Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 19
For Bruni and his fellow humanists these stylistic changes were by no means
superficial. Misled by Cicero’s praise of Aristotle’s writings, they believed that
they were restoring his lost eloquence. They saw this as a significant contribution
to their larger programme of, replacing the rebarbative treatises of the scholastics
with a classically inspired and rhetorically persuasive form of philosophizing. 24
Hardline scholastics responded to the humanist rewriting of Aristotle by
complaining that wisdom and philosophy had not been joined to eloquence and
rhetoric but rather subordinated to them. Although willing to concede that
Bruni’s translations were more readable than the medieval versions, they thought
that his lacked the scientific precision necessary in a philosophical work. Cicero
might be an appropriate model to follow in oratory but not in philosophy, where
subtle distinctions had to be made on the basis of careful reasoning. 25
Bruni’s desire to remove Aristotle from the scholastic camp and claim him for
the humanist cause was a reflection of his high regard for the philosopher. In his
Vita Aristotelis, he ranked him higher than his teacher Plato, reversing Petrarch’s
evaluation. The grounds for this judgement were Aristotle’s greater consistency
and clarity as well as his caution and moderation, which led him to ‘support
normal usages and ways of life’, in contrast to Plato, who expressed ‘opinions
utterly abhorrent to our customs’, such as the belief that ‘all wives should be held
in common’. Although he extolled Aristotle’s methodical presentation of material
in all his teachings, whether ‘logic, natural science or ethics’, Bruni’s interest
was in practice limited to moral and political philosophy, as his three Aristotelian
translations—the Nicomachean Ethics, Oeconomics and Politics—clearly
show. 26 In his Isagogicon moralis disciplinae, he contrasted ‘the science of
morals’, whose study brought ‘the greatest and most excellent of all things:
happiness’, with natural philosophy, a discipline ‘of no practical use’, unless, he
added, in words reminiscent of Petrarch, ‘you think yourself better instructed in
the Good Life for having learned all about ice, snow and the colours of the
rainbow’. Also reminiscent of Petrarch was Bruni’s belief that Ockhamist logic,
‘that barbarism which dwells across the ocean’, had reduced contemporary
dialectics to ‘absurdity and frivolity’. 27
The narrow range of Bruni’s philosophical interests was typical of Italian
humanists in the first half of the fifteenth century. The next wave of Aristotle
translators, however, were Greek émigrés, who took a much broader view of
Aristotelian philosophy. Johannes Argyropulos (c. 1410–87), a Byzantine
scholar who taught in Florence, began by lecturing on the Nicomachean Ethics
and Politics, but soon moved on to the Physics, De anima, Meteorology and
Metaphysics. 28 He was able to bring to his teaching and translating of Aristotle
an impressive blend of linguistic and philosophical competence, having received
his early training in his native Constantinople and later studying at the University
of Padua. Argyropulos was concerned to present the entire range of the
Aristotelian corpus, which he regarded as the culmination of the Greek
philosophical tradition. He did not shy away from logic, producing a
compendium on the subject, based primarily on the Aristotelian Organon (most