 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, Lords of Language, Northern Humanism. In a satirical novel published in 1872 by Samuel Butler, a traveler visits a topsy-turvy utopia called Erewhon. At one point the traveler learns about the universities of Erewhon, which school their students in unreason on the grounds that living exclusively by reason and its hard and fast rules would be intolerable. Students are alone logical, but they are always absurd. It would also be narrow-minded and constraining for the students to learn only about reality, and to ignore all the things that might possibly be real. So at these colleges, great attention is paid to hypothetics, and a whole hypothetical language has been developed to talk about things that don't exist, but could. The traveler comments, It appeared to me to be a wanton waste of good human energy, that men should spend years and years in the perfection of so barren an exercise, but people know their own affairs best. The same sentiment was expressed hundreds of years earlier, during the Renaissance, when humanists mocked the time-wasting disciplines being pursued at the universities of their own day. One such humanist was Thomas More, author of the work whose title gave us the concept of utopia, a place that is nowhere. Erewhon is of course an anagram of the word nowhere. As Butler would later do, More made fun of the schoolmen and their preoccupation with hypotheticals, writing, The following propositions are not less remarkable, but attractive also and plausible, since they are of course true. The virgin was a whore, and the whore will be a virgin, and the whore is possibly a virgin. It is not easy to say which of the two, virgins or whores, are more indebted to such an obliging dialectics. And in a letter addressed to the Senate of Oxford University, written in 1518, More lamented the way that a faction of scholastic theologians, who called themselves the Trojans, were attacking humanists at the university. Unlike the original Trojan War, the conflict between scholastics and humanists went on for much longer than ten years. University logicians and theologians sneered at the study of classical literature as an unserious topic fit only for schoolboys, and the humanists returned the favor by calling the university masters sophists. As More noted in his letter, the conflict often involved academic politics. While humanist studies won adherents across Europe, the scholastics tenaciously defended the educational approach they had been using for generations. They were largely successful for a time. By the turn of the 16th century, humanism had made only minor incursions in most German universities. A statement issued in 1502 by masters in Leipzig rejected the humanists' preferred subjects of poetry and rhetoric, asserting, Steadily and surely, though, the poets and rhetoricians managed to reform the curricula. In Germany, a breakthrough period was the second decade of the 16th century, as the universities at Wittenberg, Erfurt, and finally Leipzig all shifted towards humanist teaching. As already mentioned two episodes ago, this helped to shape Martin Luther's approach to philosophy. In his Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, held in Wittenberg in 1517, he proposed to defend such theses as, One year later, there appeared a text that might claim to be the definitive attack on the quite literally medieval preoccupations of the scholastics. This was Against the Pseudo-Dialecticians, written by a humanist named Juan Luis Vives. Originally from Valencia, Vives left Spain as a young man to study in Paris, something he very much regretted. At the university there, he said, Having suffered through years of this nonsense, Vives says, he would now pay good money to unlearn what he was taught there. Like Thomas More, Vives condemns the dialecticians out of their own mouths by simply quoting their pedantic absurdities back at them. Or, A statement in which he says, Had Vives been an English speaker, he would surely have joked that his logic masters in Paris, Jan Döllerth and Gaspar Lacks, were dull-witted and lacks in their appreciation of the true subtleties of language. Actually, Vives did stay in England numerous times, visiting at one point with Thomas More. He also lived in Bruges in the Low Countries. Connections to the courts in both places, in Brussels and with Henry VIII in England, allowed him to escape academic life. This is a telling biographical detail. In the absence of thoroughgoing reform at the universities that would create professorial chairs in philology, humanism was not really a profession. So these learned men had to find some other way to make ends meet and might be monks, courtiers, merchants, or preachers. Of course, it helped to belong to a wealthy family, like Wilbald Perkheimer, who before his death in 1513 achieved a massive scholarly output, translating dozens of texts from Ancient Greek into Latin, including several philosophical works. Vives, who died ten years later, was no slouch either. His productions included numerous original works and an addition and commentary on the massive City of God by St. Augustine. If you think that this sounds a lot like what was happening in Italy around the same time, then you're right. As we know, humanism was originally a Byzantine phenomenon, which was brought to Italy by Eastern scholars along with the Greek manuscripts the humanists so loved to collect and to study. The movement was in turn brought to other parts of Europe by Italian scholars who traveled abroad and sometimes secured teaching posts at foreign universities. Then too, foreigners who came to study at Italy's famous universities were often converted to the humanist cause. Perkheimer is an example. He went there to study law and returned home as a convinced classicist. His parents must have been thrilled. Another case would be Peter Lüder. Having studied in several Italian cities, including a stint learning medicine at Padua, Lüder gave an oration at Heidelberg