Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 356 - I’d Like to Thank the Lyceum - Aristotle in Renaissance Italy.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, I'd like to thank the Lyceum, Aristotle in Renaissance Italy. If the German language were a person, it would be an army drill sergeant, demanding, strict about rules and devoted to questionable notions of masculinity. According to German, tables, chairs, the sky, record players, and capitalism are all boys. But like all languages, it does offer many pleasures. My favorite German word is Glimflich, in part because it's so fun to say. Glimflich. It doesn't so much roll off the tongue as do a little dance on the tongue, then hop out through the mouth and into the world, making it a better place. I also like it because it is so hard to translate. Usually you'll hear it in a context where someone has been fortunate in a bad situation, like if someone escapes from a car accident unharmed. Er ist Glimflich da von gekon. Here you'd be hard pressed to render it with just one word. This is a phenomenon that will be familiar to anyone who has tried to render philosophical texts from one language into another. It can be tempting simply to leave tricky words in the original language, so tempting that, in an ancient Greek reading group I used to attend in London, we introduced a rule against having more than one untranslated word per session. Leonardo Bruni might have rejected even that rule as being too permissive. When he translated Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics into Latin, he added a preface in which he explained why it was necessary to replace the medieval version by Robert Grossetest. This older translation, he complained, was full of transliterated Greek words that would be incomprehensible to Greekless readers, which was entirely unnecessary since Latin too is a rich language amply equipped to express anything found in Aristotle's Greek. As Bruni sarcastically comments after quoting a passage full of untranslated terms, surely all this could have been said in Latin? Does the fault lie with the tongue or with the translator? And this was only one of Grossetest's shortcomings, whose translation displayed little philosophical understanding and less eloquence. He is, so to speak, a mongrel, half Greek and half Latin, deficient in both languages, competent in neither. If you've read some Aristotle yourself, you might be wondering why anyone would expect to find eloquence in an accurate version of his writings. The answer, as usual with Bruni, is Cicero. That Roman master of Latin eloquence had commented that Aristotle's writings were distinguished for their elegant style. When he said this, Cicero had in mind not the rather technical school treatises that survive today, but now lost works that were aimed at a wider audience. Not realizing this, Bruni managed to convince himself that Aristotle's treatises are beautifully written, especially the politics, which Bruni said, contains almost no passage without its rhetorical glitter and flourish. He duly exerted himself to render Aristotle into fine Ciceronian Latin. I already mentioned in episode 330 that Alonso of Burgos was unimpressed by the resulting version, which he found inexact. And there were other critics like the Spanish bishop Alfonso of Catahena. Alfonso didn't know Greek himself, but didn't let that stop him from censuring Bruni on the rather strange grounds that his Latin translation made Aristotle say things that were not true. This is a hint that philological accuracy as the standard of good translation was only just emerging in the 15th century, thanks to Bruni and the other humanists. Bruni embraced that standard, leaping to his own defense with the remark, a translation is wholly correct if it corresponds to the Greek. Alteration is the translator's sin. The spread of this approach to translation is also shown by Giannotso Manetti, who studied with Bruni. We met him already in episode 356 as the author of the other treatise called On the Dignity of Man, the one that wasn't written by Pico della Mirandola. Manetti was no one book wonder, but a polymath who learned Hebrew so that he could dispute with Jewish intellectuals and translate the Bible. If Bruni had to justify his choice to improve on gross attest, Manetti most definitely had to explain why he was giving the world another Latin Old Testament, even though the sainted Jerome had produced one in antiquity. Manetti wrote a whole treatise in defense of the project, which listed many errors in Jerome's version and also defined good translation practice more generally. Under the influence of Bruni, he complained about clunky and misleading translations that replace individual words in the original text with Latin equivalents, rather than seeking to capture the sense in an elegant and accurate way. The translator must follow a middle path, neither wandering too far from the work taken for translation, nor clinging entirely and completely word for word to the original authors, but hewing to a middle and safe way. This policy went back further than Manetti's teacher Bruni to Bruni's own teacher, Chrysalorus. This Byzantine emigre scholar encouraged an ad sensum rather than ad verbum method, that is trying to capture the meaning and not the words. But as Manetti himself implies by endorsing a happy medium between free and exact translation, the ad sensum technique could also be taken to extremes. Reacting to the output of another Greek emigre humanist, John Argyropoulos, the 16th century Aristotle