What the Renaissance Knew Piero Scaruffi Copyright 2018
What the Renaissance knew Piero Scaruffi Copyright 2018 http://www.scaruffi.com/know 1 What the Renaissance knew • The 17th Century – For tens of thousands of years, humans had the same view of the universe and of the Earth. – Then the 17th century dramatically changed the history of humankind by changing the way we look at the universe and ourselves. – This happened in a Europe that was apparently imploding politically and militarily, amid massive, pervasive and endless warfare – Grayling refers to "the flowering of genius“: Galileo, Pascal, Kepler, Newton, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Racine, Moliere, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Rubens, El Greco, Rembrandt, Vermeer… – Knowledge spread, ideas circulated more freely than people could travel 2 What the Renaissance knew • Collapse of classical dogmas – Aristotelian logic vs Rene Descartes' "Discourse on the Method" (1637) – Galean medicine vs Vesalius' anatomy (1543), Harvey's blood circulation (1628), and Rene Descartes' "Treatise of Man" (1632) – Ptolemaic cosmology vs Copernicus (1530) and Galileo (1632) – Aquinas' synthesis of Aristotle and the Bible vs Thomas Hobbes' synthesis of mechanics (1651) and Pierre Gassendi's synthesis of Epicurean atomism and anatomy (1655) – Papal unity: the Thirty Years War (1618-48) shows endless conflict within Christiandom 3 What the Renaissance knew • Decline of – Feudalism – Chivalry – Holy Roman Empire – Papal Monarchy – City-state – Guilds – Scholastic philosophy – Collectivism (Church, guild, commune) – Gothic architecture 4 What
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