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Introduction

Since the 1930s, when it first emerged as a distinctive kind of historical inquiry, intellectual history has always been fascinated with the Renaissance. Intellectual historians are concerned with unearthing the deep, often half-conscious patterns of thought that govern the way individuals understand and act within nature and society. They examine how traditions of thought situate themselves within changing linguistic and cultural settings. Lately they have begun to focus on the history of learned disciplines, intellectual routines, and practices. Above all they are concerned with the question of why large groups of human beings change their beliefs over time. This being the case, it is easy to see why the Renaissance attracts the intellectual historian. It was a period when fundamental changes occurred in Western societies across a wide range of beliefs, religious, scientific, political, historical, and anthropological. Christendom disintegrated and sovereign states emerged. So it is hardly surprising that the intellectual historian views the Renaissance as an extraordinarily well-stocked workshop for the practice of his craft.

The same is not true of philosophers and historians of philosophy. For philosophers the period of the Renaissance has often seemed a kind of valley between two hills. On one hill sit the great scholastic philosophers – Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham – great system builders and brilliant analysts of language, logic, and metaphysics. On the other hill sit the great system builders of the seventeenth century, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, men who can reasonably be described as belonging to the world of modern thought. In between lies a swampland inhabited by what seem mere epigones of the great scholastics, by sententious moralizers and litterateurs, by philologists and compilers, by wild-eyed magicians and Naturphilosophs, as fertile in propagating new ideas as they were incapable of defending them. Cusanus, Machiavelli, perhaps Valla, are acknowledged to be major thinkers, though in very different ways, but they are hardly enough to redeem the period from its reputation as a philosophical wasteland. Cusanus’ work seems more relevant to theology than philosophy; Machiavelli is more of a political scientist than a political philosopher; Valla’s major work of philosophy is available only in Latin and is in any case situated in the unfamiliar terrain of classical philology. It is no wonder that philosophers concerned with the history of their discipline are tempted to leap airily from one hill to the other rather than slog through the swamps below. Nor is it surprising that courses on Renaissance philosophy remain rare in departments of philosophy.

In addition to recovering the philosophical heritage of antiquity, Renaissance philosophers also tried to achieve a wider view of the philosophical enterprise in human history. Opponents of scholasticism told new stories about philosophy’s history to counter the Aristotelian model of Greek philosophical development, according to which earlier philosophy culminated in and was superseded by the Aristotelian system. Against this self-serving account Ficino told a new story, about how a profound ancient theological wisdom had been occluded by the rise of a less spiritual philosophy, Aristotle’s, leading inevitably to a sundering of piety and philosophy. But a new age was coming, he predicted, when the revival of Platonism would reunite philosophy and religion.12 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola The significance of Renaissance philosophy had another answer for the Aristotelians: his more Plotinian view was that there was one unitary divine wisdom for all times and places which in all times and places was available to the human intellect conscious of its own divinity. Eventually philosophers like Bruno, Campanella, Bacon, and Descartes – in radically different ways – would hold out the dazzling prospect of new undreamed-of progress in philosophy, of surpassing the ancients.13

In short, Renaissance philosophy offers many parallels with the philosophy of our own time. In our era too we have seen the fracturing and crisis of authoritive traditions, a new pluralism of philosophical perspectives, an unsettling information revolution, and passionate aspirations to integrate into philosophical discourse the wisdom literature of non-Western traditions. We too have philosophers hostile to system and rigorous demonstration who doubt the possibility of apodictic argument, philosophers who would prefer to see philosophy become a form of psychic therapy or a civil conversation or a form of persuasion and edification. We too have our skeptics and fideists; we too have those who search in philosophy’s past for alternative visions of the philosophical life. We too have philosophers fiercely committed to a wide range of positions on the proper relationship between faith and reason. We too have philosophers who aim to influence public deliberation and shape public life. If Renaissance philosophy does not promise the immediate profit of some other periods in the history of thought, if it does not always offer ready-made arguments and insights useful in current academic debates, it nevertheless offers what can be the most revealing insight of all – the insight that comes from looking in a mirror.