Renaissance philosophy outside Italy
Renaissance philosophy outside Italy
Stuart Brown
Italy might justly be described as the home of Renaissance philosophy. Many of
the important cultural developments of the period originated in Italy and only
gradually spread north and west to other countries. But each of the other major
centres1 of West European cultural activity —the German States, France, the
Iberian Peninsula, England and the Low Countries—provided a distinct context
for philosophical activity. Their very different political and religious histories
had a more or less direct effect on the kind of philosophy that flourished in each
country or region. Each, in its own way, added to what it inherited from Italy and
developed what it received from elsewhere in Europe. In different ways and to
varying extents, they prepared for or anticipated the transition to modern
philosophy. In one way or another, Renaissance philosophy and philosophies
continued to develop and flourish somewhere in Europe throughout the
seventeenth century. They provided an often neglected part of the context for
modern philosophy, both in some ways being continuous with it and in other
ways shaping some of the responses to it. There are a number of philosophers,
indeed, such as Gassendi and Leibniz,2 who can fruitfully be represented as
Renaissance as well as early modern philosophers.
A distinguishing mark of Renaissance philosophers was their deference to the
thought of the ancients. Their arguments often consisted in citing the support of
some ancient authority or the consensus of a number of ancient authorities for
the view they wished to advance. The tendency of modern philosophers, by
contrast, was to rely on appeals to reason and experience rather than on citing
authorities to advance their arguments. Some, of course, did both and the
decision whether to call them modern or Renaissance philosophers might
depend on whether their arguments turned more on one kind of appeal than the
other.
Renaissance philosophy needs also to be distinguished from the earlier style of
scholastic philosophy. And Renaissance philosophy, at least originally, was in
part a reaction against the philosophy of the academic and ecclesiastical world. A
reliance on authority was also a feature of scholastic philosophy, though it is in
some ways more difficult to locate. The scholastics relied on a tradition of
interpreting Aristotle in which appeals to reason, tradition and the word of ‘the
philosopher’ were confused. Some Renaissance philosophers turned their backs
on the Aristotelian tradition and, as we shall see, all the ancient philosophical
systems were revived at one time or another during the Renaissance. But, quite
characteristically, Renaissance philosophers had a high regard for Aristotle and
accused the scholastics of perverting Aristotle’s meaning.3
Nor did scholastic philosophy remain the same in the Renaissance period. On
the contrary, the criticisms from the humanists were often taken to heart and new
developments outside were often reflected in changes within the scholastic
tradition. Thus the Renaissance did not merely bring back neglected traditions of
philosophy but also revitalized the scholastic tradition itself.
It is convenient for the historian of philosophy to label periods by the style of
philosophy that predominates or is most significantly new in them. Any period
of philosophy, however, is always a period of transition and includes both
individuals and movements that are difficult to place. Such qualifications are
particularly needed when writing about the significant movements in European
philosophy over a period of two centuries or more. For while the sixteenth is the
main century for Renaissance philosophy outside Italy, we need to acknowledge
some figures who flourished earlier. We also need to recognize its continuing
vitality well into the period of modern philosophy and even in the eighteenth
century.4
For ease of exposition the leading philosophical figures will be grouped under
distinct strands within Renaissance philosophy. The strands are often
interwoven, however, and, whilst some individuals belong straightforwardly
within one strand, other more complex philosophers can be related to two or
more. There are even those, such as Nicholas of Cusa, who should arguably be
assigned to the late medieval period and others, such as Agrippa, whom some
would represent as early modern philosophers. The value of such debates lies
less perhaps in the prospect of their receiving a definitive resolution than in the
light thrown on the individual philosophers discussed by the possibility of seeing
them from quite different perspectives.
CUSANUS (NICHOLAS OF CUSA) AND RELIGIOUS NEOPLATONISM
Nicholas Kryfts or Krebs was born (in 1401) in the German town of Kues or
Cusa, hence his Latin name of Cusanus. He became a priest and eventually a
bishop, playing an important role in the debates concerning the authority of the
Pope and the Church Councils and in negotiations towards a reunion of the
communions of Rome and Constantinople. He wrote many theological works
and, by the time he died in Italy in 1464, he was a cardinal. His philosophical
writings reflect his concern with the nature and knowledge of God. But he was a
man of great learning who wrote treatises on science and mathematics. He was
influenced by the Italian humanists, learning Greek and amassing a considerable
library of manuscripts. Together with his younger contemporary, Ficino, he
played an important part in the Renaissance revival of Platonism.
Cusanus and his contemporaries did not make the distinction now recognized
between Plato and the school of Neoplatonism begun by Plotinus. By the end of
the seventeenth century Leibniz had begun to make distinctions between the true
Plato and the distortions of and accretions to his thought to be found in the
writings of his successors.5 But such distinctions were not made by the religious
Neoplatonists of the Renaissance. They inherited a tradition in which Plato had
been presented in a Christianized form. Important as a background source for
Cusanus are the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius—the writings falsely attributed to
St Paul’s first Athenian convert Dionysius the Areopagite. These writings had
influenced Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1327) and the medieval Rhineland school
of mysticism to which Cusanus was indebted. He was also indebted to Proclus
and commissioned a translation of his Platonic Theology.
Typically of the religious Neoplatonists Cusanus took God’s creation of the
world to imply that the world reflected God’s infinite nature. The world, for him,
is a ‘contraction’ of God and each finite thing is in turn a ‘contraction’ of the
larger universe. It follows that all things, including contradictory opposites,
coincide in a harmonious unity. If that is so then the principle of contradiction is
not a necessary condition of truth and human reason is not equal to grasping the
true nature of the world. Cusanus accordingly taught what he called ‘learned
ignorance’, partly in opposition to the Aristotelians and their insistence on the
principle of contradiction. He also taught the ‘negative theology’ of Pseudo-
Dionysius, that God transcends all positive knowledge we can have of Him.
Cusanus’s Platonic tendency to mysticism and scepticism in religious matters
did not prevent him from having definite opinions in cosmology. If, for example,
the universe is a mirror of God then it should, he thought, be conceived as having
no determined boundary. The view that everything in the universe is a microcosm
of the whole also committed him to rejecting the Aristotelian orthodoxy that the
heavenly bodies were made of a different substance from the earth. Cusanus
departed in these and in a number of other respects from the established
cosmology of Ptolemy and Aristotle.
The case of Cusanus illustrates how Neoplatonism helped to liberate some
from the (as it happens, false) assumptions of Aristotelian science and thus
contributed to the development of what, with the benefit of hindsight, we would
judge to be a truer view of the world. The influence of Neoplatonism on how
people thought about the world was not, however, invariably helpful in this way.
The view that man is a microcosm of the universe (the macrocosm) played a
central part in the thought of Paracelsus and the very influential tradition of
occult philosophy during the Renaissance. That view, to which we shall return,6
led to a number of false beliefs, for instance about what in nature could be used
to cure what diseases in humankind.
Cusanus was himself part of a tradition of philosophy in Germany which was
to continue throughout the Renaissance period and beyond. That, no doubt, is
why he appears to anticipate later German philosophy as much as he does.
Cusanus held, for instance, a number of characteristically Leibnizian doctrines
such as that each thing in the world is a reflection not only of God but of all
other things.7 Moreover, his doctrine of the coincidence of opposites in God
seems like Schelling’s theory of the Absolute as the point at which all contrasts
and distinctions disappear. But Cusanus, though perhaps the major Renaissance
Neoplatonist outside Italy, was neither the first nor the last in the German
tradition of Neoplatonism and religious mysticism. Nor were these doctrines
peculiar to him. The thought that God’s nature is reflected in every created thing
is a natural consequence of the characteristically Neoplatonist doctrine of
emanation, according to which the world comes about by a kind of overflowing
of the divinity. Nor was Cusanus the only German philosopher of the period to
hold that in God all contrasts and differences disappear.
One philosopher in the German tradition to hold both of these views was
Jakob Boehme (1575–1624), a self-educated artisan. Boehme’s ideas were the
result of much reading and reflect the work of the occult philosopher and doctor
Paracelsus (see pp. 77–8) as well as the mystic Valentin Weigel (1493–1541).
But he included highly idiosyncratic elements of his own. For instance he
identified God the Father with the Will, the Son with the Heart and the Holy
Spirit with the ‘moving life’ that emanated from these, giving rise to the spiritual
world. In Boehme, as in other Neoplatonists, the material world results by
a process of degeneration. His stress on religious intuition put him outside
philosophy, as it put him outside religious orthodoxy. He was immensely
influential, however, not only in his own time (some of his followers formed
themselves into a religious sect) but also, much later, when his work was
rediscovered by German Romantics such as Schelling.
Another strand of religious Neoplatonism that became assimilated into the
German tradition was that of the Christian Cabbala. ‘Cabbala’ is a Hebrew word
(variously transliterated) which means ‘tradition’ and became attached to an
occult tradition for interpreting the Bible which legend had it Moses passed
down through a succession of Jewish leaders. Some of the earlier Italian
Renaissance philosophers, such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Francesco
Giorgi, had taken a Christian interest in the Cabbala.8 This interest was pursued
in Germany by the humanist Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522)9 and culminated in
the late seventeenth century in a project to put together in Latin translation the
Hebrew writings known as the Zohar with other expository material. This project
involved the collaboration of two older contemporaries and friends of Leibniz,
Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–89) and Francis Mercury van Helmont
(1618–99). Knorr was responsible for the main work of editing and seeing
through the publication of Kabbala Denudata (1677–84). But amongst van
Helmont’s contributions was a short Cabbalistical Dialogue in which he sought
to expound Cabbalism and defend it from some of the criticisms levelled against
it by one of its former admirers, the distinguished Cambridge Platonist Henry
More (1614–87).10
Van Helmont’s exposition of Cabbalism gives central place to a recognizably
Neoplatonic paradox: how could the base material world have resulted from a
God who is pure Spirit? How, to put it in what for a Neoplatonist is just another
way, can what is passive and inert be caused by a being whose nature contains
nothing of that kind but who is ‘pure activity’? Van Helmont’s resolution of the
paradox is through a theory that, in the first place, is a theory of emanation,
according to which God immediately produces from Himself things of a purely
spiritual nature. These spirits do, however, degenerate and become dull, clinging
together to form matter. The individual spirit, in this reduced state, is ‘now a
natural Monade or single Being, and a very Atome’.11 In common with the other
Neoplatonists of the late seventeenth century—Leibniz, arguably, included—van
Helmont produced a monadology that sought to combine a Neoplatonic
metaphysics with contemporary scientific speculation about the nature of matter.