in 1456 in which he proposed that rhetoric and history were a more realistic course of education for the young than philosophy. Its abstractions were admirable in theory, but in practice less likely to lead to virtue than more concrete literary pursuits. If Lüder's speech was the starting gun for Northern humanism, the leader of the pack over its first lap was Rudolf Agricola. He likewise took up the baton of humanist studies from the Italians after studying in Pavia where he was allowed to give orations in Latin, a remarkable honor for a foreign student. His name would later be honored by Erasmus, too. Since Agricola was from Groningen, Erasmus was able to take him as a forerunner, another outstanding scholar from the Low Countries. Actually, outstanding would be underselling Agricola's brilliance to hear Erasmus tell it. He called his predecessor truly godlike and said that he could have been first in Italy had he not preferred Germany. What exactly did Agricola do to merit such extravagant praise? His orations were a model of Latin eloquence, of course, and were devoted to such paradigmatic humanist themes as the excellence of Petrarch and the value of philosophy. But his most seminal work was On Dialectical Invention, written in 1479, not too long before Agricola's death in 1485. In this work, Agricola goes well beyond what we have seen so far, not simply deriding scholastic logic but offering the resources to replace it with something better. Drawing on classical treatises by Aristotle, Cicero, Boethius, and also on the work of the far more recent Lorenzo Valla, this book teaches its readers how a speaker can find arguments that will solicit agreement from an interlocutor or audience. In other words, Agricola wants to show you how to be convincing. To do that, you'll need to master two arts, dialectic and rhetoric. Both were already treated by Aristotle. His treatise on dialectic is called the Topics after the topoi or argument schemes that he lists in the book. A simple example would be the argument from opposites. Opposed things have opposed properties. Thus, one might argue that, since pain is acknowledged to be bad and pleasure is the opposite of pain, pleasure must be good. Then there's another work by Aristotle called The Rhetoric, which is about persuasive speechmaking, for instance, in the law court. It also discusses argument form, but touches also on topics like the manipulation of the audience's emotions. In his own treatise on dialectic, Agricola presents the two arts as being closely aligned, since both explore dimensions of convincing speech. Dialectic takes the lead role, because it helps us find suitable arguments, which is the main order of business. The study of rhetoric simply gives us the ability to present these arguments in a more pleasing way, by adding, as Agricola nicely puts it, With the rhetorician taking care of these more aesthetic features of argumentative speech, dialectic can focus on the arguments themselves. You might expect it simply to establish rules for validity, that is, to establish the difference between arguments whose conclusions actually follow from their premises, and sophistries, which merely seem to imply their conclusions. In fact, though, Agricola has a different purpose in mind for dialectic, one that distinguishes it from the general study of logic which was conducted at the universities. The dialectician is the person who can discover arguments that are best chosen for convincing an audience. These are the arguments that, he says, are most apt for creating belief. He equates this with speaking, What exactly does this mean? In Aristotle's Topics, a dialectically effective argument is one whose premises are going to be acceptable to the interlocutor. So to go back to the example I used just before, we might start from the premise that pain is bad because pretty much everyone agrees with that, and then on that basis argue that pleasure is good. But someone might simply reject the plausible sounding premise. Good luck getting the desert church fathers or a character in an Ingrid Bergman movie to agree that pain is always bad. This means that if an argument is merely dialectically effective, then it doesn't actually prove anything for sure. To provide real proof, you need to give what Aristotle calls a demonstrative argument, which is explained in yet another treatise of his logic, the posterior analytics. Here, one's reasoning must depend ultimately on absolutely undeniable principles. This at least is how Aristotle's argument theory was understood by most late ancient and medieval commentators. They took him to be making a strict division between dialectical arguments, which tend to be convincing but are not fully decisive, and demonstrative arguments, which settle the matter once and for all. Agricola seems to undo this strict dichotomy. When he talks about seeking persuasive or probable arguments, he's not saying that the dialectician should always be content with the merely convincing. Nor is he saying that absolute proof is never possible, that we can only hope to convince the audience in front of us, but never to secure genuine demonstration. Rather, he says that a rock-solid demonstration is simply the maximally persuasive kind of argument. So if you're a dialectician who is in a position to give real proof, you should go ahead and do it. And no harm in throwing in some rhetorical flourishes to make sure the audience is enjoying your presentation. So Agricola is not a skeptic. He thinks that we can have proofs that lead to certainty. On the other hand, perhaps in deference to Cicero, whose skeptical leanings had to be taken seriously by his humanist admirers, Agricola concedes that such certainty is very rare. As all this shows, humanists did engage with texts and topics that were discussed by the scholastics, but they usually did so in a very different way. The point is also illustrated by the writings of Juan Luis Vives, who, like Erasmus, greatly admired Agricola. In fact, he had recommended the