Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

CHAPTER 1
The philosophy of the Italian Renaissance
Jill Kraye
TWO CULTURES: SCHOLASTICISM AND HUMANISM
IN THE EARLY RENAISSANCE
Two movements exerted a profound influence on the philosophy of the Italian
Renaissance: scholasticism and humanism, both of which began to take root in
northern Italy around 1300. Differing from one another in terms of methods and
aims as greatly as the scientific-and humanities-based cultures of our own times,
scholasticism and humanism each fostered a distinctive approach to philosophy.
The centres of scholasticism were the universities, where philosophy teaching
was based on the Aristotelian corpus, in particular the works of logic and natural
philosophy. In Italian universities the study of philosophy was propaedeutic to
medicine rather than, as in Oxford and Paris, theology. This encouraged an
atmosphere in which philosophy could operate as an autonomous discipline,
guided solely by rational criteria. Scholastic philosophers consistently defended
their right to explain natural phenomena according to the laws of nature without
recourse to theological arguments. 1 But although theological faculties were
absent in the universities, religious authorities had enough power within society
at large to challenge thinkers whose single-minded pursuit of natural
explanations was perceived to move beyond the territory of philosophy and into
the sacred domain of faith. Aristotelian philosophers who dared, for instance, to
argue that the soul was material and hence mortal were quickly forced to recant
by the ecclesiastical authorities. 2
On the equally sensitive subject of the eternity of the world, most scholastics
limited themselves to pointing out the opposition between the Peripatetic
hypothesis that the world was eternal and the ‘truth of the orthodox faith’ that it
was created ex nihilo by God. 3 In such cases where religious and philosophical
doctrines were in conflict, Aristotelians maintained that Christian dogma, based
on faith and revelation, was superior to explanations founded on mere reason.
The scholastic doctrine of the ‘double truth’ did not present a choice between
equally valid alternatives, but rather took for granted the subordination of the
relative truth of philosophy to the absolute truth of theology. Philosophers had no