Religious Neoplatonism had some influence in the Iberian Peninsula in the early
sixteenth century, for instance on the thought of the Portuguese Jewish
philosopher Leon Hebreo (or Abarbanel) (c. 1460– c. 1523), who wrote a
dialogue on love. In France the common Neoplatonic view of Plato’s writing as
prisca theologia, as part of a wisdom shared by Moses and other ancient writers,
was taken up by Symphorien Champier and the brothers de la Boderie in the midsixteenth
century.12 But Platonism’s reputation for containing the seeds of many
heresies was not forgotten. And in the reaffirmation of orthodoxy during the
Catholic reformation and after the Council of Trent (1545–63) Aristotle was
encouraged and Platonism actively discouraged.13 None the less religious
Neoplatonism continued to be influential, at least in liberal Protestant circles in
Germany and Britain, right into the eighteenth century.14
ERASMUS AND CHRISTIAN HUMANISM
Christian humanism was not so much a philosophical system but a set of
attitudes which could be held by people who were sympathetic to any or none of
the philosophies of the ancient world. The Christian humanists characteristically
opposed metaphysical dogma with a sceptical outlook, preferring to rely on faith
than to defend the Christian religion by scholastic proofs, and they stressed a
simple undogmatic Christianity rather than doctrinal correctness.15 They also
gave a place to ordinary human pleasures in opposition to the monastic virtues
and helped to prepare the way for a revival of Epicureanism.16 The humanists
were very influential in opposing the then academic (scholastic) philosophy and
theology during the Renaissance period. They were inclined to defend certain
philosophical positions, such as belief in free will, but to do so in a nontheoretical
way. Humanism was characteristically a lay movement and naturally
encouraged a tendency to address more applied and topical questions.
The doyen of Christian humanism was undoubtedly the great Dutch scholar
Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536). He was a pioneer in applying the critical
methods of the humanists to the text of the Bible as well as in advocating its
translation into the languages of the people. Erasmus wrote a sceptical work (In
Praise of Folly) which, if not itself rigorously philosophical, helped to establish
the role of Christian sceptic that others adopted in the late sixteenth and the
seventeenth century. Like Martin Luther (1483–1546), Erasmus was hostile to
scholasticism. More tolerant and less dogmatic than Luther and not in the least
schismatic, he remained a moderate and conservative but liberal and sceptical
Catholic to the end of his life. The two men engaged in a debate about free will,
Luther denying that men were able to achieve salvation of their own accord.
Erasmus for his part defended the availability of divine grace and human freedom
to accept or refuse it.17
Amongst the Christian humanists in England, also distinguished followers of
Erasmus, were Thomas More (1478–1535) and John Colet (c. 1467–1519).
More’s Utopia shows some debt to Plato’s Republic, for instance in its
communistic rather than individualistic ideal of human living. Yet his utopians
are given to a life of pleasure and the work is Epicurean rather than Stoic or
Platonic in its view of the highest good. At the same time the higher pleasures of
reading literature are important to them. More’s work had a considerable
influence on English literature, for instance on Bacon’s New Atlantis. Colet was
an educational reformer who was strongly influenced by the Italian Neoplatonist
Ficino.18
Erasmus also enjoyed a very considerable following in Spain where the
erasmitas were influential both at court and in the universities until the midsixteenth
century. One of the most outstanding Spanish Christian humanists was
Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540). Vives was a keen opponent of Aristotelianism and
was sceptical about the attainment of knowledge as understood in Aristotelian
terms. His thought anticipates the ‘mitigated scepticism’ of many of the early
modern philosophers. He advocated a form of inductive method and a more
limited view of what could be achieved in science.19 His views influenced
another sceptical Spanish philosopher, Sanches. Vives was not only a
theoretician but also a social reformer who criticized the Church for failing to do
enough for the poor and who advocated a system of poor relief.
After the Council of Trent and the revival of orthodox belief and piety in
Catholic Spain, the erasmitas lost their positions of importance. But their
influence was strongly felt in the writings of the new scholastics who emerged in
their place. The new scholastics adopted a less formal style of writing than in
earlier scholasticism and often their philosophical writings were reflections on
problems of practical life. The humanist concern with practical problems was
shared by many of the Spanish Jesuits, notwithstanding their commitment to
doctrinal orthodoxy and their involvement in doctrinal controversies.
This concern was shown by Juan de Mariana (1536–1624), who risked trouble
with his Order and with the Spanish authorities through his pronouncements on
the problem of poverty. Mariana also created trouble for himself by a book he
wrote that offered guidance on the rights and duties of kings.20 This book
became notorious by appearing to sanction regicide in certain circumstances. Its
author went so far as to refer to the assassin of Henry III as ‘the eternal glory of
France’, words which his Order required him to delete from later editions. Such
lapses of discretion were perhaps a hazard for a work which adopted the relaxed
and personal style of the humanists and which developed its arguments through
discussions of particular cases. At the same time Mariana wrote within the
intellectual framework for discussing political philosophy provided by Aristotle
and Aquinas. His book was thus very traditional and very topical and
provocative at the same time. When Henry IV was also assassinated part of the
blame fell on Mariana’s book, copies of which were publicly burned in Paris. He
himself spent some time in prison, but no charges were brought against him in
Spain.
It is not certain how much Mariana would have acknowledged a humanist
influence on his practical concerns and on his style of writing. But one figure
who represented himself as a Christian humanist and who sought the support of
Erasmus was the German “occult philosopher’ Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von
Nettesheim (1486–1535). Agrippa wrote a highly iconoclastic book to expose the
‘uncertainty’ and ‘vanity’ of the arts and sciences. He wrote the book, as he
explained in the preface he wrote for the reader, ‘because I see that so many
men, puffed up with human knowledge and learning, not only condemn and
despise the words of the Sacred Scriptures, but also prosecute and deride it with
the same contempt…’. To the extent that he sought to encourage scepticism
about human learning and institutions and a return to a simple biblical
Christianity, Agrippa was similar to Erasmus. But he was more radical though
perhaps even less consistently sceptical. He sought to demolish the edifice of
received wisdom in order to remove the barriers to the discovery of truth that
were placed in people’s way by deference to established authorities. Thus he
could exclaim: ‘how impious a piece of tyranny it is, to capture the minds of
students for prefixed authors, and to deprive them of the liberty of searching
after and following the truth….’21 This suggests that Agrippa was by no means
content to accept an Erasmian fideism. On the contrary, he seems to have
believed that there was a method of attaining truth that was not vulnerable to the
sceptic’s attack.22 He remained a Catholic but he was by no means disposed to
accept the authority of the Church. Erasmus, by contrast, whilst acknowledging
the fallibility and imperfection of the Church and its institutions, taught that in
matters of faith they provided the best guide available.
PARACELSUS AND THE TRADITION OF OCCULT PHILOSOPHY
It is perhaps artificial to distinguish religious Neoplatonism from its
manifestations in what has become known as ‘occult philosophy’. The former is
concerned with the relation of humankind to God and only in a metaphysical way
with the material world. The latter is more concerned with the relation of
humankind to the world and with possible ways of manipulating the world for
human benefit. There is no reason why these concerns should not be shared by
the same people, as to some extent they were. They might, moreover, be given
almost equal emphasis, as they were in the case of the Christian Cabbalist F.
M.van Helmont, who in his own day was celebrated throughout much of Europe
as a physician whose alternative medicine brought some spectacular cures where
other doctors had failed. None the less there is some justification for the
distinction between religious Neoplatonism and the occult philosophy. If the
theoretical claims of the former brought charges of heresy, the practical bent of
the occult philosophers led them to attach importance to experience.
One of the most influential figures in the Renaissance tradition of occult
philosophy was Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (c. 1493–1541), who
styled himself and is generally known as Paracelsus. Paracelsus was a self-taught
Swiss physician who, like Agrippa and perhaps partly under his influence, set
himself against all established scientific authority. ‘My proofs’, he insisted,
‘derive from experience and my own reasoning, and not from reference to
authorities.’23 In some ways Paracelsus and Agrippa belong in the modern period.
But their empiricism was unrigorous and their rejection of past assumptions and
traditional authorities was not thoroughgoing. Both accepted the Neoplatonic
view of humankind as a microcosm of the universe. Paracelsus based his
medicine on this assumption. There are, for him, all sorts of correspondences
between what we discover in man and what we discover in nature. These
correspondences are evidence of hidden causal relations which the occult
philosopher can learn to trigger and so manipulate the course of nature in a
magical way. The discovery of such correspondences is a matter of what Agrippa
termed ‘long experience’. But the occult philosophers lacked a rigorous
methodology for identifying them reliably. The kidney bean may look like a
kidney but, contrary to what Paracelsians supposed, such beans have no special
powers to cure kidney disorders.