translator Francesco Vemercato, commented that if the medieval versions were too literal, the humanist ones were too free. For Vemercato, a middle approach could retain technical terms from scholasticism, some of which were indeed so useful that they remain in use by English-speaking philosophers. We still use substance, Latin substantia, and alteration, Latin alteratio, which he endorsed as translations of the Greek words usia and ad aeosus. And Vemercato made another point I find convincing. A good translation should capture for the reader what it is like to read the original text and not, for instance, make Aristotle's treatises into works of elegant rhetoric, as Bruni sought to do. Instead, Vemercato sought to mimic Aristotle's dense and compressed style so that he might appear the same to those speaking Latin as to those speaking Greek. We usually think of Italian humanism as a movement away from the Aristotelian interests of medieval scholasticism, distinguished by its recovery of Plato and Hellenistic authors like Lucretius. But as we can see with the case of Bruni, the humanists felt that Aristotle too had to be recovered in a sense, saved from his medieval translators and hide-bound scholastic interpreters. After learning Greek, Poggio Braccionini was thrilled to discover the real Aristotle hidden beneath the Latin Aristotle. He wrote, And soon enough it would become much easier to imbibe Aristotle in the original vintage. In the time of Bruni and Poggio, reading Aristotle in Greek, or Latin for that matter, meant reading a manuscript, but by the end of the 15th century there would be printed editions of his works. This was thanks above all to Aldo Manutio, usually called by the Latin version of his name Aldus Manucius. Manucius was a member of the circle gathered around the precocious, and let's not forget, rich, Pico della Mirandola. He also associated with Ermolao Barbaro. You might remember Barbaro as the recipient of Pico's irony-laced defense of barbaric scholastic Latin, but more relevant here are the informal lectures that Barbaro gave on Aristotle in Venice. By 1500, Venice was already a major center of Latin printed editions, now inspired by the philosophical interests of Pico and Barbaro, Manutius undertook to print Aristotle's works in the original Greek, a project of great scholarly significance which would hopefully make him a nice pile of money in the process. Not just Aristotle either. The Aldine edition of Aristotle also included work by his student Theophrastus, and the project went on to print Aristotle's late ancient exegetes in the original Greek. Commentaries by Ammonius, Philoponus, and Alexander appeared before Manutius died in 1515. He also printed a Greek grammar written by Theodore of Gaza, and works by Latin authors, notably the collected works of Poliziano, as well as Italian literature like Dante and Petrarch. As that last detail shows, Manutius's achievement was very much a part of the humanist movement. He collaborated with no less a humanist than Erasmus, who stayed with Manutius and saw his translation of Euripides put out by the Aldine press. Manutius also consulted with humanist philologists to establish correct Greek texts. Actually, the printed versions wound up with many errors. Still, this was a pioneering attempt to usher Greek into the world of printed editions, much as the humanists sought to spread knowledge of Greek through the world of Italian scholarship. To give you a sense of just how innovative the project was, I need only mention that Manutius had to commission a special typeface for Greek, which was handmade for him by a goldsmith. The font, which imitated a cursive italic script, would make the Aldine text distinctive and recognizable, even once other printers started printing in Greek. Or, at least, it should have. In 1503, Manutius had to issue a warning to buyers, not to be fooled by knockoff editions using an imitation of his typeface. As exciting a breakthrough as it was to have Aristotle printed in Greek, we should not imagine that Latin translations of his works became irrelevant in the 16th century. Though Greek was sometimes taught at the universities, it was only a handful of committed humanists who achieved true mastery of the language. As the scholar Paul Grundler has commented, Greek failed to find a secure place in the curriculum because it only served the needs of Latin culture. So the vast majority of readers still had to consult Latin translations. Charles Schmitt, the leading expert of the reception of Aristotle in this period, calculates that fewer than 10% of 16th century works about Aristotle quote him in the original Greek. In this respect, then, the Aristotle of the Italian Renaissance was not so different from the Aristotle of medieval scholasticism. Mostly, he still spoke Latin. In other respects, though, Aristotle was a changed man. Changed in part by the company he kept. The printing of late ancient commentators and their increased availability in Latin translations meant that Renaissance interpreters were closer to being in the enviable position earlier enjoyed by the circle of Anacomnene. They could survey the whole history of Aristotelianism and write commentaries that built on and responded to the earlier commentaries made in Late Antiquity and Byzantium. And, like the circle of Anacomnene, they explored areas of Aristotelian science that had been largely ignored in the medieval Latin tradition. Theophrastus's works on plants added botany to the menu, and Aristotle's own zoological works were consulted as never before. A