Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

2 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
usefully be called ‘the Renaissance’, and that a philosophy or group of
philosophies formed a part of this movement. What is at issue, when people talk
of the myth of the Renaissance, is the making of certain inflated claims on behalf
of this movement.
In explaining what is meant here by ‘Renaissance philosophy’, I will begin by
stating a commonplace. This is, that the area covered by the term ‘philosophy’
has shrunk in the course of the centuries; that, for example, what was once called
‘natural philosophy’ is now called ‘physics’, and an important part of what was
once called ‘mental philosophy’ is now called ‘psychology’. In the Renaissance,
the term ‘philosophy’ had a very wide sense indeed, covering not only physics
and psychology, but also such subjects as rhetoric, poetics and history, and even
magic and astrology. 3 However, the term also covered what would now be called
‘philosophy’; scholars speak of Renaissance logic and metaphysics, Renaissance
theory of knowledge, and Renaissance moral and political philosophy. It is
Renaissance philosophy in this sense that will be the concern of the present
volume.
I have already implied a distinction between Renaissance philosophy and
scholasticism—a movement which, incidentally, continued to exist up to the
seventeenth century. This indicates that when ‘Renaissance philosophy’ is
spoken of here the term is not taken to mean every philosophy which existed
during the period of the Renaissance. Rather, it means a philosophy which was
distinctively Renaissance in character. At this stage, it is necessary to try to be a
little clearer about the term ‘Renaissance’. I have spoken of the period which the
Renaissance is generally agreed to have covered; there is also general agreement
that the movement began in Italy and spread to the rest of Western Europe. It
was a movement in which (to quote one eminent specialist in the field) ‘there
was a revival of interest in the literature, styles and forms of classical antiquity’. 4
But this definition generates a problem. I have distinguished Renaissance
philosophy from scholasticism; but it is well known that the scholastics, too,
derived much inspiration from classical philosophy. The question is, then, what
distinguishes Renaissance philosophy from scholasticism. Here, one must first
consider what the term ‘scholasticism’ means. As a philosophical movement,
scholasticism reached its peak during the Middle Ages, and for some people the
terms ‘scholasticism’ and ‘medieval Christian philosophy’ are interchangeable. 5
There is a more precise sense of the term, however. In this sense, scholasticism
begins in cathedral schools in the eleventh century, and reaches its peak in the
universities of Paris and Oxford during a period that lasted from the early
thirteenth to the middle of the fourteenth century. As a guide to the nature of
scholasticism, taken in this sense, it is helpful to follow the account given by
Dom David Knowles in his book The Evolution of Medieval Thought. 6 Knowles
argues that scholasticism was distinguished by its goal, form and technique. Its
goal was to provide a preparation for theology and to explain and defend
Christian doctrines. In its form, it depended heavily on ancient philosophy, and
in particular on Aristotle. Its technique was, par excellence, the method of