Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

22 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
The professional philosophers whose ability to understand Aristotle Poliziano
called into question and whose preserve he invaded, responded, not surprisingly,
by accusing him of teaching technical subjects which he knew nothing about.
These vampires (lamiae), as Poliziano called them in his 1492 inaugural lecture
on the Prior Analytics, had taken to ridiculing him as a would-be philosopher.
He in turn replied that he had never claimed to be a philosopher, but rather a
philologist (grammaticus), a scholar who used his knowledge of classical
languages and culture to interpret ancient texts, be they literary, legal or
philosophical. 42
Another philologist who brought his talents to bear on philosophical and
scientific works was Poliziano’s great friend, the Venetian humanist Ermolao
Barbaro (1454–93). 43 In 1474–6 Barbaro lectured at Padua on the Nicomachean
Ethics and Politics, using the medieval Latin versions—no doubt because of
university requirements—but correcting them against the Greek. 44 His
experiences in the citadel of traditional scholastic Aristotelianism convinced him
of the need to promote the new, humanist approach to philosophy. This involved
an ambitious plan to retranslate all of Aristotle, although owing to his early death
he completed only a version of the Rhetoric and a humanistic reworking of the
Liber sex principiorum, a twelfth-century Latin treatise on the categories which
had become a regular part of the Aristotelian logical corpus. The latter work
allowed him to prove that even the most technical philosophical subjects could
be rendered with elegance. Barbaro also wrote a brief treatise which
demonstrated that the English calculatory tradition, a highly technical form of
logico-mathematical physics developed in fourteenth-century Oxford, could be
treated in classical Latin. His overall goal was to reunite eloquence and
philosophy, which he believed had been artificially sundered, to the detriment of
both, by generations of scholastics. 45
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), although on good terms with both
Barbaro and Poliziano, did not share their humanist disdain for the ‘dull, rude,
uncultured’ scholastics. Pico, who had spent ‘six years on those barbarians’,
denied that their lack of eloquence detracted from the quality of their
philosophical thought. In his view it was rhetoric and oratory which were the
greatest obstacles to philosophy, for they were nothing but ‘sheer mendacity,
sheer imposture, sheer trickery’, while philosophy was ‘concerned with knowing
the truth and demonstrating it to others’. A philosopher’s style should therefore
be not ‘delightful, adorned and graceful’ but ‘useful, grave, something to be
respected’. Orators who sought the roar of the crowd’s approval had to be well
spoken, but not philosophers, who wanted only the silent respect of the
discerning few. 46 Pico’s disparagement of eloquence is itself so eloquent that
irony is almost certainly in play. But the argument he presented was a serious
one, which highlighted a long-standing difference between the scholastic and
humanist styles of philosophy.
There were substantive as well as stylistic differences between humanist and
scholastic Aristotelianism. While Averroes still reigned supreme as ‘the