Renaissance (humanist) Philosophy (c. 1300-1650)

Il volume raccoglie alcune delle relazioni presentate durante il 4° Colloquio Internazionale della Societas Artistarum. Svoltosi presso l’Università degli studi di Milano il 7-9 novembre 2019 esso si proponeva di approfondire da prospettive diverse come si sia configurato nell’Italia medievale e rinascimentale il rapporto fra medicina e filosofia. Alcuni contributi si soffermano sul contesto storico-istituzionale dell’insegnamento e della pratica della medicina sull’uso di dottrine etiche e di strumenti logici e retorici da parte dei medici. Altri contributi avvalendosi anche di documenti e testi inediti analizzano invece temi interdisciplinari come le teorie della generazione e la natura delle acque fluviali oppure mettono a fuoco il pensiero e l’opera di medici-filosofi come Bartolomeo da Salerno Taddeo Alderotti Antonio da Parma e Ludovico Boccadiferro.

This is the first edition of Nikola Vitov Gučetić’s (1549–1610) compendium of philosophical and theological problems arising from Aristotle’s De anima Book 3 Chapter 4 where he begins his discussion of the thinking part of the soul that is the intellect (nous). With the interpretation of Averroes (1126–1198) this text has structured much of the debate on the immortality of the soul in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Gučetić’s Breve compendium is a testament to these debates interesting for its selection of issues for discussion in connection with Aristotle’s text and for its open defence of the Averroist position in the late decades of the sixteenth century. Although Gučetić had a preliminary arrangement with Aldo Manuzio the Younger to print this text around 1590 at some point he abandoned the plan to publish it.

The main purpose of this book is to provide a critical edition of the Latin text for scholars in the humanities especially historians of late Medieval and Renaissance philosophy. The edition is accompanied by an introductory study that places the author and his work in the historical and intellectual context describes the manuscript and gives a detailed synopsis of the work. This will make the book useful also to students of the humanities and those interested in the history and culture of Dubrovnik.

« Sur les phénomènes les plus récents de l’univers » : le titre de ce recueil d’essais offerts à Miguel Ángel Granada est emprunté à l’ouvrage de Tycho Brahe sur la comète de 1577. Il fait allusion au lien entre les prodiges qui ont traversé le ciel entre la fin du 16e et le début du 17e siècle (les supernovas de 1572 et de 1604 les grandes comètes de 1577 et 1618) et les renouvellements profonds philosophiques religieux culturels qui ont marqué cette période. Ce lien le travail mené par Miguel Angel Granada depuis une trentaine d’années n’a cessé de l’approfondir. En explorant la complexité de ce qu’on appelle la Révolution scientifique il a aussi été un acteur majeur de la transformation et de l’élargissement de l’histoire des sciences : l’étude de l’astronomie mathématique longtemps centrale s’intègre désormais à une histoire des savoirs des institutions des contextes politiques et religieux.

Les articles qui composent ce recueil s’inscrivent dans ce sillage. Ils s’inspirent des découvertes et des idées de ce grand chercheur et prolongent certaines de ses enquêtes en abordant tous les domaines de la métaphysique à l’astrologie. Ils restituent ainsi l’image d’une Europe savante en train de se constituer par la circulation et la dissémination des idées de Rostock à Naples de Lisbonne à Prague ou de Londres à Wittenberg.

John Wyclif (d. 1384) famous Oxford philosopher-theologian and controversialist was posthumously condemned as a heretic at the Council of Constance in 1415. Wyclif’s influence was pan-European and had a particular impact on Prague where Jan Hus from Charles University was his avowed disciple and the leader of a dissident reformist movement. Hus condemned to the stake at Constance gathered around him a prolific circle of disciples who changed the landscape of late medieval religion and literature in Bohemia just as Wyclif’s own followers had done in England.

Both thinkers and the movements associated with them played a crucial role in the transformation of later medieval European thought in particular through a radically enlarged role of textual production in the vernaculars (especially Middle English and Old Czech) as well as in Latin in the philosophical theological and ecclesiological realms.

This interdisciplinary volume of essays brings together cutting-edge research from scholars working in these and contiguous fields and asks fundamental questions about the methods that informed Wycliffite and Hussite writings and those by their interlocutors and opponents. Viewing these debates through a methodological lens enables a reassessment of the impact that they had and the responses they elicited across a range of European cultures from England in the west via France and Austria to Bohemia in the east.

This study looks at the ways in which physicians and philosophers developed Galen's philosophical legacy at the end of the Renaissance and shows how their reading of classical medical texts moved beyond accepted patterns and conventions.

By challenging a traditional historiographical account that described Renaissance Galenism in terms of decline and fall this study argues for a new assessment of Galen's legacy also read through the lens of those who opposed or reacted critically to it and thus contributed to the shaping of important aspects of the early modern debate on anthropology ethics psychology and even quantified experimentation. Among these many innovations and transformations the notion of 'ingenuity' (ingenium) deserves particular attention. Hidden within this corporeal inherent and heritable inclination two major themes that side disquietingly with the development of modern subjectivity can be identified: the 'corporeality of the body' and the common destiny of humans and animals.

More generally this study offers a contribution to the ongoing debate on the role and value of medical history arguing in favour of the concept of 'historical translatability' in balancing the longue durée of traditions with the chaotic interactions of individual thinkers.

Pierre de la Ramée or Petrus Ramus (1515-1572) has long been a controversial figure in educational reform and innovation from the moment of his first public academic statements in the 1530s to his reception among scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What is beyond dispute however is the vast reach of his influence throughout Europe. Ramus’s ideas were disseminated through copious editions and translations of his own textbooks and in wave after wave of adaptations and re-imaginings of his ideas that swept across the continent.

