Renaissance Philosophy Renaissance Philosophy Was the Period of the History of Philosophy in Europe That Falls Roughly Between the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment

Renaissance philosophy Renaissance philosophy was the period of the history of philosophy in Europe that falls roughly between the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. It includes the 15th century; some scholars extend it to as early as the 1350s or as late as the 16th century or early 17th century, overlapping the Reformation and the early modern era. Among the distinctive elements of Renaissance philosophy are the revival (renaissance means "rebirth") of classical civilization and learning; a partial return to the authority of Plato over Aristotle, who had come to dominate later medieval philosophy; and, among some philosophers, enthusiasm for the occult and Hermeticism. Renaissance humanism was a movement that affected the cultural, political, social, and literary landscape of Europe. Beginning in Florence in the last decades of the 14th century, Renaissance humanism revived the study of Latin and Greek, with the resultant revival of the study of science, philosophy, art and poetry of classical antiquity. The revival was based on interpretations of Roman and Greek texts, whose emphasis upon art and the senses marked a great change from the contemplation on the Biblical values of humility, introspection, and meekness. Beauty was held to represent a deep inner virtue and value, and an essential element in the path towards God. Humanism's divergence from orthodox Christianity can be identified with the condemnation of Pelagianism by Jerome and Augustine. Like the Humanists, Pelagius perceived humans as possessing inherent capacity for developing the qualities that the church perceived as necessitating the gift of grace from God. Pelagius rejected the doctrine of original sin. The Humanists likewise recognize humans as born not with a burden of inherited sin due to their ancestry but with potential for both good and evil which will develop in this life as their characters are formed. The Humanists therefore reject Calvinistic predestination, and understandably therefore arouse the hostility of Protestant fundamentalists. Renaissance humanists believed that the liberal arts (music, art, grammar, rhetoric, oratory, history, poetry, using classical texts, and the studies of all of the above) should be practiced by all levels of wealth. They also approved of self, human worth and individual dignity. Noteworthy humanist scholars from this period include the Dutch theologian Erasmus, the English author (and Roman Catholic saint) Thomas More, the French writer François Rabelais, the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch and the Italian scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. In astronomy, heliocentrism is the theory that the Sun is at the center of the Solar System. The word came from the Greek ( Helios = sun= center). Historically, heliocentrism was opposed to geocentrism, which placed the earth at the center. (The distinction between the Solar System and the Universe was not clear until modern times, but extremely important relative to the controversy over cosmology and religion.) Although a number of early cosmologists such as Aristarchus speculated about the motion of the Earth around a stationary Sun, most of them refrained themselves from speaking out out of the fear for imprisonments and even execution based on claims of blasphemy and other charges from the Church at the time. It was not until the 16th century with sacrifices of scientists such as Giordano Bruno and the Polish mathematician and astronomer Copernicus presented a fully predictive mathematical model of a heliocentric system, which was later elaborated and expanded by Kepler and defended by Galileo, becoming the center of a major dispute. The City of the Sun is a philosophical work by the Italian Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella. It is an important early utopian work. The City of the Sun is presented as a dialogue between "a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea-Captain". Inspired by Plato's Republic and the description of Atlantis in Timaeus, it describes a theocratic society where goods, women and children are held in common. It also resembles the City of Adocentyn in the Picatrix, an Arabic guide to magical town planning. In the final part of the work, Campanella prophesies — in the veiled language of astrology — that the Spanish kings, in alliance with the Pope, are destined to be the instruments of a Divine Plan: the final victory of the True Faith and its diffusion in the whole world. While one could argue that Campanella was simply thinking of the conquest of the New World, it seems that this prophecy should be interpreted in the light of a work written shortly before The City of the Sun, The Monarchy in Spain, in which Campanella exposes his vision of a unified, peaceful world governed by a theocratic monarchy. .

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