Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

INTRODUCTION 3
quaestio, disputatio and sententia: the posing of a problem which was such that
authorities differed about the correct answer, arguments concerning the problem,
and a solution. 7
Although Renaissance philosophy did not follow the method of quaestio,
disputatio and sententia, it might be argued that it resembled scholasticism in
respect of the fact that it was a book-centred philosophy, deriving its inspiration
from the writings of the ancients. It would be granted that Renaissance scholars
rediscovered many classical texts, with the result that their knowledge of ancient
philosophy was much wider than that which the medievals had. But it may be
said that this would not of itself justify one in regarding the Renaissance as a
separate movement; it might simply be a movement that did more effectively
what the scholastics had tried to do. In order to answer this point, it is necessary
to examine more closely the relation between Renaissance writers and classical
texts. More specifically, one has to consider that aspect of the culture of the
Renaissance which is called ‘humanism’. The abstract noun ‘humanism’, like the
term ‘the Renaissance’, is a nineteenth-century coinage; however, the term
‘humanist’ is much older. It originated in Italy in the late fifteenth century and
was used to refer to a teacher or student of the studia humanitatis— the
humanities—a term which was used to mean the study of classical texts
concerning, in the main, five subjects: grammar, rhetoric, poetics, moral
philosophy and history. 8 The deeper knowledge of classical Latin and Greek that
the humanists acquired led them to scorn both the scholastics’ translations of the
classics and their barbarous misuse of the Latin language. 9 Instead of using the
cumbrous Latin of the scholastics, the humanists wanted to write about
philosophical topics in elegant Latin of the kind that Cicero might have written.
I have said that the philosophy that most concerned the humanists was moral
philosophy: that is, a branch of philosophy that concerns human beings and their
relations with each other. This concentration of interest upon human beings was
emphasized by the Swiss scholar Jakob Burckhardt in his influential book The
Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Burckhardt saw the Renaissance
as an epoch in which man for the first time became a genuine individual; an
epoch in which the modern age began. Modern critics are sceptical of
Burckhardt’s claim, arguing that although the writers and artists of the
Renaissance distanced themselves from the Middle Ages, they were in fact more
medieval than they realized. When such scholars speak of ‘the myth of the
Renaissance’ it is above all Burckhardt’s picture of the Renaissance that they
have in mind. 10
What, then, was the importance of the Renaissance in the history of Western
philosophy? Some scholars point to the way in which late Renaissance
philosophy questioned ‘all authorities, even the classics’; they also see it as
leading to seventeenth-century attempts to establish the unity and coherence of
knowledge. 11 To this it may be replied that the philosophers of the Middle Ages
were by no means uncritical in their response to the classical philosophers, and
that the establishment of the unity of knowledge was surely the aim of the