central aspect of Aristotle's original project, his empirical investigation of the natural world, had been relatively unimportant to the medievals, with occasional exceptions like Albert the Great. Now Aristotle reappeared as an acute observer and recorder of his physical environment, putting the nature back in Aristotelian natural philosophy. An excellent example of this is meteorology. This is a topic I've barely if ever mentioned in this whole podcast series, so you might be forgiven for being surprised that Aristotle wrote about it. Especially since he lived in Athens, what was he going to say, that the forecast was for plenty of sun with a chance of Macedonian invasion? But as it turns out, Aristotelian meteorology was not mostly about weather prediction. It was a wide-ranging science dealing with all manner of phenomena observable in the sky, including meteorological events in our sense like lightning storms, but also such things as comets and rainbows. Aristotle thought that many such phenomena could be explained by appealing to exhalations, vapors that build up under the earth and are then released with more or less violence. From the point of view of the Renaissance commentators, meteorology was thus a fairly rudimentary science in the sense that it dealt with non-living brute material forces, the interaction of things like wind, water, and earth. This means that some of the standard conceptual tools in Aristotelian science were all but irrelevant. Where animals, plants, and humans have substantial forms, something like a rainbow or storm might simply happen when air and vapor are pushed around in the atmosphere because of changes in heating, cooling, and the like. As Pietro Pompanazzi said, these things are closer to matter than form. In part for this reason, and in part because of the difficulty of discerning the causes of meteorological phenomena, the commentators were modest in their claims about what this science could achieve. Agostino Nifo, for instance, stated that Aristotle's proposals for the underlying causes in meteorology were purely conjectural. Of particular interest was the question whether meteorological events have final causes, that is natural purposes. Perhaps they're just random events with all that pushing around and moving of vapor happening by sheer accident. An example would be Nifo's explanation of thunder, which happens when a mass of dense air collides with a mass of rarefied air in the sky. But on the other hand, could a Renaissance Christian really believe that anything happens by sheer accident? Even if hailstorms and comets have no natural purpose, surely they play some role in God's providential design for our world? For all his empiricism and commitment to natural explanation, Pompanazzi was eager to concede this point. Even damaging storms and earthquakes are intended by God. They seem bad to us, he said, but are in fact for the best. It's just that we are ignorant of their purpose. Earthquakes were a topic that received extensive discussion inspired by Aristotle's meteorology, which explains that they are caused by eruptions of wind below the earth. In the 1570s, a series of earthquakes all but leveled the city of Ferrara, leaving observers to debate the scientific and theological meaning of this disaster. One scholar at Bologna lamented that the earthquakes could not possibly be part of God's benevolent natural order since they disrupt everything, strip away beauty, and demolish. In keeping with this, naturalistic accounts based on Aristotle proposed that Ferrara had been struck because of its geological location. Caves nearby were apt to trap exhalations that would then be released with sudden violence. At the other extreme, the Pope chipped in with the suggestion that Ferrara was chosen for destruction because it hosted such a large Jewish population. As we've seen before, Renaissance authors often reflected on such diversity of opinions by writing dialogues, with different characters adopting different points of view on the topic at hand. So it was here, several authors staged literary discussions about the causes of earthquakes. A representative example is Giacomo Buoni, who has a series of speakers address the topic within a philosophical, historical, and theological framework. His philosophical spokesman affirms the accidentally of earthquakes, which is clearly foreign to the nature of earth, which tends towards stillness and being at rest, gathered as it is around the midpoint of the cosmos. But the final word is given to a theologian who states that, while earthquakes are partly natural, they are also partly divine, sent by God when he wants, how he wants, where and how much he wants, and more often for sins, moving with his will the secondary causes and nature which he commands at his pleasure. Aristotle stood for the more empirical approach, which helps to explain why a figure like Galileo could say, as late as 1640, I am sure that if Aristotle returned to the world he would receive me among his followers. Such hard-nosed scientific interests seem a far cry from the philological concerns of the humanists, even if the textual productions of the humanists made it possible for Aristotelianism to achieve new breadth and diffusion in Renaissance culture. And the aforementioned Charles Schmitt has proposed that we should speak not of Renaissance Aristotelianism, but Renaissance Aristotelianisms. That would more fittingly capture the different and often innovative approaches that were taken to this long-studied body of texts in the 15th and 16th