James Hankins

The Myth of the Platonic Academy of Florence

here has never been much doubt among Renaissance scholars about the leading role played by Marsilio Ficino and Neoplatonic philosophy in the cultural life of the High Renaissance. From the time of his first biographer, Giovanni Corsi, Ficinos work of recovering and disseminating Platonism was held to be one of the great achievements of Medici patronage. The publication history of his translations and other writings during the early modern period attests to the widespread interest they aroused, not only among professional philosophers, but also among educated persons in general. Modern scholars have documented extensively the influence of Ficinian Platonism on the arts, on musical theory, and on Italian, French, German and English literature; the work of Frances Yates

The revival of Platonic philosophy

“Plato is praised by greater men, Aristotle by a greater number.” This pithy statement by Petrarch (1304-74) in his work On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others is best read in context. Petrarch goes on in the same passage: “each of them is worthy of praise both by great men and by many - by all, really.” On the one hand, Petrarch reflects here a medieval commonplace, inherited from St. Augustine (354-430): that of all the ancient pagan philosophies, Platonism came the closest to Christian truth. Even more precisely, Augustine said: the ancients who had believed things about the creator that were close to “us” were represented by “Plato and those who had understood him correctly.” This process of “understanding” a past thinker is significant. It is primarily exegetical, and those who embraced it - as many adherents of Platonism in the Renaissance did - assumed that it was their responsibility as interpreters to bring out the truth of the ancient thinker or school that they were investigating. On the other hand, Petrarch gives voice here to a historically specific sentiment which in the late fourteenth century was finding expression not only in the nascent humanist movement but also in other areas of spiritual and intellectual life, even in the realm of scholastic philosophy: that there was something about institutionalized forms of learning that was not responding to contemporary needs, that there existed a restrictive manner in which knowledge was being channeled, and that institutional structures of higher learning were lending themselves to a sometimes unhelpful social reproduction. The result of this social reproduction was that certain key questions associated with “philosophy” from the days of Socrates were becoming more difficult to answer satisfactorily.

The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy

1. Introduction James Hankins Part I. Continuity and Revival: 2. The philosopher and Renaissance culture Robert Black 3. Humanism, scholasticism and Renaissance philosophy James Hankins 4. Continuity and change in the Aristotelian tradition Luca Bianchi 5. The revival of Platonic philosophy Christopher S. Celenza 6. The revival of Hellenistic philosophies Jill Kraye 7. Arabic philosophy and Averroism Dag Nikolaus Hasse 8. How to do magic and why: philosophical prescriptions Brian Copenhaver Part II. Towards Modern Philosophy: 9. Nicholas of Cusa and modern philosophy Dermot Moran 10. Lorenzo Valla and the rise of human dialectic Lodi Nauta 11. The immortality of the soul Paul Richard Blum 12. Philosophy and the crisis of religion Peter Harrison 13. Hispanic scholastic philosophy John P. Doyle 14. New visions of the cosmos Miguel Granada 15. Organization of knowledge Ann M. Blair 16. Humanistic and scholastic ethics David Lines 17. The problem of the Prince Eric Nelson 18. The significance of renaissance philosophy James Hankins Appendices: 1. Chronology 2. Short biographies of Renaissance philosophers.

Exclusivist Republicanism and the Non-Monarchical Republic

The idea that a republic is the only legitimate form of government and that non-elective monarchy and hereditary political privileges are by definition illegitimate is an artifact of late eighteenth century republicanism, though it has roots in the “godly republics” of the seventeenth century. It presupposes understanding a republic (respublica) to be a non-monarchical form of government. The latter definition is a discursive practice that goes back only to the fifteenth century and is not found in Roman or medieval sources. This article explains how the definition emerged in Renaissance Italy.

Humanism, scholasticism, and Renaissance philosophy

Another species of mitigated scepticism, which may be of advantage to mankind … is the limitation of our enquiries to such subjects as are best adapted to the narrow capacity of human understanding … A correct Judgment … avoid[s] all distant and high enquiries, confines itself to common life, and to such objects as fall under daily practice and experience, leaving the more sublime topics to the embellishment of poets and orators, or to the arts of priests and politicians. (David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , XII) Humanism as a form of culture It is apt to be forgotten by students of the Renaissance that the abstract noun “humanism,” with its cognates in Latin and the modern languages, is not attested for the period of the Renaissance itself, but began to be widely used only in the early nineteenth century. It was in the latter period, under the influence of Hegel, that the modern addiction to reifying ideologies and social trends using nouns formed from - ismos , the Greek suffix indicating nouns of action or process, began to take hold. Humanismus , humanisme , and umanesimo , the German, French, and Italian forms of the word respectively, eventually embraced two broad families of meaning. The first family understood humanism in the sense of classical education: the study of ancient literature in the original languages. It was in this sense that Georg Voigt in his seminal work, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Altertums oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus (1859), retrofitted the word to signify the Renaissance movement to revive classical studies. In Italy the word umanesimo broadened its meaning somewhat to include Italy’s literary production in the Latin language from Petrarca to Pietro Bembo.

