto the stage of philosophy, bringing the knowledge of his works to the same level as had been possible in Constantinople. This was thanks especially to Ficino, whose complete Latin translation of Plato appeared in 1484. But his efforts had been anticipated by earlier scholars such as Leonardo Bruni and George of Trebizond. Meanwhile, Ficino and others also made a close study of late ancient Platonists, including Plotinus and Proclus. Now, Platonism could finally compete with Aristotelianism on a more or less equal footing in a contest that carried on from earlier debates in Byzantium. The upshot of all this is that a remarkably diverse array of sources could attract the attention of Italian Renaissance thinkers. It was a time when, depending on your literary taste, your educational background, and your city, you might cherish Cicero, Plato, or Averroes above all other thinkers. If you were a humanist, you would probably value most highly the thinkers who seem to contribute the most in the sphere of ethics. The humanists borrowed from Hellenistic texts the assumption that all philosophy worthy of the name should help us to live better lives. Already Petrarch had gone so far as to say, it is better to will the good than know the truth. And there were powerful links between ethics and political philosophy in this period. In part because of the rise of Republican city-states, it's often said that the Renaissance gave birth to modern ideas of individualism, a proposition whose validity we'll need to test. In political philosophy proper, Machiavelli is only the most famous of the authors of the time who debated the relative merits of Republican and princely institutions. Speaking of institutions, the fundamental contrast between humanism and scholasticism has in part to do with institutional contexts. In Florence, for instance, there was no university, allowing the new humanist paradigm to flourish in the absence of competition. The existence of philosophy outside universities was in itself nothing new. A handful of intriguing and well-known medieval thinkers also wrote beyond the university setting, such as Petrarch and Dante. But in the Renaissance that will become increasingly common, if not the norm. Similarly, our survey of the medieval age included a number of philosophers who, as women, were excluded from the world of the schoolmen. That too will continue into the Renaissance with figures like Christine de Pizan, Laura Charetta, Morarata Fonte, and Lucrezia Marinella. As always, we will also be looking at cultural phenomena that seem to be of philosophical importance, despite not being classified as philosophical according to modern day disciplinary boundaries. In particular, I'll be doing my best to explore the scientific achievement of the Renaissance. In particular focus will be medicine and the mathematical disciplines, especially astronomy, which will give us a chance to meet such prominent scientists as Galileo Galilei. We will also take the opportunity to explore so-called pseudo- or occult sciences, like alchemy and magic. Nor will the famous developments of Renaissance art escape our notice. We'll be touching on theories of aesthetics and on such disciplines as architecture and music. Among the social sciences, our look at political philosophy will be complemented by an exploration of economics and the writing of history, something else we've seen foreshadowed in Byzantium. This broad thematic approach I'll be taking will be compensated by a rather narrow geographical approach. This introduction may have made you feel like a visitor to Boston's north end, everyone seems to be Italian. And for good reason, or at least I hope is a good reason. As already flagged in the title of this episode, this series on Renaissance philosophy is only going to deal with the Italian Renaissance. In these same centuries Germany, the Netherlands, France, and the British Isles produced philologists to match anything that Italy had to offer, like Erasmus or Isaac Kazoban. At the same time, the Protestant Reformation was unfolding with its untold significance for European history, including the history of philosophy. These developments were so rich and diverse that they are going to need a series of their own. So, my overall strategy will be as follows. I'll be taking you to the threshold of the 17th century, the time of the Enlightenment, in two parallel series. The first will cover the Italian Renaissance, while the second will look at the 15th and 16th centuries across the rest of Europe. That further series on philosophy in the Reformation will take in the Northern humanists, Protestant leaders like Luther and Calvin, themes within scholastic culture like the notorious Wege Streit, and much much more. While I think this division of labor between the two series is necessary and should mostly work pretty well, it will also cause a few problems. In particular, we have to reckon with figures who do not fit neatly into Italy or the north. Take Nicholas of Cusa, a German philosopher who spent time in Italy, or the just mentioned Costine de Bizan, who was Italian but lived and wrote in France. I'll be tackling both of them in this first series on Italy, in part because they're both so exciting that I just can't wait. Nonetheless, we will occasionally have the problem that developments outside Italy had a major impact on the Italian Renaissance. A particularly spectacular example is the printing press, whose impact on all European thought was immense. In Italy, this technology arrived in 1465 and had a major impact on the dispersion of philosophical literature. Obviously, the Italians also responded to the Reformation, and some of the figures we'll be covering can reasonably be considered as representatives of the Counter-Reformation. The same problem will also arise in science, most notably as a northern thinker Copernicus should be covered in the Reformation series, but we'll have to say at least a little about him to understand late 16th century Italian astronomy. So you'll have to bear with me as I make occasional forays into the rest of Europe to provide context for what happened in Italy, and be reassured that we will have a chance to cover everything properly in due course. I'll finish for today by stressing what an exciting moment this is in our history of philosophy. The various strands of the story are going to weave themselves back together. Classical and late antique philosophical works become available after being inaccessible for a thousand years or more, even as ideas from Latin scholasticism and the Islamic world remain influential. Then there is the tradition we just covered, philosophy in Byzantium. That is a tradition that is almost always ignored by historians of philosophy, whether in research, in university teaching, in textbooks, or in popular presentations, but it's actually the part of our story that is most directly relevant to the As already mentioned, the Byzantine humanists were the direct progenitors of the Italian humanists, and the Greek manuscripts of Constantinople helped to kickstart Renaissance thought. But we won't truly appreciate the powerful links between Byzantine and Renaissance philosophy until we discuss the Greek-speaking scholars who actually lived in Italy and taught there. In so doing, they facilitated the rebirth of ancient thought. Next time we'll call the midwives, exploring the impact of George of Trebizond, Bessarion, and other Greeks in Italy, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.