Paracelsus, like other practitioners of an alternative medicine, had an erratic
career as a physician, but he was credited with some spectacular cures. He did
introduce some specific treatments of value, such as the use of laudanum as a
pain-killer. Moreover some of his ideas would have been of great benefit had
they been adopted. On his account all disease is natural and this led him to reject
the view that mental disorders are due to inhabitation by demons. At the same
time he was overly optimistic in his belief that nature had a cure for every
disease.
Amongst the Paracelsians were some, including Boehme and the younger van
Helmont, who have here been categorized as religious Neoplatonists. Mention
should be made, however, of John Baptiste van Helmont (1577–1644)—who,
though less of a philosopher than his son, is an important figure in the history of
chemistry and is credited with the discovery of gases.24 The Paracelsians were
influential through much of the seventeenth century, when they were represented
in England by Robert Fludd (1574–1637) and others.25 But they and many of the
religious Neoplatonists were opposed by, and some later opposed themselves to,
the mechanical philosophy. Gassendi wrote a book attacking Fludd, and the
moderns, especially the rationalists, tended to dismiss the occult philosophers
and Neoplatonists generally precisely because they rejected such ‘hidden’ or
unintelligible factors in the explanations for phenomena.26
ARISTOTELIANISM AND ITS OPPONENTS
During the medieval period, Aristotle’s authority was undisputed and he was
usually referred to simply as ‘the philosopher’. But, though Aristotle remained
by far the single most important philosopher during the Renaissance, this
monopoly came to an end. Some of the Italian Renaissance humanists like
Lorenzo Valla (see Chapter 1) associated Aristotle with the scholasticism they
rejected. Others, however, such as Ermolao Barbaro (1454–93), sought to revive
what they regarded as the true Aristotle, studied in the Greek, as against the
distorted Aristotelian doctrines taught by the scholastics. Some, like Ficino,
turned to other traditions, particularly the Platonic. Others, like Giovanni Pico
della Mirandola, sought to reconcile Aristotle with those other traditions. These
were just some of the responses available also to those outside Italy.
Martin Luther seems to have taken the extreme view of Valla and largely
opposed himself to all philosophy, taking the view that Christianity had been
corrupted by the Greek philosophical influence. Such a view could hardly be
sustained in the long run in view of the central role that philosophy played both
in the articulation of theological doctrine and in the educational curriculum. Not
surprisingly, therefore, one of Luther’s closest associates, Philipp Melanchthon
(1497–1560), went back to an eclectic Aristotelianism. Melanchthon played a
key role in the consolidation of Lutheranism in Germany, partly through his
published works such as the Loci communes. Though this was a basically
theological work, Melanchthon adopted a broadly Aristotelian framework. At the
same time he was willing to interpret Aristotle in a modern way (for instance, as
a nominalist) and, where the defence of religion might be advantaged by it, he
did not refrain from incorporating notions that are quite foreign to
Aristotelianism, such as the doctrine of innate principles.
Within the German university context a kind of Renaissance Aristotelianism
became possible which embraced the humanist critique of the scholastics but
insisted that they had distorted Aristotle’s meaning. This had been the position of
the so-called ‘father of German humanism’, Roelof Huysman (1444–85), known
by his Latin name of Rodolphus Agricola. It was to become a common humanist
position—one held, for instance, by the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre
d’Étaples (c. 1460–1536), who sought to reform Aristotelianism via more
accurate texts.27
The thought that the scholastics had debased Aristotle and departed from his
true teachings invited, within the Protestant context, a comparison with the
religious Reformation and its return to the correct text and true teachings of the
Bible. There could be reformers (reformatores) in philosophy who would call for
a return to the true Aristotle—the thought being that Aristotle was right after all
and not to be condemned on account of the errors and obscurities of the
scholastics.28 In reality, however, the distinction between such a pure
Aristotelianism and scholasticism was virtually impossible to sustain. In the
short run, at least, the tacit and unthinking influence of traditional interpretations
of Aristotle, like traditional interpretations of the Bible, was likely to be greater
than new interpretations based on a humanist treatment of the Greek texts.
Moreover the virtual equivalence of Aristotelianism with rationality disposed
many to credit Aristotle with any view that had the authority of reason.
Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy were inevitably confused and the
assignation of individuals to one category rather than another is often highly
problematic. Some of the new scholastics (see pp. 81–3) seem to have played an
important part in ensuring that Aristotle’s texts continued to receive attention.
Indeed it is a remarkable fact that the publication of Aristotle’s texts reached a
high point in the mid-sixteenth century when the Catholic Reformation was at its
peak.29 The return to Aristotle in philosophy may have seemed like a return to
good order in intellectual life. That, at any rate, seems to have been the thinking
of Ignatius of Loyola, whose quasi-military teaching order, the Society of Jesus
(founded in 1534), was committed to the restoration of papal authority, to
Aquinas in theology and to Aristotle in philosophy.
If it is difficult to treat scholastics and Aristotelians as a separate class, there is
no difficulty about separating the anti-Aristotelians from either of them. One of
the most prominent and influential opponents of Aristotle was the French
convert to Calvinism, Pierre de la Ramée (1515–72), usually known by his Latin
name of Ramus. Ramus’s criticisms fastened on the artificiality of Aristotelian
logic which, in common with other humanists, he claimed was useless for
discovering new truth. What was needed was a ‘natural logic’ that reflected
human thought processes. What was needed was an art of discovery and an art of
judgement. Ramus’s writings were much more influential than they were
original. In particular they helped to focus the preoccupation with method
characteristic of such early modern philosophers as Descartes and Leibniz.30
SUAREZ AND THE NEW SCHOLASTICISM
I suggested in discussing Christian humanism (pp. 75–7) that part of what was
new about the new scholasticism of the late sixteenth century was its reflection
of humanistic values. This is already evident in the writings of the Dominican
Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1492–1546), who had been acquainted during his time in
Paris with Erasmus, Vives and some of the other leading humanists. Vitoria was
appointed in 1526 to the most important theological chair at Salamanca and it is
partly through this appointment that he was to exercise such a formative
influence on the new scholasticism that flourished in Spain in the late sixteenth
century.
Vitoria is best remembered for his pioneering work in international law.31 He
gave lectures at the university on current issues and the notes of some of these
were published as relectiones on particular topics. In his De Indis (1532) he
considered and defended the rights of the American Indians against the Spanish
colonizers. In the same year he also produced a study of the rights and wrongs of
war, his De Jure Belli, in which he argued for proportionality in the use of force
as well as for the rights of non-combatants. Although Vitoria accepted there
could be a ‘just war’, he rejected religious grounds as a ‘just cause’. Thus the
Spanish had no right, on his arguments, to make war on the American Indians or
to dispossess them of their property merely because they were heathens. Vitoria
was arguing within a framework of natural law that derived from Aristotle and
Aquinas. But his concern with applied questions, which led to his being
consulted by Charles V on matters of state, shows the influence of humanism.
As well as lecturing on such topics as the just war, Vitoria also lectured on
theology. Here he broke with a centuries-old tradition by lecturing on Aquinas’s
Summa Theologica instead of the Sentences of Peter Lombard. This had already
been done by another Dominican in Italy, Thomas de Vio, commonly known as
Cajetan (1468–1534). But Vitoria pioneered the change in Spain. In doing so he
prepared the way for even greater changes from traditional styles of presentation.
These were initiated by his pupil, Francisco Suarez (1548–1617), perhaps the
most important systematic philosopher of the period.32 The traditional scholastic
mode of presentation was the commentary. Suarez’s most important work, his
Disputationes metaphysicae (1597), was the first systematic and independent
treatise on metaphysics. It dealt with a wide range of topics, from the nature of
metaphysics to the existence of God, from universals to our knowledge of
singulars, causality, freedom, individuality and many others. Although, as a
Jesuit, Suarez was committed to Aquinas in theology, he departed from St
Thomas in treating philosophy as independent of theology. His Latin was easy to
read by comparison with the usual run of scholastic writings. Moreover some of
his thought, for instance his nominalism, already reflected a critical approach to
traditional scholasticism, and some accommodation to the ‘modern way’ of
William of Occam and his followers. These are among reasons why he may have
been so influential. But the pervasive influence of Suarez on seventeenthcentury
philosophy was not due entirely to the virtues of his own writings—remarkable
though they were. Suarez was the major philosopher of the Society of Jesus and
the Jesuits played a key role in the best educational institutions of Catholic
Europe. Suarez’s metaphysics also found its way into textbooks and was widely
taught in Protestant universities. In these diverse ways his Disputations became
an important part of the background to Descartes33 in a Catholic context and to
Leibniz in his Protestant German context.34
Suarez was also very influential as a political philosopher. The Dutch theorist
Huig de Groot (1583–1645), known by his Latin name of Grotius, was indebted
to Suarez and the Thomist tradition of natural law.35 Grotius, who is regarded as
the first theorist of natural rights, found in this tradition an answer to the
relativism of Montaigne. Suarez himself drew rather conservative conclusions.
Although he held the view that government derives its authority from the
consent of the people, Suarez held that the community corporately invested its
authority in the monarch in such a way that it could not be taken back. Unlike the
more radical Jesuit Mariana,36 Suarez thought it was almost never right to kill a
tyrant, unless he was threatening to destroy the community. Again Suarez
distinguished the ius gentium from natural law by making the former depend on
customary practices of states rather than on what was true for all states. Since
slavery conformed to the ius gentium, Suarez did not condemn it.
Suarez’s work had great influence within the Jesuit order. Some took to
writing systematic treatises on philosophy. The Spaniard Roderigo de Arriaga
(1592–1667) wrote a systematic introduction to philosophy called Cursus
philosophicus (1632) which was widely read and cited throughout the century.
