Bridging the Gap: A Different View of Renaissance Humanism and Science (original) (raw)
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Renaissance Humanism and Science
Res Publica Litterarum, XIV (1991); Studi umanistici piceni, XI (1991), 1991
applied their thought to problems of the natural world as well. Their approach, which can, like any science, 5 be called a search for truth, nonetheless differed, because of its religious context, from that of the ancient world, as from that of today. The ancient and modern type of Western 6 science can perhaps be called a search for the reality of the natural world -the understanding of the objective (that is, existing independently of the perceiver), evident truth of that reality, 7 and even (or, nowadays, especially) the truth not so evident but provable through experiment and analysis.
This entry examines the humanist articulation of three key philosophical relations: being and seeming, virtue and fortune, and stasis and mutability. These relations address matters of epistemology (knowing), ethics, and ontol-ogy (reality). Humanists, when grappling with these concerns, resorted to alternative approaches. They identified reality on the basis of the stability of reason, which could ground an objective view of things. In this sense, they became finders of wisdom. Or, as seekers of wisdom, they acknowledged the transience of phenomena, which they confronted in their awareness of illusion and limited vision. If they grounded their role as objective expositors of the truth of things on the traditional concept of the animal rationale, they also celebrated the new force of the homo ludens, the philosopher at play, who participates in the unveiling of reality through masking and seeming, and also intersubjec-tively, through conversations with others.
Broadening Horizons of Renaissance Humanism from the Antiquity to the New World
Broadening Horizons of Humanism, 2018
It is a commonplace about the Renaissance that it broadened the horizon of Medieval Europeans in more than one direction. It rediscovered the cultural and intellectual heritage of the classical Antiquity, discovered the true structure of the skies, found new geographical horizons, discovered new lands, and forged the birth of the natural sciences. There was a special intellectual group in the hub of all these changes: the humanists. Some of them were primarily scientists, others educators, or artists, but common in them was that their enthusiasm toward the classical heritage often connected with an interest in the new, the unknown, and the futuristic. The paper reflects on the long debate concerning the definition of humanism and the humanists and revisits several case studies which show the combination of philology, historical interest, and the proposition of new ideas-often inspired by a widening horizon resulting from travel.
Humanism between Middle Ages and Renaissance
New Horizons for Early Modern European Scholarship, 2021
Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy presents a glittering fresco of grandiloquent personalities and cultural dynamism, the colors of which gleam brighter because of their contrast to his briefly sketched medieval dystopia. Burckhardt, of course, did not introduce this dichotomy; it was Petrarch who “created” the Middle Ages. Modern scholars have recognized the artificiality of Petrarchan-Burckhardtian periodization, and medievalists, in particular, have railed against it. Yet in spite of copious evidence for continuities between medieval and Renaissance intellectual life, students, and many scholars, still contrast an ahistorical, otherworldly, clerical intellectual culture of the period before 1300 with a secular, classicizing, and anthropocentric Renaissance agenda. Although specialists would eschew this stark dichotomy, those trained as medievalists continue to focus on scholasticism when they discuss 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th century intellectual life, while those trained as early modernists highlight everything that was (or was claimed to be) novel about the humanists’ program. This chapter argues that a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the emergence of humanism requires, first, that scholars examine the records of schools, courts, and chanceries with the care of researchers like Robert Black and Ronald Witt. Second, it demands that medievalists and early modernists adopt, or at least borrow, each other’s research tools and questions. What are the post-Augustinian, as well as the classical, sources for a humanistic text? How do figures like Marsilio of Padua, Nicholas of Cusa, and Pietro Pompanazzi evince or disdain a new historical approach? Substantive intellectual changes can only be identified by modern scholars who are equipped to distinguish between the inflammatory rhetoric of eager self-promoters and novel ways of thinking. Recognizing the true importance of humanism within early modern European culture requires better understanding of its continuing interaction with earlier scholarly practices.
The Two Cultures and Renaissance Humanism
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 33, 2, June 2008, 121-133., 2008
C. P. Snow's 'two cultures' distinction between scientific and humanistic thought is perennial. It may be said to correspond to empirical and metaphorical bents in human nature. Since antiquity, attempts have been made by some to bridge the gap. The natural bridge of scientific (in the broad sense) scholarship has been largely overlooked, but the development in the West of philological and historical methods by fifteenth and early sixteenth century humanists (in the technical sense) exhibits numerous criteria and examples of a scientific approach to the world around us, as does such scholarship today.