centuries, a time that Schmitt calls the high point of Western Aristotelianism. Like religious and biblical knowledge, he comments, Aristotelian doctrine was available in many different forms, from the most learned, annotated editions of the Greek text to the sketchiest of compendia in Latin or a number of different vernaculars. That point is one worth dwelling on. We've seen that for every humanist who could read Aristotle in Greek, there were ten scholars who read him in Latin, to which we can add that there would have been many more reading Aristotle, or reading about Aristotle, in Italian. The history of Aristotle in European vernacular languages goes all the way back to the 11th century, when Notka of Saint Gallen translated a couple of the logical works into that most unforgiving of tongues, German. Subsequently, Nicole Orem had translated Aristotle's On the Heavens into French in 1377, but it was only in the Renaissance that we see a real blossoming of Aristotle outside of Latin, with figures like Antonio Bruccioli putting many of his works into Italian in the mid-16th century. Not long after, in 1565, Lorevico Dolce produced an Italian Summary of Aristotle's Philosophy, which integrates Platonist arguments for the immortality of the soul and Christian authorities into an overview of peripatetic thought. Even such peripheral text as The Mechanics, not really by Aristotle but ascribed to him as its author, got the treatment. That's a hint to the important fact that the audience for Aristotelian texts was getting wider. Alessandro Piccolomini said explicitly that his version of The Mechanics was intended principally for engineers. Later on, in the early 17th century, the beautifully monicred Pannfillo Persico produced a vernacular compendium of the ethics and politics, and said it was aimed at princes, men of the republic, and of the court. Women were also occasionally named as beneficiaries of Italian versions or summaries of Aristotle, since for the most part they could not read Latin, notwithstanding the famous achievements of female humanists like Cassandra Fedele and Laura Cerreta. As Piccolomini said, while stressing the usefulness of his philosophical textbooks on Aristotelian ethics, women remained deprived, through no fault of their own, of those habits which could make them happy. On the other hand, we also find vernacular works being aimed at more expert readers, including readers who were assumed to have the ability to go back and check the original Greek of Aristotle, or at least the Latin version if they had a mind to. Luca Bianchi, a scholar who has devoted great attention to the rise of philosophy in the vernacular in the Renaissance, has thus pointed out that, by the 16th century, languages like Italian were emerging for the first time as an instrument of scientific communication. Still, it would not be wrong to see vernacularization as a trend towards the popularization of philosophy, and Aristotle in particular. The vast majority of vernacular works devoted to him were not in fact translations of those works, but summaries, paraphrases, and original dialogues or treatises like the ones we just discussed dealing with meteorology. Elite scholars were not necessarily thrilled by this development. Bernardo Sagni, who translated the rhetoric into Italian, said that he was criticized by some who blamed him for making it possible for uneducated people to learn what others had acquired over many years with great effort from Greek and Latin books. But there was not only Greek and Latin to contend with, there was also Arabic. The emergence of new forms of Aristotelianism in the Italian Renaissance goes hand in hand with a resurgence of his greatest medieval commentator, Ibn Rushd, known in Latin as Averroes. As you'll remember, Averroes' works had caused a stir back in the 13th century when his doctrines led to debate and condemnation in Paris. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Averroism returned with a vengeance. As a development inextricably entwined with the diffusion of Aristotelian literature, most literally so in the case of the famous Giunta edition of Aristotle, which appeared from 1550 to 1552. It included Latin translations of Averroes' commentaries, so that every reader of Aristotle could turn to this Muslim guide to understand his works. Amazingly, out of the 38 surviving exegetical works by Averroes on Aristotle, no fewer than 36 were printed in the 16th century. This can be understood as a blow for scholasticism against the antiquarian interests of the humanists. As Tommaso Giunta said in his preface to the edition, the humanists prized only classical languages and ignored contributions from the Islamic world. Our age, he wrote, accepts nothing and admires nothing coming from the despised and contemptible teaching of the Arabs, unless it knows it to have been transmitted to us from the Greek treasure house. But we're not going to make the same mistake. In episodes to come, we'll be surveying distinctive developments in one particular type of Renaissance Aristotelianism, the one that carries on most directly from medieval scholasticism, and once again dares to entertain the notorious teachings of that outstanding commentator Averroes. But before we turn to that, we'll be joined by an outstanding Aristotelian commentator of the present day, David Lyons. He'll be joining us to speak in a vernacular language of his choice, and let's hope it's not German, about the reception of Aristotle's ethics in the Renaissance. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.