Others engaged in applied philosophy. One of Suarez’s pupils, the Flemish Jesuit
Leonard Lessius (1554–1623) wrote a book largely devoted to what nowadays
would be called ‘business ethics’.37 Lessius, who taught theology in Louvain,
travelled regularly to Antwerp to learn at first hand about business practices in
what was then one of Europe’s major financial centres. His De jure et
justitia drew on the thought of Aquinas but sought to answer contemporary
moral problems, including the fraught problem of usury. Lessius was the first
Catholic theologian to defend the view that lending money with interest was not
wrong in itself.
Throughout the late Renaissance period Jesuit philosophers were to be found at
the frontiers of the subject. That is not to say that they did not engage in debates
relating to traditional philosophical topics. One frequent topic of Renaissance
philosophy was free will, and the traditional problem of how this could be
reconciled with God’s foreknowledge and preordination was addressed by,
amongst others, Luis de Molina (1535–1600).38 Molina, as also Suarez, held that
God knows through what he called the ‘middle science’ (scientia media) what
any individual would do (freely) if given sufficient grace to do it. In extending
sufficient grace and so preordaining a right action God does not detract from the
freedom of the individual. Such freedom is quite consistent, Molina argued, with
the fact that nothing happens but God knows it will happen and ordains that it
will happen.
Others of the Society of Jesus worked and wrote commentaries on the texts of
Aristotle. One who influenced Suarez himself was ‘the Portuguese Aristotle’,
Peter da Fonseca (1528–99). Fonseca’s own books—one of which went into
fifty-three editions between 1564 and 1625—were by themselves highly
influential in restoring Aristotelianism.39 Moreover, as a teacher at the University
of Coimbra, he was able to instigate the work of a team of Jesuit scholars to
produce a set of texts and commentaries on Aristotle’s major works. The
Coimbra commentaries (1592–1606) were often reprinted and widely used
throughout the seventeenth century.
JUSTUS LIPSIUS AND THE REVIVAL OF STOICISM
Stoicism was one of the great systems of ancient Greek philosophy and one that
was adopted by some of the greatest writers of the Roman world, such as Seneca
and Cicero. The Stoics believed that events in the material world were
profoundly and necessarily interconnected. They believed that there was an
underlying cause of these events but did not identify this first cause with a
providence. Wise men do not allow themselves to be dependent on the way the
world goes but seek to achieve tranquillity through recognizing the
interconnection of things.
The Renaissance revival of Stoicism is due, in particular, to the Flemish
humanist Joest Lips (1547–1606), usually known by his Latin name, Justus
Lipsius. Lipsius’s first Neostoic work was his De constantia (1584),40 a dialogue
set during the revolt of the Low Countries against Spanish rule. The work
commends the virtue of steadfastness (constantia)—of being unmoved by
changes in external circumstances. Lipsius’s main accounts of Stoicism were his
Physiologia Stoicorum and Manuductio ad stoicam philosophiam, both published
in 1604. He also produced an edition of the texts of Seneca.
Stoicism was introduced into Germany by Kaspar Schoppe (1576–1649),
known by his Latin name of Scioppius, and seems to have become well
established in the Low Countries.41 It was also influential in France,42 thanks
partly to Guillaume Du Vair (1556–1621). Du Vair wrote several works in
French, including his De la philosophie morale des Stoïques, which he wrote as a
preface to his French translation of Epictetus’s Enchiridion in 1594. Like
Lipsius, he advocated a Christianized Stoicism. Both were translated into English
in the late sixteenth century—Du Vair’s Moral Philosophie of the Stoicks being
favoured with two translations.43
Stoicism was highly influential at the beginning of the seventeenth century,
when it was taken to be entirely compatible with Christianity.44 During the
century, however, this compatibility came to be questioned and its influence
declined.45 Epicureanism, on the other hand, seems to have become regarded
more favourably.46 For long misrepresented and dismissed as a debased
philosophy, it was revived in a Christianized form by Pierre Gassendi, who
published three books on Epicurus in 1647–9. Gassendi was able to do this by
presenting Epicurean atomism as a hypothesis and combining it with scepticism
as to whether humans are capable of arriving at definitive knowledge of the
world.47
Stoicism and Epicureanism, together with Platonism and Aristotelianism,
comprised what were seen as the four great ‘dogmatic’ philosophical systems of
the ancient world. As we have seen, each of them was revived and defended in
the late Renaissance period. The embarrassment of choice was no doubt one
factor promoting a more persistent revival, that of scepticism, which opposed
itself to the claims of such dogmatic systems. Yet some, like Gassendi, found it
possible in practice to combine scepticism with a suitably tempered allegiance to
any of the ancient ‘schools’, except Aristotelianism. Montaigne began as a Stoic
before rejecting that System for the scepticism of his later period. But his associate
and disciple Pierre Charron (1541–1603) combined his scepticism with a Stoic
moral philosophy.48
MONTAIGNE AND THE REVIVAL OF ANCIENT SCEPTICISM
We have already seen that the Christian humanists, in their reaction against
academic philosophy and theology, tended to adopt a highly sceptical view of
human aspirations to knowledge apart from revelation. In the case of Agrippa
this scepticism was argued for in a comprehensive and systematic way by a
critical and highly iconoclastic treatment of the pretensions of all the known arts
and sciences. Agrippa alluded to the ancient Greek sceptics but made little use of
their arguments. Renaissance philosophers often argued by seeking to establish a
consensus amongst ancient authorities. Agrippa turned this mode of argument on
its head and sought to argue, on the contrary, that on every major point the
ancient authorities contradicted one another.
During the Renaissance period some of the important sources for classical
scepticism were rediscovered, including Cicero’s Academica, Diogenes
Laertius’s Life of Pyrrho and the collected writings of Sextus Empiricus.49 These
arguments were frequently taken up in a Christian humanist way—in the first
place, to discredit the claims of Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy and, more
positively, to underline the ‘fideist’ claim that humans could not achieve
knowledge by their own resources and should rely instead on faith and divine
revelation. The Christian Pyrrhonist, François de La Mothe le Vayer (1588–1672),
wrote as if the entire purpose of scepticism was to reduce people to a total
suspense of judgement (called the Epoché). In that state of mind they had
abandoned the arrogance of the scholastics (referred to abusively as ‘the
Pedants’) for the humility of those able to receive the fruits of faith: ‘O precious
Epoché! O sure and agreeable mental retreat! O inescapable antidote against the
presumption of knowledge of the Pedants!’50
There is little doubt that La Mothe le Vayer was sincere in his profession of a
religious motivation. It was so usual, however, to plead such a motivation that it
became something of a convention adopted later by many of the best-known
sceptics of the modern period such as Pierre Bayle and David Hume. Just
because it was a way of making scepticism publicly acceptable and a way of
avoiding the charge of subversion, it was a motive that might readily be
professed insincerely, either because it was not the motive at all or because it
was not as important a motive as was made out. For this reason the interpretation
of the writings of Renaissance sceptics such as Agrippa, Michel de Montaigne
(1533–92) and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) has been fraught with difficulty and
controversy.51
Agrippa sought to present himself, as we have seen, as an Erasmian sceptic
whose purpose was to make people turn back to a simple biblical Christianity.
But, as the author of De occulta philosophia he was represented in the late
sixteenth century as a Faust figure, who had made a pact with the devil in order
to obtain a knowledge of the magical arts. This evil reputation should probably
be regarded as an almost total fabrication, as a propaganda coup by the monks to
whom Agrippa was so bitterly opposed. At the same time it is notable that one form
of magic—a natural or empirical magic—was exempted from the otherwise
complete scepticism of Agrippa’s De vanitate. This makes him appear as a Faust
figure in a more positive way, as someone who rejected established knowledge
as of no value to human beings and who sought rather to unlock the secrets of
nature so as to use natural powers for human benefit. But it may be wrong to
expect a simple consistent interpretation of the thought of such figures as
Agrippa. The existence of tensions and inconsistencies in their thought may more
fruitfully be seen as a reflection of what has been identified as the deepening
‘sceptical crisis’52 of Renaissance and early modern philosophy.
Montaigne’s Apologie de Raimond Sebond (1580) used the arguments of the
ancient sceptics in order to cast doubt on the reliability of the senses, to show
how human judgements are made fallible by all sorts of social and cultural
factors. Montaigne advocated the Pyrrhonian suspension of judgement and urged
that people should live in accordance with nature and custom. He professed
Christian fideism but at least part of his purpose in using sceptical arguments
seems to have been to oppose bigotry and promote greater tolerance. He seems to
have been a conservative, suggesting that people, having been led to a due sense
of the limitations of human faculties, should accept the guidance of established
authority, be it civil or ecclesiastical.
Another direction in which scepticism might be pursued was to the conclusion
that only God, strictly speaking, was capable of knowledge, if knowledge be
understood in the Aristotelian sense of giving necessary reasons or causes for
phenomena. Human beings could not hope to achieve such knowledge. This is
the conclusion, for instance, of the arguments put forward by the Portuguese
physician and philosopher Francisco Sanches (c. 1550–1623) in his Quod Nihil
Scitur.53 One corollary Sanches drew was the fideistic one, that the Christian
religion cannot be defended by philosophy and depends wholly on faith. But he
also, and quite consistently, proposed an experimental method that would lead to
a true ‘understanding of natural phenomena’. Sanches thus anticipated one kind
of response to scepticism in modern philosophy (for instance in Gassendi and
Locke) which was to accept the impossibility of knowledge but to seek a reliable
substitute through methods which would at least give results that were highly
probable.
The arguments of the sceptics provided an important part of the intellectual
context in which Descartes (see Chapters 5 and 6) developed his philosophical
thought. Descartes sought to meet the sceptics on their own ground. Yet it is not
known that any sceptic thought he had been refuted by Descartes’s arguments.
