Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 81
This consideration left a choice between becoming a partisan of a particular
ancient ‘sect’ or becoming a sceptic.
One might, of course, combine a moderate scepticism with the qualified
adoption of one of the ancient systems. 57 To do this consistently, however, it
would be necessary to find a basis for accepting what the ancient authors had
said which did not consist simply in the fact that they had said it. To do that was
to begin to be a modern philosopher. To the extent that this is what Gassendi did
in his defence of Epicureanism, he is properly regarded as a modern philosopher.
Some of the early modern philosophers have, like Gassendi, a Renaissance
face and indeed philosophy could still be presented in a Renaissance style right
through the seventeenth and even in the eighteenth century. 58 But, if moderns
could sometimes behave like Renaissance philosophers, it is also true that some
Renaissance philosophers were in some respects early moderns. For instance,
many of the most sceptical and iconoclastic figures, such as Agrippa, Vives,
Sanches and Ramus sought independent methods of making discoveries and
verifying them. Methodology was already becoming a preoccupation of late
Renaissance philosophy, as it was for the early moderns. The two periods of
philosophy are to that extent continuous. For this reason the sixteenth century
may as aptly be represented as a period of transition as a period of revival or
‘renaissance’.
NOTES
1 These countries and regions were home to most of the major Renaissance
philosophers outside Italy. Mention should also be made of Switzerland, which was
the native country of Paracelsus. Renaissance philosophy was not, of course,
confined to these countries. But other parts of Europe are largely neglected in the
literature. For accounts of humanism in Croatia, Hungary and the Czech Lands, see
Rabil [2.96], Part III.
2 See, for instance, Brown [2.171], See also Heinekamp [2.176].
3 See pp. 79–81.
4 See note 14 below.
5 See note 26 below.
6 See pp. 77–9.
7 In his Discourse on Metaphysics, sec. IX, for instance, Leibniz put forward a
number of paradoxical propositions, beliefs made more credible by his theory of
substance, including that no two substances are exactly alike and that each
substance is a mirror of God and of the entire universe. These doctrines are all
anticipated in De docta ignorantia, but it is unlikely that Leibniz owed any of them
directly to Cusanus. Indeed he wrote as if the first of them was a refinement by him
of a doctrine of Aquinas.
8 See Chapter 1, pp. 45–6, for a more detailed account of the interest in the Cabbala
in the Italian Renaissance.
9 See Reuchlin [2.56], particularly the introduction by G.Lloyd Jones.