This volume embarks on a European tour of Ramism using a wide range of previously unpublished or untranslated archival evidence from throughout the continent to examine the dissemination of Ramus’s works and his intellectual influence in geographic and in disciplinary terms. The ten chapters explore the spread of Ramism from his home country of France to Protestant strongholds in Germany Holland and Britain and in the Catholic context of the Iberian peninsula. The book also examines Ramism in the less familiar territories (to most Anglophone readers) of Scandinavia and Hungary and considers the preceding and contemporary Dutch and German educational reform movements from which Ramus borrowed to forge his own distinctive intellectual method.

Contemporary historiography holds that it was the practices and technologies underpinning both the Great Voyages and the ‘New Science’ as opposed to traditional book learning which led to the major epistemic breakthroughs of early modernity. This study however returns to the importance of book-learning by exploring how cosmological and cosmographical ‘novelties’ were explained and presented in Renaissance texts and discloses the ways in which the reports presented by sailors astronomers and scientists became not only credible but also deeply disturbing for scholars preachers and educated laymen in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.

It is argued here that dialectic - the art of argumentation and reasoning - played a crucial role in articulating and popularizing new learning about the cosmos by providing the argumentative toolkit needed to define discard and authorize novelties. The debates that shaped them were not confined to learned circles; rather they reached a wider audience via early modern vernacular genres such as the essay.

Focusing both on major figures such as Montaigne or Descartes as well as on now-forgotten popularizers such as Belleforest and Binet this book describes the deployment of dialectic as a means of articulating and disseminating but also of containing the disturbance generated by cosmological and cosmographical novelties in Renaissance France whether for the lay reader in Court or Parliament for the parishioner at Church or for the student in the classroom.

The fourteenth century saw an exponential rise in charterhouses across Europe. During this period of growth the cloister walls protecting the silence and solitude of the relatively small and isolated semi-eremitical Carthusian houses became more porous pliable and open to the outer world. Although still considered at the forefront of Christian piety and asceticism the Carthusians began to be more clearly identified with their newly acquired taste for the arts literature and architecture. Gradually charterhouses became major humanist centres attracting sophisticated patrons artists and scholars.

Of the long line of renowned anti-scholastic intellectuals who were attracted to Carthusian circles Petrarch was undoubtedly the first. By revealing the Carthusian imprint on Petrarch’s thought as well as elements of Carthusian spirituality present in his texts this book argues that Carthusianism was an essential component of Petrarch’s Christian humanism and hermeneutics of the self. An interdisciplinary approach involving parallel readings of Petrarchan texts early monastic and Carthusian primary sources together with more recent theological reflections offers new insights into the role of Carthusianism in the intellectual debate on spirituality and the position of the individual within this order. Through Petrarch and his literary works the Carthusian milieu ultimately shaped not only Renaissance humanism but also our understanding of the relationship between ‘self’ God and others.

Klugheit heute oftmals missverstanden als Cleverness oder Gerissenheit gehört bis in die Frühe Neuzeit zu den Schlüsselbegriffen der praktischen Philosophie.

Die in diesem Band versammelten Beiträge untersuchen den Begriff der Klugheit in historisch vergleichender Perspektive von seinen Ursprüngen in der griechischen Antike über die islamische Philosophie bis in das lateinische Mittelalter das eine systematisch komplexe und stark differenzierte Klugheitslehre entwickelt. Ein Ausblick auf frühneuzeitliche und moderne Entwicklungen beleuchtet das weitere Geschick der Klugheit in der europäischen Tradition und macht dabei auf Kontinuitäten und Neuaufbrüche zwischen Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit aufmerksam.

En 1629 Pierre Gassendi se lance dans un projet qui devait l’occuper jusqu’à sa mort en 1655 et avoir une profonde influence sur sa propre philosophie. Ce projet était la préparation d’un traité détaillé de la totalité de la philosophie d’Épicure sous le titre de Philosophia Epicuri. Cependant il modifia deux fois son projet initial au niveau de la disposition et de la présentation des textes. Au terme de la première révision le travail se vit attribuer le titre de De Vita et Doctrina Epicuri. Les résultats de la seconde révision élaborée entre 1633 et 1645 sont parvenus jusqu’à nous sous différentes formes soit publiées soit manuscrites.

Les livres I - VII furent publiés en 1647 sous le titre de De Vita et Moribus Epicuri ; le livre VIII « De philosophia Epicuri universe » est conservé à la British Library Ms. Harley 1677 ff. 1v - 55r ; les livres XII - XXV consacrés à la Physique sont conservés à Tours Mss. 707-710. Nous présentons ici pour la première fois le texte des livres IX - XI qui portent sur la Canonique composé par Gassendi à Aix-en-Provence en 1636 conservé à Carpentras Bibliothèque Inguimbertine Ms. 1832ff. 205r - 256r.

Gassendi considérait que la logique était une branche importante de la philosophie ce qu’il a affirmé à divers moments de sa carrière. Le manuscrit de Carpentras est important parce que rédigé à miparcours entre la polémique de jeunesse de Gassendi contre la dialectique d’Aristote et l’Institutio Logica de sa maturité il permet de comprendre comment à un moment crucial de sa vie l’attachement croissant de Gassendi pour la doctrine d’Épicure l’a aidé à formuler sa propre vision philosophique sur des questions aussi importantes que l’existence de la vérité la valeur de l’observation et de l’investigation scientifiques et la possibilité du progrès.

Le texte bien évidemment traduit en français est ici précédé par une introduction destinée à éclairer les principales caractéristiques des livres IX - XI ; il s’agit de replacer l’exposé de la Canonique par Gassendi à l’intérieur du contexte philosophique plus large.