Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

4 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
authors of the great medieval Summae. That must be granted; but if one is
concerned, not with what was new, but rather with what is important about
Renaissance philosophy, then what has been said may stand. There is at least one
further respect in which the Renaissance did differ from the Middle Ages—
though here we are concerned with the Renaissance in general rather than with
Renaissance philosophy in particular, and with the sociology of philosophy
rather than with philosophy as such. It was during the Renaissance that there
began what one may term the laicization of the European culture of the Christian
era. 12 Some of the humanists were in holy orders—one may mention Petrarch
and Erasmus—but most were not. From the time of the Renaissance onwards, a
clerk (in the sense of a scholar) no longer had to be a cleric. In this way, the first
moves were made towards loosening the hold that Christian institutions had upon
philosophy.
I must emphasize that by the laicization of European culture I do not mean
what has been called ‘the secularisation of the European mind’; 13 that is, the
decline in the importance that religious ideas, and more specifically Christian
ideas, have had for European thinkers. It is plausible to argue that the two were
connected; but they were different from each other. To speak of laicization in
this context is to speak of the people who were the bearers of culture, and it is to
say that they ceased to be predominantly clerical; it is not to say anything about
the content of what such people believed. In fact, what were regarded as
Christian concepts and Christian truths continued to be dominant in Renaissance
philosophy, just as they had been dominant in the Middle Ages. Humanists
might disagree over the answer to the question whether Plato or Aristotle was
more compatible with Christianity; but that a sound philosophy should be so
compatible was not in dispute. Even the arguments of the ancient sceptics, whose
writings became widely available in the sixteenth century, were made to serve
religious purposes. 14
From the Renaissance we move to the beginnings of what may be regarded as
modern (as opposed to ancient, medieval or Renaissance) philosophy. For the
majority of contemporary philosophers, the first modern philosopher was
Descartes. There are two main reasons for this view. One of the main features of
the European philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the role
played in it by one form or other of philosophical idealism, and it is argued that
one can trace this idealism back to Descartes’s view that the human mind is
known before any physical object is known. But even those philosophers for
whom idealism is no longer a live issue find that Descartes is relevant to their
concerns. When Gilbert Ryle published his influential book The Concept of Mind
shortly after the end of the Second World War, 15 he presented Descartes as the
source of philosophical views about the human mind which were profoundly
wrong. However, if one’s concerns include science and its philosophy, then there
is a case for regarding as the first modern philosopher someone who was born
thirty-five years before Descartes. This was Francis Bacon.