treatise we'd just been discussing as a better study of dialectic even than those of Cicero and Boethius. He also adopted a similarly tentative approach to human knowledge, as we can see in Vives' treatment of the human soul. Backing away from some of the more confident psychological theories one might find among the scholastic Aristotelians, Vives says that nothing is more concealed than the soul, and that he will simply pass over the difficult question of what the soul is, and focus instead on what it is like and what are its operations. It must be said, though, that late medieval scholastics were also known to express agnosticism on such metaphysical questions as the soul's nature. For a stronger and more telling contrast between the philosophies of these humanists and their scholastic rivals, we need to look instead to philosophy of language. As we just saw with Agricola's treatise on dialectic, the humanists saw language as an instrument of persuasive and appealing discourse. Often they would emphasize that its function is to teach. Vives even claims that before the fall of humankind into sin, language was only used to impart knowledge, this being its God-given function. Only with the onset of sin has language been used to mislead. This is the serious point that lies behind all those passages mocking scholastic sophistry. Whatever the merits of a sentence like, no, no man does not possibly not run, it is certainly not a piece of effective communication. To this accusation, the scholastics might have responded that they were, in fact, seeking to free philosophy from the ambiguities and flaws of natural languages like Latin, German, and English. Their highly artificial and regimented use of Latin was intended to convey ideas more rigorously and clearly, though the result would of course be clear only to someone trained at the schools and used to this highly specialized way of talking. Thus, they would stipulate fixed ways of negating terms in a Latin sentence, since otherwise there could be confusion between statements like, no man runs, and man does not run. A worthwhile project, even if, when taken to extremes, it led to the apparently preposterous uses of negation satirized by Vives. Does this show that the humanists simply failed to understand what the scholastics were up to? I think not. Or should I say, not, I think so. Rather, they understood the project full well and rejected it. We can see this by turning back to Vives's treatise Against the Pseudo-Dialecticians. By now the point of that title should be clear. The university logicians were not doing real dialectic because they did not use well-formed language to fashion convincing arguments. When it's done right, as by Agricola, dialectic does not create an artificial language for playing logical games. To the contrary, it is highly attentive to the nuances of natural language. Again, negation provides an example. Vives points out that double negation equates to affirmation in Latin, but not in French, and one needs to understand this when mounting arguments in either language. If you make up rules for language use, as the logicians do, then you're retreating into a highly specialized and idiosyncratic use of words. In that case, you might as well let each person devise their own language, and in the end, no person will understand another, since everyone will use words in their own way and not the common one. We should instead do the reverse, looking to actual language use to determine the rules of correct speech. As Vives says in his commentary on Augustine, native speakers are the lords of language, and it is they, not rules made up in university lecture halls, that determine what is grammatical. We also need to bear in mind, says Vives, that the study of language and reasoning is not an end in its own right. Alluding to the standard conception of logic as an instrument in the Aristotelian tradition, Vives says that what the university arts masters do is like someone who wants to sift flour and spends all their time designing the sieve. Only the foolish, he says, devote long and anxious effort to putting together a tool. Again, the purpose of language is to teach, and the most important thing we can teach is virtue. So we should be devoting much more attention to becoming good than to such topics as the rules of argumentation. For the classicist scholars of this era, antique literature was ideally suited to this goal. Greek and Roman texts impart moral instruction along with eloquence. Hence, Vives wrote that studies devoted to such texts are called the humanities, and may they render us human. Like the Italian humanists, Northern humanists went well beyond banal, if eloquent, praise of virtue. Vives was especially interested in the topic of the emotions, and the question of how these could be moderated and made to serve virtue rather than vice. This would make us better and also happier people, since it would free us from disturbance. He made recommendations at the political level too, not just for individual well-being. Vives and other humanists moved in elite circles and took advantage of it. This was in fact an important factor in the uptake of their educational program. Conservative university masters might reject humanism, but autocratic potentates were more sympathetic, being highly attuned to the charm of a well-crafted speech or flattering letter. In several cases, German universities changed their curricula to accommodate humanism at the behest of rulers or the wealthy elite. In Vienna, for example, chairs for poetry and rhetoric were founded by the Emperor Maximilian I, who, as one scholar reports, was said to have wrestled with bears, climbed mountains, married twice with vigor, and patronized many Renaissance humanists and artists. Enjoying patronage of his own, Vives seized the opportunity to show the connections between philology and philanthropy. In a 1526 work inspired by the misery of the poor in Bruges, he traces the very existence of poverty to the prevalence of sin. Alluding