Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

10 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
name of Hobbes to the list of those philosophers who began to weaken the links
between Christianity and philosophy. But it is not certain that they were right;
the subject is one on which scholars still disagree. 46 What is certain is that
Hobbes’s political philosophy, with its sombre view that a life that satisfies the
demands of reason can be lived only under conditions of absolute rule, still
fascinates philosophers. 47
NOTES
1 The arguments for this view have been clearly set out by Peter Burke in his book
The Renaissance (London, Macmillan, 1987), pp. 1–5. Burke himself does not
accept these arguments, saying (p. 5) that the term ‘the Renaissance’ is ‘an
organising concept which still has its uses’.
2 See, for example, C.B.Schmitt and Q.Skinner (eds) The Cambridge History of
Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988:
abbreviated, CHRP), p. 5.
3 CHRP, Introduction, p. 3.
4 C.B.Schmitt, in R.Sorabji (ed.) Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian
Science (London, Duckworth, 1988), p. 210.
5 See, for example, the entries for ‘scholasticism’ and ‘medieval philosophy’ in J.
O.Urmson and J.Rée (eds), The Concise Encyclopaedia of Western Philosophy and
Philosophers (London, Unwin Hyman, 1989).
6 London, Longman, 2nd edn, 1988, pp. 76–82. Dom David’s account applies to
what one might call the golden age of scholasticism, up to the middle of the
fourteenth century; on the new scholasticism of the late sixteenth century, see
Stuart Brown in Chapter 2 of this volume, pp. 76, 81–3.
7 cf. R.W.Southern, Grosseteste (Oxford, Clarendon, 1986), p. 32.
8 See, for example, P.O.Kristeller, ‘Humanism’, in CHRP, pp. 113–37. One should
stress the phrase ‘in the main’; humanism, like the Renaissance, has a long history,
and in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries humanists became involved in a
range of subjects from logic and science that do not fall within a simple five-part
scheme. On this, see the chapters on humanism and science and humanism and
philosophy in Jill Kraye (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance
Humanism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). See also
Anthony Grafton, ‘Humanism, Magic and Science’, in A. Goodman and A.Mackay
(eds) The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe (London, Longman, 1990), pp.
99–117.
9 See especially some remarks of the fifteenth-century Florentine chancellor
Leonardo Bruni, quoted by B.P.Copenhaver, CHRP, p. 106.
10 cf. Burke, op. cit.
11 Cesare Vasoli, ‘The Renaissance Concept of Philosophy’, CHRP, p. 73.
12 See especially J.Stephens, The Italian Renaissance (London, Longman, 1990), pp.
xvi, 54, 137, 149.
13 The phrase comes from Owen Chadwick, The Secularisation of the European Mind
in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975).