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The essay explores humanism’s modernity by inquiring into the way the fifteenth-century humanist cultural program posited moral values and, at the same time, contributed to a sense of moral confusion. While Niccolò Niccoli, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and Leonardo Bruni associated ethical enlightenment with learning and even social acclaim, Leon Battista Alberti criticized these assumptions not only for their susceptibility to political manipulation but also for their failure to cultivate the attributes they promised: virtue, and by extension happiness and tranquillity. The tensions in humanist culture between conformity and dissent, rational certainty and sense of mutability, generated the creative energy that we, as moderns, have come to attribute to this culture.
Broadening Horizons of Humanism
Broadening Horizons of Renaissance Humanism from the Antiquity to the New World2018 •
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.
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.
Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques
Philosophy and Theology in an Oral Culture: Renaissance Humanists and Renaissance Scholastics2014 •
The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy
Three chapters: “Introduction,” “Humanism, Scholasticism and Renaissance Philosophy,” and “Conclusion”2007 •
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Interpretations of Renaissance Humanism
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"Humanism" entry in Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy (excerpt)Res Publica Litterarum, XIV (1991); Studi umanistici piceni, XI (1991)
Renaissance Humanism and Science1991 •
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Et Amicorum: Essays on Renaissance Humanism and Philosophy
Et Amicorum: Essays on Renaissance Humanism and Philosophy2018 •
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"Renaissance Humanism and the Ambiguities of Modernity: Introduction," The European Legacy 20.5 (2015): 427-435Reformation & Renaissance Review
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Perceiving the Past: Renaissance Humanism after the Cognitive Turn1998 •
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