to the communist proposals of Plato's Republic, where the guardian class have no private property, Vives claims that nature provides sufficiently for all. It is only because of the greed of some that others have less than enough. As a remedy, he argues that work programs and education should be offered to the indigent. Indeed, Vives probably never met a person he didn't want to educate, which is of course consistent with his view that instruction is the purpose of all language. He's particularly celebrated for supporting the idea of educating women. Failing to do this, he argues, would be tantamount to treating them like animals. As he warms to his theme, Vives can sound downright feminist, as when he laments, In their whole life what else did they do but serve us? Their fathers when they are young women, their husbands when they are married, their children when they are mothers. Yet Vives does remain a man of his time. He repeats with approval the biblical injunction that women should not teach, and issues careful guidelines for what they should read. No love poetry, since it is corrupting, but rather such improving authors as Plato, Cicero, Seneca, and the Church Fathers. On this point, and many others, Vives was in full agreement with his more famous humanist colleague Erasmus. Both of them identified as their goal a kind of pious erudition, fusing knowledge of pagan classics with deep Christian faith. This comes out even in the humanist polemics against scholasticism. Since commented that it is better to be less of a sophist and wiser in the ways of the gospel, Perkehimer that he was unmoved by that sophistical and quibbling philosophy which is not able to lead to a good and blessed living. In Vives's case, the serene and learned of religiosity masked a more troubled story. His family was descended from conversos, that is, Spanish Jews forcibly converted to Christianity at the end of the 14th century. Such people were suspected of insincere faith, and when the Inquisition erupted in Spain, Vives's parents were caught up in it. His father was imprisoned, then hanged and burned. His mother escaped such treatment by being already dead, but her bones were dug up to be incinerated. Antisemitism played a central role in the career of the humanist Johannes Reuchlin, too. He was yet another German scholar who made his way south to Italy, where he met Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. He was especially excited about the study of Jewish literature, including Kabbalah, an interest he shared with Pico. Upon his return to Germany, he became an academic star, hired to teach Greek and Hebrew in Tübingen. After all, who could object to Christians studying Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament? Johann Pfeffecorn, that's who. A Jewish Christian convert, Pfeffecorn turned violently against his first religion and initiated a confiscation of Hebrew books in 1509. Reuchlin was alarmed and wrote a denunciation provoking a backlash from Pfeffecorn. Other authors piled in on both sides. Ultimately, the papacy would get involved, condemning Reuchlin's pamphlet in 1520. This literary scandal has often been seen through the lens of the wider conflict between humanists and scholastics, with schoolmen taking the opportunity to slap down Reuchlin, a living embodiment of humanism. While there may be some truth to that, the core issue does really seem to have been anti-Jewish sentiment. Reuchlin's critics usually professed admiration of his learning, before going on to excoriate his admiration for Jewish culture. As for Reuchlin himself, he surely feared that Pfeffecorn's censorship might cause a loss of valuable Hebrew manuscripts, but his motives were not just scholarly. He said of the Jews, Unfortunately, this will not be the last time we have to discuss anti-Semitism in the current series. Nor will it be our last encounter with the tensions between two models of education and of philosophy itself, the old scholastic way and the new humanist impulse to go back to something far older by learning both wisdom and eloquence from classical texts. It should be said, though, that this choice was not as stark as it may seem. The reform of university teaching did not expunge scholastic methods or texts entirely. Rather, humanism was offered as a complement to the traditional approaches. As a result, plenty of 16th-century writers, among them leading reformers like Luther and Melanchthon, were exposed to both intellectual currents as young students. Meanwhile, some explicitly argued that scholasticism and humanism both had their place. Take Jacob Wimfeling, who studied in Germany and taught at Heidelberg, eventually becoming a bishop. He had strongly humanist sympathies, writing a work on elegant Latin style that drew on Lorenzo Valla. Wimfeling was capable of the usual sarcastic invective against the arts masters, once remarking that these logicians acted as if the welfare of our souls and our political states depended on finding a resolution to the problem of universals. But he also admitted that training in dialectic was useful in defense of the faith, and for this purpose commended the work of such scholastic authors as John Mayer. In an oration delivered at Heidelberg in 1499, Wimfeling offered an olive branch by choosing as his theme the harmony between dialectic and oratory. As the subject of our next episode will argue, sometimes we can and must reconcile things that are opposed. Indeed, this next philosopher is famous for the idea of the coincidence of opposites. But it's no coincidence that we're tackling him right after our general look at northern humanism, because he is the most famous thinker of the Renaissance to export the humanism and Platonism of Italy to his native Germany. He's also the author of one of the most famous philosophical works of the 15th century, called On Learned Ignorance. But hopefully we can do a little bit better than that as we look at Nicholas of Cusa next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. you