On the contrary, the sceptics, notably Simon Foucher (1644–97), were amongst
his keenest critics. Foucher presented himself, in Renaissance style, as an
apologist for the sceptics of the ancient Platonic Academy. His characteristic
mode of attack was to identify the underlying assumptions of the metaphysical
dogmatists (Descartes and Malebranche particularly) and then complain that
these had not been demonstrated.54 He did believe that certain truths (e.g. the
existence of God) could be demonstrated but denied Descartes’s demonstration of
the existence of the material world. Foucher was an early critic of the distinction
between primary and secondary qualities. He played an important role in
showing how Cartesianism tended towards idealism.55 Indirectly, through Bayle
and Berkeley, Foucher’s scepticism is linked with that of David Hume.56
CONCLUDING REMARKS
It is convenient to distinguish Renaissance from early modern philosophy. But,
in some respects, modern philosophy continued tendencies that already existed
beforehand. Humanism took philosophy out of the schoolroom and the cloister
and made it, to a degree unprecedented in the history of Christendom, a
layperson’s subject. Whereas previously Latin had been the language for
philosophy as for academic discourse generally, the development of printing and
a wider lay readership made translation into vernacular languages an increasingly
common practice. This in turn led, particularly in France, to the practice of
writing philosophical works in the vernacular. Amongst late-sixteenth-century
philosophers, Montaigne, Du Vair and Charron all wrote in French.
Another modern tendency already apparent in the late sixteenth century was to
treat philosophy as a subject independent of theology. This showed itself even in
the new scholasticism, a movement which originated amongst clergy. It is a
curious feature of the Catholic reformation that it promoted a more secular view
of philosophy. Grotius put it famously, if controversially, in his suggestion that
the obligations of natural law hold even ‘if we concede that there is no God’. In
this respect his view of natural law was no different from that of the Jesuit
Suarez, to whom he acknowledged a considerable debt. It seems clear that one
reason why Suarez and other Jesuits gave so much time to political theory was
that they wished to see a radical separation between the authority of a monarch
and the authority of the Church. Whereas the authority of a monarch was secular
and derived ultimately from the consent of the people, the Church and papal
authority was directly ordained by God.
The respect in which Renaissance philosophy is most obviously different from
that of modern philosophy is in its willingness to use arguments that rely upon
appeal to traditional authorities. Renaissance philosophers believed, or affected
to believe, that they were reviving the thought of the ancients. For some this
meant believing in an ancient wisdom that had been lost and needed to be
recovered. But ancient authorities could be found to disagree with one another.
This consideration left a choice between becoming a partisan of a particular
ancient ‘sect’ or becoming a sceptic.
One might, of course, combine a moderate scepticism with the qualified
adoption of one of the ancient systems.57 To do this consistently, however, it
would be necessary to find a basis for accepting what the ancient authors had
said which did not consist simply in the fact that they had said it. To do that was
to begin to be a modern philosopher. To the extent that this is what Gassendi did
in his defence of Epicureanism, he is properly regarded as a modern philosopher.
Some of the early modern philosophers have, like Gassendi, a Renaissance
face and indeed philosophy could still be presented in a Renaissance style right
through the seventeenth and even in the eighteenth century.58 But, if moderns
could sometimes behave like Renaissance philosophers, it is also true that some
Renaissance philosophers were in some respects early moderns. For instance,
many of the most sceptical and iconoclastic figures, such as Agrippa, Vives,
Sanches and Ramus sought independent methods of making discoveries and
verifying them. Methodology was already becoming a preoccupation of late
Renaissance philosophy, as it was for the early moderns. The two periods of
philosophy are to that extent continuous. For this reason the sixteenth century
may as aptly be represented as a period of transition as a period of revival or
‘renaissance’.
NOTES
1 These countries and regions were home to most of the major Renaissance
philosophers outside Italy. Mention should also be made of Switzerland, which was
the native country of Paracelsus. Renaissance philosophy was not, of course,
confined to these countries. But other parts of Europe are largely neglected in the
literature. For accounts of humanism in Croatia, Hungary and the Czech Lands, see
Rabil [2.96], Part III.
2 See, for instance, Brown [2.171], See also Heinekamp [2.176].
3 See pp. 79–81.
4 See note 14 below.
5 See note 26 below.
6 See pp. 77–9.
7 In his Discourse on Metaphysics, sec. IX, for instance, Leibniz put forward a
number of paradoxical propositions, beliefs made more credible by his theory of
substance, including that no two substances are exactly alike and that each
substance is a mirror of God and of the entire universe. These doctrines are all
anticipated in De docta ignorantia, but it is unlikely that Leibniz owed any of them
directly to Cusanus. Indeed he wrote as if the first of them was a refinement by him
of a doctrine of Aquinas.
8 See Chapter 1, pp. 45–6, for a more detailed account of the interest in the Cabbala
in the Italian Renaissance.
9 See Reuchlin [2.56], particularly the introduction by G.Lloyd Jones.
10 Henry More is discussed in vol. 5, Chapter 1, as is another Neoplatonist, Ann
Conway. For a discussion of the connection between these two philosophers,
F.M.van Helmont and Leibniz, see Brown [2.170].
11 Van Helmont, [2.62], 13.
12 On the influence of Champier, see Copenhaver [2.115]. On the ‘ancient theology’
in sixteenth-century France, see Walker [2.108], ch. 3.
13 For the encouragement of Aristotle’s philosophy, see note 29 below. The fate of
Bruno discussed at the end of the previous chapter is symptomatic of the reaction
against Neoplatonism in Catholic orthodoxy. For an account of the reaction against
the occult philosophy, see also Yates [2.109].
14 Thus Berkeley, in his late work Siris (1744), sought to argue that ‘the
Pythagoreans and Platonists had a notion of the true System of the World’ (sec.
266) and explicitly acknowledged key Neoplatonic figures such as Plotinus,
Proclus and Iamblichus.
15 Some of those discussed as sceptics on pp. 85–7, such as Montaigne, may also be
classed as Christian humanists. Erasmus, Vives and perhaps Agrippa can also be
discussed under both heads.
16 See pp. 83–4. See also Allen [2.75] and Jungkuntz [2.93].
17 There is a version of this debate edited and translated by E.W.Winter as Erasmus-
Luther: Discourse on Free Will, New York, 1961.
18 See Miles [2.137].
19 See Limbrick [2.162], 3off.
20 See Mariana [2.54]. See also Talmadge [2.148],
21 Agrippa [2.46], from the preface ‘To the Reader’.
22 Agrippa also (see pp. 77 and 85–6) had positive commitments to the occult
philosophy, in particular to natural magic. Whether his overall position is a
consistent one has puzzled those who have studied his work. See Bowen [2. 127],
Nauert [2.128] and Zambelli [2.129],
23 Quoted from Paracelsus [2.42], 55.
24 See Redgrove and Redgrove [2.166].
25 See Debus [2.111],
26 The Paracelsians invoked an ‘Archeus’ or ‘world soul’ as a kind of universal cause
and the Neoplatonists generally sought to defend a vitalistic view of the world in
opposition to the mechanical philosophy. Leibniz frequently criticized them for
doing this (e.g. L.E.Loemker (ed.) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophical
Papers and Letters (Dordrecht, Reidel, 2nd edn, 1969), p. 409; P.Remnant and
J.Bennett (eds) G.W.Leibniz: New Essays on Human Understanding (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 72). That is partly why he distinguished the
Renaissance Neoplatonists from and contrasted them unfavourably with Plato.
Thus he criticized Ficino for launching into extravagant thoughts and abandoning
what was more simple and solid. ‘Ficino speaks everywhere of ideas, soul of the
world, mystical numbers, and similar things, instead of pursuing the exact
definitions Plato tries to give of notions’ (C.I. Gerhardt (ed.) Die Philosophischen
Schriften von G.W.Leibniz (Berlin, 1875–90), vol. i, p. 380).
27 Lefèvre d’Étaples was not exclusively interested in Aristotle. He was also
influenced by Neoplatonism and edited Neoplatonic works.
28 Leibniz cast himself as such a reformer of philosophy, as a reviver of the true
Aristotle against the distortions of the scholastics in a letter to his former teacher,
Jacob Thomasius, in 1669. He interpreted Aristotle as a nominalist and argued that
modern philosophy was consistent with Aristotle’s physics. (See Loemker, op. cit.,
pp. 93ff.)
29 C.B.Schmitt [2.100] has cited the (probably incomplete, but none the less
significant) statistical information, which shows the number of Aristotle editions
dipping to fifty-one in the 1520s and rising to 219 in the 1550s. The first two
sessions of the Council of Trent were held in 1545–7 and 1551–3. The conjecture
that this revival of Aristotle owes a good deal to the Catholic Reformation is my
own.
30 Leibniz was less dismissive of scholastic logic than was Descartes. But he
contrasted the ‘true logic’ with ‘what we have previously honoured by that name’
and offered a Ramist redefinition of the subject as ‘the art of using the
understanding not only to judge proposed truth but also to discover hidden truth’
(Loemker, op. cit., p. 463).
31 See Scott [2.167]. See also Hamilton [2.124].
32 See Mora [2.164].
33 Descartes studied at the Jesuit College of La Flêche and is reputed to have carried a
copy of the Disputations around with him on his travels. On Descartes’s debt to
Suarez, see Cronin [2.173] and Wells [2.186].
34 See Lewalter [2.177] and Wundt [2.187]. Suarez’s followers in Germany included
Leibniz’s teacher, Jacob Thomasius. Leibniz himself claimed that, as a young man,
he could read Suarez like a novel. There is a direct influence of Suarezian
nominalism on Leibniz’s early dissertation on the principle of individuation.