Nicholas of Cusa and modern philosophy

“Gatekeeper of the modern age” Nicholas of Cusa (Niklas Krebs, known as Cusanus, 1401-64), one of the most original and creative intellects of the fifteenth century, has been variously described as “the last great philosopher of the dying Middle Ages” (Alexandre Koyre), as a “transition-thinker” between the medieval and modern worlds (Frederick Copleston), and as the “gatekeeper of the modern age” (Rudolf Haubst). He is a lone figure with no real successor although he had some influence on Copernicus, Kepler, Bruno, and, tangentially, on Descartes. The German Idealists showed some interest in Nicholas of Cusa but the real revival of his thought was stimulated by the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), who called him “the first modern thinker” and by the existentialist Karl Jaspers. Cassirer compared him to Kant for his view that objects have to be understood in terms of the categories of our own thought. Other scholars, notably Alexandre Koyre, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Blumenberg, Werner Beierwaltes, and Karsten Harries, all see him in a certain way as a harbinger of modernity. Yet his outlook is essentially conservative, aiming, as Hans Blumenberg has recognized, to maintain the medieval synthesis. Cusanus was a humanist scholar, Church reformer - his De concordantia catholica ( On Catholic Concord , 1434) included proposals for the reform of Church and state - papal diplomat, and Catholic cardinal. In the course of his life he attempted to reconcile papal and conciliar ecclesiology, Greek Eastern and Latin Western Christianity, Muslims and Christians, traditional theology and emerging mathematical science.

The significance of Renaissance philosophy

Since the 1930s, when it first emerged as a distinctive field of research, intellectual history has always been fascinated with the Renaissance. Intellectual historians are concerned with unearthing the deep, often half-conscious patterns of thought that govern the way individuals understand and act within nature and society. They examine how traditions of thought situate themselves within changing linguistic and cultural settings. Lately they have begun to focus on the history of learned disciplines, intellectual routines, and practices. Above all they are concerned with the question of why large groups of human beings change their beliefs over time. This being the case, it is easy to see why the Renaissance attracts the intellectual historian. It was a period when fundamental changes occurred in Western societies across a wide range of beliefs, religious, scientific, political, historical, and anthropological. Christendom disintegrated and sovereign states emerged. The Catholic Church lost much of its authority and new Protestant churches and sects appeared. Religious divisions and wars led to the first tentative expressions of the need for tolerance and freedom of expression. Educational ideals and practice were transformed. Humanists arose to challenge the hegemony of scholastic culture. Christian culture underwent a major reorientation in its attitude to the pagan culture of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Republicanism and absolutism crystallized into distinct traditions of political thought. Major changes occurred in how Europeans saw and analyzed human nature, the cosmos, and natural processes. The sciences grew less interested in contemplating nature and more interested in controlling it. A New World was discovered full of societies, flora, and fauna utterly unknown to Western learned traditions.

Machiavelli, Civic Humanism, and the Humanist Politics of Virtue

Abstract Modern studies of Italian humanist political thought emphasize the theme of republican liberty, but this conception has been understood in anachronistic ways and exaggerated in importance. Much more central is the problem of how to encourage virtuous and prudent behavior in the ruling class. The humanist answer — a classical education in virtue and wisdom, along with the creation of new social technologies of persuasion — was comprehensively rejected by Machiavelli, whose own approach to political success truly introduced new modi e ordini.

Iamblichus, Ficino and Schleiermacher on the Sources of Religious Knowledge

In one of the Platonic schools of late antiquity Iamblichus developed a philosophical defence of religious experience, describing it as a precognitive awareness of humanity’s existential dependence on a divine principle of unity. The argument was directed against the high rationalism of Porphyry. Marsilio Ficino, the first student of Iamblichus in the Latin West since antiquity, made the argument a foundational one in his own philosophy, implicitly responding to sceptical themes in Renaissance scholasticism. The argument was revived a third time by Friedrich Schleiermacher in response to the scientific materialists of the Enlightenment and as a development of Rousseau’s religious thought.