Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy Edited by Jill Kraye and M.W.F.Stone
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London Studies in the History of Philosophy Series Editors: Jonathan Wolff, Tim Crane, M.W.F.Stone and Tom Pink London Studies in the History of Philosophy is a unique series of tightly focused edited collections. Bringing together the work of many scholars, some volumes will trace the history of the formulation and treatment of a particular problem of philosophy from the Ancient Greeks to the present day, while others will provide an in-depth analysis of a period or tradition of thought. The series is produced in collaboration with the Philosophy Programme of the University of London School of Advanced Study. 1 Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy Edited by Jill Kraye and M.W.F.Stone Forthcoming 2 Proper Ambition of Science Edited by M.W.F.Stone and Jonathan Wolff Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy Edited by Jill Kraye and M.W.F.Stone London and New York First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 2000 Jill Kraye and M.W.F.Stone All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Humanism and early modern philosophy/[edited by] Jill Kraye and M.W.F.Stone. p. cm.—(London studies in the history of philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. I. Humanism. 2. Philosophy, Modern. I. Kraye, Jill. II. Stone, Martin W.F. (Martin William Francis), 1965– . III. Series. B821.H657 2000 99–34091 144–dc21 CIP ISBN 0-203-01607-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-21104-9 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0 415 186161 (Print Edition) Contents List of Illustrations vii List of contributors viii Preface xi 1 The theology of Lorenzo Valla 1 JOHN MONFASANI 2 Renaissance Latin translations of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle 24 CHARLES H.LOHR 3 From Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples to Giulio Landi: Uses of the dialogue in Renaissance Aristotelianism 41 LUCA BIANCHI 4 The adoption and rejection of Aristotelian moral philosophy in Reformed ‘Casuistry’ 59 M.W.F.STONE 5 The relationship of Stoicism and scepticism: Justus Lipsius 91 A.H.T.LEVI 6 ‘Ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus’: Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations from Xylander to Diderot 107 JILL KRAYE 7 The myth of Francis Bacon’s ‘anti-humanism’ 135 BRIAN VICKERS v vi Contents 8 ‘Delicate learning’, erudition and the enterprise of philosophy 159 J.R.MILTON 9 Grandeur and the mechanical philosophy 172 SUSAN JAMES 10 Renaissance humanism, lingering Aristotelianism and the new natural philosophy: Gassendi on final causes 193 MARGARET J.OSLER 11 Galileo, Ficino and Renaissance Platonism 209 JAMES HANKINS 12 Humanist Platonism in seventeenth-century Germany 238 CHRISTIA MERCER Index 259 Illustrations Figures 6.1 Title-page of Marcus Aurelius, De rebus suis sive de eis qae ad se pertinere censebat libri XII, ed. and trans. Thomas Gataker, Cambridge, 1652 115 6.2 Frontispiece and title-page of Marcus Aurelius, Libri XII eorum quae de seipso ad seipsum scripsit, ed. Joannes Franciscus Buddeus, Leipzig, 1729 121 12.1 Title-page of A.Scherzer, Vade mecum sive manuale philosophicum quadripartitum, Leipzig, 1686. (Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.) 241 Tables 2.1 Renaissance editions of the Greek commentators on Aristotle, in Greek and Latin translation 28–29 vii Contributors Luca Bianchi is Professor of the History of Medieval Philosophy at the University of Vercelli. His books include Il vescovo e i filosofi: la condanna parigina del 1277 e l’evoluzione dell’aristotelismo scolastico (1990); Le verità dissonanti: Aristotele alla fine del medioevo (1990; French translation, 1993), written jointly with Eugenio Randi; and a forthcoming monograph on Censure et liberté intellectuelle à l’Université de Paris au Moyen Age. James Hankins, Professor of History at Harvard University, is the author of Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (1990) and General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library. Susan James is a Fellow of Girton College and a Lecturer in the Philosophy Faculty, University of Cambridge. Her publications include The Content of Social Explanation (1984) and Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (1997). Jill Kraye is Reader in the History of Renaissance Philosophy at the Warburg Institute, the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She was the associate editor of The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (1988) and has recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (1996; Spanish translation, 1998) and Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, 2 vols (1997). A.H.T.Levi took early retirement after teaching at Oxford, Warwick and St Andrews, where he was professor of French. He studied philosophy in Munich and has a Roman degree in theology. His first book, French Moralists: The Theory of the Passions, 1585 to 1649 (1964), was based on his Oxford DPhil. He is currently writing a biography of Erasmus. viii Contributors ix Charles H.Lohr is Professor Emeritus of the History of Medieval Theology in the University of Freiburg. Trained in the United States and Germany, he was Director of the Raimundus-Lullus-Institut of the University of Freiburg from 1974 to 1990. In addition to numerous special studies, he is the author of an inventory of Latin Aristotle Commentaries (1988–95) and the editor of the Opera latina of Raymond Lull and of the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, versiones Latinae temporis resuscitatarum litterarum. Christia Mercer is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She has recently published a monograph on the evolution of Leibniz’s philosophy, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development, and is presently working on a study of German conciliatory eclecticism and Platonism in the seventeenth century entitled Divine Madness: Metaphysics, Method, and Mind in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. J.R.Milton is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at King’s College, University of London. Most of his research has been on the history of early modern philosophy, and he is currently working on an intellectual biography of John Locke. John Monfasani is Professor of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and the Executive Director of the Renaissance Society of America. His publications include: the monographs George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic (1976) and Fernando of Cordova: A Biographical and Intellectual Profile (1992); an edition, Collectanea Trapezuntiana: Texts, Documents, and Bibliographies of George of Trebizond (1984); and two volumes of collected essays, Language and Learning in Renaissance Italy (1994) and Byzantine Scholars in Renaissance Italy (1995). Margaret J.Osler is Professor of History and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. Her most recent book is Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (1994). M.W.F.Stone is Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College, University of London. His main research interests are in late medieval philosophy, x Contributors particularly the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and in the continuation of the scholastic tradition in early modern times. He is the author of a two-volume study, The Subtle Arts of Casuistry, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press, as well as papers on medieval and early modern philosophy. Brian Vickers is Professor of English Language and Literature, Director of the Centre for Renaissance Studies, ETH, Zurich and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His books include Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (1968) and In Defence of Rhetoric (1988; third edition, 1997). He has edited Francis Bacon (1996) for the ‘Oxford Authors’ series, Bacon’s History of King Henry VII (1998) and The Essays of Francis Bacon (1999). Preface There are those who would have us believe that the study of the history of philosophy is enjoying something of a revival in English-speaking countries. Evidence for this view is not, on the face of it, that difficult to find. Looking at the state of the ancient philosophy, one sees a robust and confident subject whose best practitioners combine philological expertise and historical sagacity with philosophical skill. Likewise, early modern philosophy reveals its house to be in good order. Those who work on the philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, having liberated themselves from the anachronism so typical of post- war scholarship on Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume and Kant, are now far more aware of, and responsive to, the general intellectual context in which the canonical works of modern philosophy were composed and disseminated; the publication in 1998 of The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy provides solid evidence of this new, more historical outlook. The general buoyancy of the history of philosophy in the Anglophone world can be illustrated still further by examining current practices in fields such as medieval and nineteenth-century philosophy. Even analytic philosophy, the least historically minded of disciplines, is nowadays characterized by a greater awareness of its origins and development. Nevertheless, one major area of philosophy’s past remains neglected by the philosophical academy: the Renaissance. The appearance in 1986 of The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, and in 1992 of Renaissance Philosophy, volume III in the Oxford University Press series ‘A History of Western Philosophy’, has made little impact on scholars based in departments of philosophy.