Though his thought developed along quite different lines, Leibniz included Suarez
amongst the ‘deeper scholastics’ and not amongst those whom, as a modern, he
frequently abused.
35 See Grotius [2.52]. See also Tuck [2.144].
36 See pp. 76–7 for a brief account of Mariana.
37 Lessius [2.27], See Chamberlain [2.146].
38 See Molina [2.33]. See also Pegis [2.151].
39 See Ferreira Gomez [2.142].
40 This work was translated into English in 1595 and has been reprinted. See Lipsius
[2.53].
41 Lipsius is further discussed in connection with Spinoza in Chapter 9, pp. 316–17.
See also Kristeller [2.178].
42 Chesneau [2.114] gives an account of the history of Neostoicism in earlyseventeenth-
century France.
43 The new Stoicism seems to have been well received in England. There were two
English translations of Du Vair’s treatise and one of Lipsius’s De constantia at the
end of the sixteenth century.
44 The assumption that it was an inherently Christian philosophy was not confined to
lay people. One of the adherents of Stoicism in England was the Anglican Bishop,
Joseph Hall.
45 Stoicism was attacked as a naturalistic and unChristian philosophy by the
Jansenists, especially by Biaise Pascal. In a paper attacking the ‘two sects of
naturalists in fashion today’, Leibniz placed Hobbes within the Epicurean tradition
and Spinoza within the tradition of Stoicism. He criticized Spinoza and the Stoics
for their fatalism and for seeking to make a virtue of enforced ‘patience’. (See
G.W.Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics and Related Writings, ed. and trans.
R.N.D.Martin and S.Brown (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988), pp.
104f.)
46 See Jungkuntz [2.93].
47 Gassendi’s philosophy is discussed more fully in Chapter 7.
48 See Charron [2.16].
49 See Schmitt [2.98] and Schmitt [2.101].
50 Quoted from Popkin [2.95], 93. The original is from La Mothe le Vayer’s ‘Petit
Traitté Sceptique sur cette façon de parler’, La Mothe le Vayer [2.5], IX, 280.
51 Few modem commentators and probably few of his contemporaries have supposed
that Hume’s fideistic conclusion to his sceptical essay ‘Of Miracles’ is anything
other than ironic. But many of the Renaissance sceptics seem to have been
perfectly sincere in their fideism, even as late as Bayle, whom Elizabeth Labrousse
[2.131] has suggested should be so interpreted.
52 The phrase is that of Richard Popkin, whose pioneering book [2.182] on the history
of scepticism in the early modern period remains one of the most original and
perceptive treatments of this topic.
53 This work was written in 1576 and published in 1581. It is available in a modern
English translation [2.57] with a good introduction.
54 For an account of late seventeenth-century philosophy that gives some prominence
to Foucher, see R.A.Watson, The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics (Atlantic
Highlands, N.J., Humanities Press, 1987).
55 Foucher seems to have been responsible for Leibniz’s perception of Descartes as a
Renaissance philosopher, whose most important contribution had been to restore
the study of Plato and to add to it the doubts (concerning the senses) of the Platonic
Academy. (See, for instance, Loemker, op. cit., p. 469.)
56 Hume’s scepticism is treated in the next volume of this series, vol. 5, Chapter 6.
57 See pp. 83–4.
58 When Leibniz wrote his Specimen of Dynamics, he presented it as a restoration of
Aristotelianism:
Just as our age has already saved from scorn Democritus’ corpuscles,
Plato’s ideas, and the Stoic’s tranquillity in light of the most perfect
interconnection of things, so now we shall make intelligible the teachings
of the Peripatetics concerning forms or entelechies…
(G.W.Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. R.Ariew and D. Garber
(Indianapolis, Ind., Hackett, 1989), p. 118)
Leibniz was himself in many ways a late Renaissance philosopher. But in the
early 1690s he was still willing to present himself as a post-modern or néo-
Renaissance philosopher, arguing in a modern way without appeals to ancient
authority but none the less claiming that, properly understood, his conclusions were
not really entirely novel but important confirmation of truths taught by a
‘philosophy accepted for so many centuries’. Berkeley’s late defence of the
Neoplatonists should perhaps also be understood as such a development. See note
14.
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2.23 Gassendi, Pierre, Epistolica exercitatio, in qua praecipua principia philosophiae
Roberto Fluddi…reteguntur, Paris, 1630.
2.24 Grotius, Hugo, De iure belli ac pacis libri tres, Paris, 1625.
2.25 Knorr von Rosenroth, Christian (ed.), Kabbala Denudata Seu Doctrina Hebraeorum
Transcendentalis et Metaphysica, Sulzbach, vol. 1, 1677, vol. 2, 1684; reprinted,
Hildesheim, Olms, 1974.
2.26 La Mothe le Vayer, François de (under pseudonym of Oratius Tubero), Cinque
Dialogues, faits à l’imitation des anciens, Mons, 1671.
2.27 Lessius, Leonard, De Jure et Justitia, Louvain, 1605.
2.28 Lipsius, Justus, Manuductionis ad Stoicam philosophiam libri tres, Antwerp, 1604.
2.29 Lipsius, Justus, Physiologia Stoicorum, Antwerp, 1604.
2.30 Mariana, Juan de, De Rege et Regis Institutione, Toledo, 1599.
2.31 Melanchthon, Philipp, Compendiaria dialectes ratio, Wittenberg, 1520.
2.32 Montaigne, Michel de, ‘Apologie de Raymond Sebond’ (1576), in Les Essays de
Michel de Montaigne, ed. P.Villey, Paris, Alcan, 1922.
2.33 Molina, Luis de, Liberi Arbitrii cum Gratiae Donis, Divina Praescientia,
Providentia, Praedestinatione et Reprobatione Concordia, Lisbon, 1588.
2.34 Ramus, Petrus, Dialecticae institutiones. Aristotelicae animadversiones, Paris, 1543;
reprinted, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Friedrich Frommann, 1964.
2.35 Sanches, Francisco, Quod Nihil Scitur, 1581.
2.36 Suarez, Francisco, Metaphysicarum disputationum, in quibus et universa naturalis
theologia ordinate traditur, et quaestiones ad omnes duodecim Aristotelis libros
pertinentes, Maguntiae, 1697; reprint of Paris, 1866, edition by Olms, Hildesheim,
1965.
2.37 Suarez, Francisco, Tractatus de legibus ac Deo Legislature, Conimbriae, D. Gomes
de Loureyo, 1612.
2.38 Vitoria, Francisco de, Relectiones de Indis et De Iure Bello, Salamanca, 1557.
2.39 Vives, Juan Luis, Adversus Pseudodialecticos, Selestadii, 1520; critical edition by
C.Fantazzi, Leiden, Brill, 1979.
English translations
Complete and selected works
2.40 Erasmus, Collected Works, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1974–.
2.41 Montaigne, Michel, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. D.M.Frame,
Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1958.
2.42 Paracelsus, Selected Writings, ed. J.Jacobi, trans. N.Guterman, London, Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1951.
2.43 Paracelsus, Hermetical and Alchemical Writings, trans. A.E.Waite, 2 vols, New
Hyde Park, N.Y., University Books, 1966.
2.44 Suarez, Francisco, Selections from Three Works (incl. On the Laws), trans.
G.L.Williams, Classics of International Law Series, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1944.
2.45 Vitoria, Francisco de, Political Writings, ed. A.Pagden, trans. L.Lawrance,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Separate works
2.46 Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henricus Cornelius, Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of
Artes and Sciences, trans. James Sandford, London, Henry Wykes, 1569; reprinted,
C.M.Dunn (ed.), Northridge, Calif., California State University Press, 1974.
2.47 Bayle, Pierre, Historical and Critical Dictionary (Selections), ed. and trans. R.
H.Popkin, Indianapolis, 1965; reprinted, Indianapolis, Ind., Hackett, 1991.
2.48 Cusanus, Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance: A Translation and Appraisal of De
Docta Ignorantia, ed. and trans. J.Hopkins, Minneapolis, Minn., Arthur J.Banning
Press, 1981.
2.49 Du Vair, Guillaume, trans. T.James, London, 1598; in R.Kirk (ed.), The Moral
Philosophie of the Stoicks, New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 1951.
2.50 Erasmus, Desiderius, In Praise of Folly and Letter to Dorp, trans. C.H.Miller,
Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1979.
2.51 Fludd, Robert, Mosaicall Philosophy, grounded upon the essentiall truth or eternal
sapience. Written first in Latin, and afterwards thus rendred into English, London,
1659.
2.52 Grotius, Hugo, De iure belli ac pacis libri tres, trans. F.W.Kelsey and others, Oxford,
Clarendon, 1925.
2.53 Lipsius, Justus, Two Books of Constancie, trans. J.Stradling, London, 1595; reprinted,
R.Kirk (ed.), New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 1939.
2.54 Mariana, Juan de, The King and the Education of the King, trans. G.A.Moore,
Maryland, The Country Dollar Press, 1948.
2.55 Melanchthon, The Loci Communes of Philipp Melanchthon, trans. C.L.Hill, Boston,
Meador, 1944.
2.56 Reuchlin, Johann, De arte cabalistica. On the Art of the Kabbalah, trans. M. and
S.Goodman, New York, Abaris Books, 1983.
2.57 Sanches, Francisco, That Nothing is Known (Quod Nihil Scitur), ed. E.Limbrick and
D.F.S.Thomson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
2.58 Suarez, Francisco, Francis Suarez: On the Various Kinds of Distinction,
Disputationes metaphysicae, disputatio VII, ed. and trans. C.Vollet, Milwaukee,
Wisc., Marquette University Press, 1947.
