Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 83
Jacob Thomasius, in 1669. He interpreted Aristotle as a nominalist and argued that
modern philosophy was consistent with Aristotle’s physics. (See Loemker, op. cit.,
pp. 93ff.)
29 C.B.Schmitt [2.100] has cited the (probably incomplete, but none the less
significant) statistical information, which shows the number of Aristotle editions
dipping to fifty-one in the 1520s and rising to 219 in the 1550s. The first two
sessions of the Council of Trent were held in 1545–7 and 1551–3. The conjecture
that this revival of Aristotle owes a good deal to the Catholic Reformation is my
own.
30 Leibniz was less dismissive of scholastic logic than was Descartes. But he
contrasted the ‘true logic’ with ‘what we have previously honoured by that name’
and offered a Ramist redefinition of the subject as ‘the art of using the
understanding not only to judge proposed truth but also to discover hidden truth’
(Loemker, op. cit., p. 463).
31 See Scott [2.167]. See also Hamilton [2.124].
32 See Mora [2.164].
33 Descartes studied at the Jesuit College of La Flêche and is reputed to have carried a
copy of the Disputations around with him on his travels. On Descartes’s debt to
Suarez, see Cronin [2.173] and Wells [2.186].
34 See Lewalter [2.177] and Wundt [2.187]. Suarez’s followers in Germany included
Leibniz’s teacher, Jacob Thomasius. Leibniz himself claimed that, as a young man,
he could read Suarez like a novel. There is a direct influence of Suarezian
nominalism on Leibniz’s early dissertation on the principle of individuation.
Though his thought developed along quite different lines, Leibniz included Suarez
amongst the ‘deeper scholastics’ and not amongst those whom, as a modern, he
frequently abused.
35 See Grotius [2.52]. See also Tuck [2.144].
36 See pp. 76–7 for a brief account of Mariana.
37 Lessius [2.27], See Chamberlain [2.146].
38 See Molina [2.33]. See also Pegis [2.151].
39 See Ferreira Gomez [2.142].
40 This work was translated into English in 1595 and has been reprinted. See Lipsius
[2.53].
41 Lipsius is further discussed in connection with Spinoza in Chapter 9, pp. 316–17.
See also Kristeller [2.178].
42 Chesneau [2.114] gives an account of the history of Neostoicism in earlyseventeenth-century
France.
43 The new Stoicism seems to have been well received in England. There were two
English translations of Du Vair’s treatise and one of Lipsius’s De constantia at the
end of the sixteenth century.
44 The assumption that it was an inherently Christian philosophy was not confined to
lay people. One of the adherents of Stoicism in England was the Anglican Bishop,
Joseph Hall.
45 Stoicism was attacked as a naturalistic and unChristian philosophy by the
Jansenists, especially by Biaise Pascal. In a paper attacking the ‘two sects of
naturalists in fashion today’, Leibniz placed Hobbes within the Epicurean tradition
and Spinoza within the tradition of Stoicism. He criticized Spinoza and the Stoics
for their fatalism and for seeking to make a virtue of enforced ‘patience’. (See