Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 39
ALTERNATIVE PHILOSOPHICAL CURRENTS
Flowing around the edges of the Aristotelian mainstream were a number of
alternative philosophical currents. Not all of them were hostile to Aristotelianism
—though most were—but each challenged the prevailing Peripatetic orthodoxy
by putting forward a new model of philosophical enquiry.
Complaints about the impenetrable jargon of scholastic logic were
commonplace among humanists, but few critics were as incisive as Lorenzo
Valla (1407–57). Believing that the limits of allowable discourse were fixed by
the usage of the best classical authors, Valla banned virtually the entire logical
and metaphysical vocabulary of scholasticism. Not satisfied with assaulting
medieval and Renaissance Aristotelianism, he attacked Aristotle himself,
rejecting his basic terminology (e.g. potentiality and actuality) and reducing his
ten categories to only three (substance, quality and action). Even more radical
was Valla’s refusal to consider logic as an independent discipline, treating it
instead as a part of rhetoric, on the grounds that the logician’s repertoire was
limited to the syllogism, while the orator could draw on the full range of
argumentative strategies, both necessary and probable, both demonstrative and
persuasive. Moreover, orators, who needed to be understood by their audiences,
respected the common manner of speech of learned men (by which Valla meant
good classical Latin), whereas logicians created their own language, which was
meaningless to non-specialists. This subordination of logic to rhetoric entailed a
drastic lowering of Aristotle’s authority and a concomitant rise in the prestige of
Cicero and Quintilian. 130
Valla’s programme did not find another champion until the mid-sixteenth
century. 131 Mario Nizolio (1488–1567), a fanatical Ciceronian, who compiled a
Latin lexicon devoted entirely to words used by his hero, was indignant when
some of his contemporaries questioned Cicero’s competence in philosophical
matters. In reply to these ‘Cicerobashers’ (Ciceromastiges) Nizolio wrote a
series of works, culminating in the treatise De veris principiis et vera ratione
philosophandi contra pseudophilosophos (1553). The ‘pseudo-philosophers’ of
the title were Aristotelian logicians and metaphysicians, whose false, obscure
and useless disciplines he wanted to replace with a ‘true method of
philosophizing’, one which combined Ciceronian rhetoric, Latin grammar and
philological expertise. Nizolio cited Valla’s attacks on Aristotelianism with
approval and shared his humanist contempt for scholastic terminology as well as
his desire to demote logic to a mere subdivision of rhetoric. But Valla had not
gone far enough, merely cutting off the foliage and branches of Aristotelian
philosophy while leaving its trunk and roots intact. 132 To eradicate it completely
Nizolio employed a thorough-going nominalism, dismissing Platonic ideas as
harmless poetic fictions, but arguing forcefully against the reality of Aristotelian
universals, which he regarded as the pillars of scholastic logic and metaphysics.
Through philological and philosophical analysis, he demonstrated that universals
were simply collective names given to concrete particulars belonging to the same