2.59 Suarez, Francisco, Suarez on Individuation. Metaphysical Disputation V: Individual
Unity and Its Principle, ed. and trans. J.J.E.Gracia, Milwaukee, Wisc., Marquette
University Press, 1982.
2.60 Suarez, Francisco, Francis Suarez: On Formal and Universal Unity, ed. and trans.
J.F.Ross, Milwaukee, Wisc., Marquette University Press, 1964.
2.61 Suarez, Francisco, The Metaphysics of Good and Evil according to Suarez:
Metaphysical Disputations X & XI, ed. and trans. J.Gracia, Munich, Philosophia,
1989.
2.62 van Helmont, Francis Mercury, A Cabbalistic Dialogue in Answer to the Opinion of
a Learned Doctor in Philosophy and Theology that the World was made out of
Nothing, as it is contained in the second part of the Cabbala Denudata & appears in
the Lib. Sohar, London, 1682.
2.63 Vitoria, Francisco de, De Indis et de iure belli relectiones, trans. J.Pawley, Classics of
International Law Series, Washington, D.C., Carnegie Institution, 1917.
2.64 Vives, Juan Luis, Against the Pseudodialecticians. A Humanist Attack on Medieval
Logic, ed. and trans. R.Guerlac, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1979.
Bibliographies and concordances
Bibliographies
2.65 Cranz, F.E. and Schmitt, C.B. A Bibliography of Aristotle Editions, 1501–1600,
Baden-Baden, V.Koerner, 1971; 2nd edn, 1984.
2.66 Kleinen, H. and Danzer, R. ‘Cusanus-Bibliographie, 1920–1961’, Mitteilungen und
Forschungenbeiträge der Cusanus-Gesellschaft I (1961) 95–126.
2.67 McCormick, J.F. A Suarezian Bibliography, Chicago, Ill., Loyola University Press,
1937.
2.68 Margolin, Jean Claude, Douze années de bibliographie érasmienne, 1950–1961,
Paris, Vrin, 1963.
2.69 Nore a, C.G. A Vives Bibliography, Studies in Renaissance Literature, vol. 5,
Lewiston, Edwin Mellon Press, 1990.
2.70 Schmitt, C.B. A Critical Survey and Bibliography of Studies on Renaissance
Aristotelianism, 1958–1969, Padua, Antenore, 1971.
2.71 Smith, G. ‘A Suarez Bibliography’, in G.Smith (ed.) Jesuit Thinkers of the
Renaissance, Milwaukee, Wisc., Marquette University Press, 1939, 227–38.
Concordances
2.72 Bolchazy, L.J. (ed.) A Concordance to the Utopia of St. Thomas More and A
Frequency Word List, Hildesheim, Olms, 1978.
2.73 Wedick, H.E. and Schweitzer, F. (eds) Dictionary of the Renaissance, New York ,
Philosophical Library, 1967.
2.74 Zellinger, E. Cusanus-Konkordanz, Munich, Huber, 1960.
Background and influences on Renaissance philosophy outside
Italy
2.75 Allen, D.C. ‘The Rehabilitation of Epicurus and his Theory of Pleasure in the Early
Renaissance’, Studies in Philology 41 (1944) 1–15.
2.76 Burnyeat, M. (ed.) The Sceptical Tradition, Berkeley, Calif., University of California
Press, 1983.
2.77 Gibson, M. (ed.) Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, Oxford, Blackwell,
1981.
2.78 Gandillac, M.de, ‘Neoplatonism and Christian Thought in the Fifteenth Century
(Nicholas of Cusa and Marsilio Ficino)’, in D.J.O’Meara (ed.) Neoplatonism and
Christian Thought, Norfolk, Va., International Society for Neoplatonic Studies,
143–68.
2.79 Hillgarth, J.N. Ramon Lull and Lullism in Fourteenth-Century France, Oxford,
Clarendon, 1971.
2.80 Klibansky, R. The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition during the Middle Ages.
Plato’s Parmenides in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Munich, Kraus
International Publications, 1981.
2.81 Kristeller, P.O. Renaissance Thought and its Sources, ed. M.Mooney, New York,
Columbia University Press, 1979.
2.82 Lovejoy, A.O. The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University
Press, 1936.
2.83 Schmitt, C. Aristotle and the Renaissance, The Martin Classical Lectures 27,
Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1983.
2.84 Wallis, R.T. Neoplatonism, London, Duckworth, 1972.
General surveys of Renaissance philosophical movements and
aspects of Renaissance philosophy
2.85 Blau, J.L. The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala in the Renaissance, New York,
Columbia University Press, 1944.
2.86 Cassirer, E. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. M.
Domandi, New York, Harper & Row, and Oxford, Blackwell, 1963.
2.87 Conger, G.P. Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms in the History of Philosophy,
New York, Russell & Russell, 1922.
2.88 Copleston, F. A History of Philosophy, vol. 3, Late Medieval and Renaissance
Philosophy, Part II, The Revival of Platonism to Suarez, Maryland, The Newman
Press, 1953.
2.89 Coudert, A. ‘Some Theories of a Natural Language from the Renaissance to the
Seventeenth Century’, Studia Leibnitiana (Sonderheft) 7 (1978) 56–114.
2.90 Giacon, C. La Seconda Scolastica, Milan, Fratelli Bocca, 3 vols, 1944–50.
2.91 Gilbert, N.W. Renaissance Concepts of Method, New York, Columbia University
Press, 1960.
2.92 Henry, J. and Hutton, S. (eds) New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought, London,
Duckworth, 1990,
2.93 Jungkuntz, R.P. ‘Christian Approval of Epicureanism’, Church History 31 (1962)
279–93.
2.94 Oestreich, G. Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1982.
2.95 Popkin, R.H. The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, Berkeley and Los
Angeles, Calif., University of California Press, 1979.
2.96 Rabil, A., Jr (ed.) Renaissance Humanism. Foundations, Forms and Legacy, vol. 2,
Humanism Beyond Italy, Philadelphia, Penn., University of Pennsylvania Press,
1988.
2.97 Rice, E.F. The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University
Press, 1958.
2.98 Schmitt, C.B. ‘Towards a Reassessment of Renaissance Aristotelianism’, History of
Science 11 (1973) 159–93; reprinted in Schmitt, C.B. Studies in Renaissance
Philosophy and Science, London, Variorum Reprints, 1981.
2.99 Schmitt, C.B. Cicero Scepticus: A Study of the Influence of the ‘Academica’ in the
Renaissance, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1972.
2.100 Schmitt, C.B. Studies in Renaissance Philosophy and Science, London, Variorum
Reprints, 1981.
2.101 Schmitt, C.B. ‘The Rediscovery of Ancient Skepticism in Modern Times’, in
M.F.Burnyeat (ed.) The Skeptical Tradition, Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.,
University of California Press, 1983, 225–31.
2.102 Schmitt, C.B. and Skinner, Q. (eds) The Cambridge History of Renaissance
Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
2.103 Secret, F. Les Kabbalistes chrétiens de la Renaissance, Paris, Dunod, 1964.
2.104 Skinner, Q. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1978.
2.105 Smith, G. (ed.) Jesuit Thinkers of the Renaissance, Milwaukee, Wise., Marquette
University Press, 1939.
2.106 Sommervogel, C. (ed.) Bibliothèque de la Companie de Jesus, Brussels, Schepens,
and Paris, Picard, 11 vols, 1890–1932.
2.107 Vedrine, H. Les philosophies de la Renaissance, Paris, Presses Universitaires de
France , 1967.
2.108 Walker, D.P. The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the
Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, London, Duckworth, 1972.
2.109 Yates, F.A. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London, Routledge,
1979.
Works on Renaissance philosophy in different countries
England
2.110 Cassirer, E. The Platonic Renaissance in England, trans. J.P.Pettegrove, London,
Nelson, 1953.
2.111 Debus, A.G. The English Paracelsians, London, Oldbourne, 1965.
2.112 Schmitt, C.B. John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England, Kingston
and Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983.
2.113 Schoeck, R.J. ‘Humanism in England’, in A.Rabil, Jr (ed.) Renaissance Humanism.
Foundations, Forms and Legacy, vol. 2, Humanism Beyond Italy, Philadelphia,
Penn., University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, 5–38.
France
2.114 Chesneau, C. ‘Le stoïcisme en France dans la première moitié du XVII siècle: les
origines 1575–1616’, Etudes franciscaines 2 (1951) 389–410.
2.115 Copenhaver, B.P. Symphorien Champier and the Reception of the Occultist
Tradition in Renaissance France, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1977.
2.116 Rice, E.F. ‘Humanism in France’, in A.Rabil, Jr (ed.) Renaissance Humanism.
Foundations, Forms and Legacy, vol. 2, Humanism Beyond Italy, Philadelphia,
Penn., University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, 109–22.
Germany
2.117 Beck, L.W. Early German Philosophy. Kant and His Predecessors, Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press, 1969.
2.118 Brann, N.L. ‘Humanism in Germany’, in A.Rabil, Jr (ed.) Renaissance Humanism.
Foundations, Forms and Legacy, vol. 2, Humanism Beyond Italy, Philadelphia,
Penn., University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, 123–55.
2.119 Petersen, P. Geschichte der Aristotelischen Philosophie im Protestantischen
Deutschland, Leipzig, Meiner, 1921.
2.120 Spitz, L.W. The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists, Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press, 1963.
Low countries
2.121 Dibon, P. La Philosophie néerlandaise au siècle d’or, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 1954.
2.122 Ijsewijn, J. ‘Humanism in the Low Countries’, in A.Rabil, Jr (ed.) Renaissance
Humanism. Foundations, Forms and Legacy, vol. 2, Humanism Beyond Italy,
Philadelphia, Penn., University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, 156–215.
Spain
2.123 Di Camillo, O. ‘Humanism in Spain’, in A.Rabil, Jr (ed.) Renaissance Humanism.
Foundations, Forms and Legacy, vol. 2, Humanism Beyond Italy, Philadelphia,
Penn., University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, 55–108.
2.124 Hamilton, B. Political Thought in Sixteenth-Century Spain: A Study of the Political
Ideas of Vitoria, De Soto, Suarez and Molina, Oxford, Clarendon, 1963.
2.125 Norea, C.G. Studies in Spanish Renaissance Thought, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1975.
2.126 Pagden, A.R.D. ‘The Diffusion of Aristotle’s Moral Philosophy in Spain’, Traditio
31 (1975) 287–313.
Writings on individual philosophers
Agrippa
2.127 Bowen, B.C. ‘Cornelius Agrippa’s De vanitate: Polemic or Paradox?’, Bibliothèque
d’humanisme et Renaissance 34 (1972) 249–65.
2.128 Nauert, C.G. Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought, Urbana, Ill.,
University of Illinois Press, 1979.
2.129 Zambelli, P. ‘Magic and Radical Reformation in Agrippa of Nettesheim’, Journal
of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976) 69–103.
Bayle
2.130 Brush, C.B. Montaigne and Bayle, Variations on the Theme of Skepticism,
International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol. 14, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1966.
2.131 Labrousse, E. Pierre Bayle, Past Masters Series, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1991.
Boehme
2.132 Koyré, A. La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme, Paris, Vrin, 1929.
2.133 Penny, H.E. Introduction to the Study of Jacob Böhme’s Writings, New York, 1901.
Charron
2.134 Horowitz, M.C. ‘Pierre Charron’s View of the Source of Wisdom’, Journal of the
History of Philosophy 9 (1971) 443–57.
2.135 Soman, A. ‘Pierre Charron: a Revaluation’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et
Renaissance 32 (1970) 57–79.
2.136 Soman, A. ‘Methodology in the History of Ideas: the Case of Pierre Charron’,
Journal of the History of Philosophy 12 (1974) 495–501.
Colet
2.137 Miles, L. John Colet and the Platonic Tradition, La Salle, Ill., Open Court, 1961.
Cusanus
2.138 Bett, H. Nicholas of Cusa, London, Methuen, 1932; reprinted, Cambridge, Mass.,
Harvard University Press, 1969.
2.139 Watts, P.M. Nicolans Cusanus: A Fifteenth Century Vision of Man, Leiden, Brill,
1982.
Erasmus
2.140 DeMolen, R. (ed.) Essays on the Works of Erasmus, New Haven, Conn., Yale
University Press, 1978.
2.141 McConica, J. Erasmus, Past Masters Series, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1991.
Fonseca
2.142 Ferreira Gomes, J. ‘Pedro da Fonseca, Sixteenth Century Portuguese Philosopher’,
International Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1966) 632–44.
Grotius
2.143 Knight, W.S.M. The Life and Works of Hugo Grotius, London, Sweet & Maxwell,
1931.
2.144 Tuck, R. Natural Rights Theories, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
La Mothe le Vayer
2.145 Grenier, J. ‘Le Sceptique masqué: La Mothe le Vayer’, Table Ronde 22 (1949)
1504–13.
Lessius
2.146 Chamberlain, C.H. ‘Leonard Lessius’, in G.Smith (ed.) Jesuit Thinkers of the
Renaissance, Milwaukee, Wisc., Marquette University Press, 1939, 133–56.
Lipsius
2.147 Saunders, J.L. Justus Lipsius: The Philosophy of Renaissance Stoicism, New York,
Liberal Arts Press, 1955.
Mariana
2.148 Talmadge, G.K. ‘Juan de Mariana’, in G.Smith (ed.) Jesuit Thinkers of the
Renaissance, Milwaukee, Wise., Marquette University Press, 1939, 157–92.
Melanchthon
2.149 Hildebrandt, F. Melanchthon, Alien or Ally?, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1946.
2.150 Stern, L. Philipp Melanchthon: Humanist, Reformer, Praeceptor Germaniae, Halle,
Festgabe des Melanchthon-Komitees der Deutschen Demokratischen Republic,
1960.
Molina
2.151 Pegis, A.C. ‘Molina and Human Liberty’, in G.Smith (ed.) Jesuit Thinkers of the
Renaissance, Milwaukee, Wise., Marquette University Press, 1939, 75–132.
Montaigne
2.152 Burke, P. Montaigne, Past Masters Series, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981.
2.153 Frame, D.M. Montaigne: A Biography, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965;
reprinted, San Francisco, Calif., North Point Press, 1984.
2.154 Limbrick, E. ‘Was Montaigne really a Pyrrhonian?’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et
Renaissance 39 (1977) 67–80.
2.155 Schiffman, Z.S. ‘Montaigne and the Rise of Skepticism in Early Modern Europe: a
Reappraisal’, Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984) 499–516.
More (Thomas)
2.156 Kenny, A. Thomas More, Past Masters Series, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1983.
2.157 Skinner, Q. ‘More’s Utopia’, Past and Present 38 (1967) 153–68.
Paracelsus
2.158 Pachter, H.M. Paracelsus, New York, Schumann, 1951.
2.159 Stillman, J.M. Paracelsus, Chicago, Ill., Open Court, 1920.
Ramus
2.160 Ong, W.J. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard
University Press, 1958.
Reuchlin
2.161 Spitz, L.W. ‘Reuchlin’s Philosophy: Pythagoras and Cabala for Christ’, Archiv für
Reformationsgeschichte 47 (1956) 1–20; revised as ‘Reuchlin: Pythagoras Reborn’,
in L.W.Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists, Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press, 1963, ch. IV.
Sanches
2.162 Limbrick, E. ‘Introduction’ to Francisco Sanches: That Nothing is Known (Quod
Nihil Scitur), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Suarez
2.163 Fichter, J.H. Man of Spain: Francis Suarez, New York, Macmillan, 1940.
2.164 Mora, J.F. ‘Suarez and Modern Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas 14
(1953) 528–47.
Van Helmont (F.M.)
2.165 Brown, S. ‘F.M. van Helmont: his Philosophical Connections and the Reception of
his later Cabbalistic Philosophy (1677–1699)’, in M.A.Stewart (ed.) Studies in
Seventeenth Century Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
Van Helmont (J.B.)
2.166 Redgrove, H.S. and Redgrove, J.M.L. J.B.Van Helmont, Alchemist, Physician,
Philosopher, London, W. Rider, 1922.
Vitoria
2.167 Scott, J.B. The Spanish Origin of International Law, vol. 1, Francisco de Vitoria
and His Law of Nations, Washington, D.C., Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, and Oxford, Clarendon, 1934.
Vives
2.168 Nore a, C.G. Juan Luis Vives, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1970.
The Renaissance background to modern philosophy
2.169 Berre, Henri, Du Scepticisme de Gassendi, trans. B.Rochot, Paris, Michel, 1960.
2.170 Brown, S. ‘Leibniz and More’s Cabbalistic Circle’, in Sarah Hutton and R. Crocker
(eds) Henry More (1614–1687): Tercentenary Studies, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1989,
77–95.
2.171 Brown, S. ‘Leibniz: Modern, Scholastic or Renaissance Philosopher?’, in T. Sorell
(ed.) The Rise of Modern Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993,
213–30.
2.172 Brush, C.B. Montaigne and Bayle: Variations on the Theme of Skepticism, The
Hague, Nijhoff, 1966.
2.173 Cronin, T.J. ‘Objective Being in Descartes and in Suarez’, Analecta Gregoriana,
Rome, Gregorian University Press, 1966.
2.174 Dear, P.R. ‘Marin Mersenne and the Probabilistic Roots of “Mitigated Scepticism”’,
Journal of the History of Philosophy 22 (1984) 173–205.
2.175 Gouhier, H. Les Premières pensées de Descartes. Contribution à Phistoire de l’anti-
Renaissance, Paris, Vrin, 1958.
2.176 Heinekamp, A. (ed.) Leibniz et la Renaissance, Wiesbaden, Steiner, 1983.
2.177 Lewalter, E. Spanische-jesuitische und deutsche-lutherische Metaphysik des 17.
Jahrhunderts, Hamburg, 1935; reprinted, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1967.
2.178 Kristeller, P.O. ‘Stoic and Neostoic Sources of Spinoza’s Ethics’, History of
European Ideas 5 (1984) 1–15.
2.179 Meier, M. Descartes und die Renaissance, Munster, 1914.
2.180 Mesnard, P. ‘Comment Leibniz se trouve place dans le sillage de Suarez’, Archives
de philosophie 18 (1949) 7–32.
2.181 Politella, J. ‘Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Cabalism in the Philosophy of
Leibniz’, PhD dissertation, University of Philadelphia, 1938.
2.182 Popkin, R.H. The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, Berkeley and Los
Angeles, Calif., University of California Press, 1979.
2.183 Popkin, R.H. and Schmitt, C.B. (eds) Scepticism from the Renaissance to the
Enlightenment, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1987.
2.184 Ross, G.M. ‘Leibniz and Renaissance Neoplatonism’, in A.Heinekamp (ed.) Leibniz
et la Renaissance, Wiesbaden, Steiner, 1983.
2.185 Schmitt, C.B. ‘Perennial Philosophy: From Agostino Steuco to Leibniz’, Journal of
the History of Ideas 27 (1966) 505–32.
2.186 Wells, N.J. ‘Objective Being, Descartes and His Sources’, Modern Schoolman 45
(1967) 49–61.
2.187 Wundt, M. Die deutsche Schulmetaphysik des 17. Jahrhunderts, Tubingen, Mohr,
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