Early modern Europe · c. 1350–1600
Renaissance humanism
The recovered classics of Greece and Rome show what human beings can become, so learning should centre on human life, language and civic action.
What can human beings make of themselves?
In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, rich city-states, the hunt for lost classical manuscripts and Greek scholars arriving from Byzantium gave readers direct access to Plato, Cicero and the ancient historians. Many found late scholastic philosophy narrow and technical, and wanted a learning that would train citizens, preachers and princes.
If the ancients reached such heights of eloquence, virtue and statecraft without Christian revelation, then human nature itself must be capable of greatness. The way to cultivate it is the studia humanitatis — grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and moral philosophy — read in the original texts rather than through layers of commentary.
- Return to the ancient sources themselves, not later commentaries.
- Human dignity lies in our freedom to shape ourselves.
- Morals and politics are learned from history and experience.
Its return to original sources fed the Reformation and modern textual scholarship, while Montaigne’s doubt and Machiavelli’s realism set the problems that Descartes and Hobbes took up.
Thinkers
1463–1494Giovanni Pico della MirandolaItalian humanist who proclaimed humanity’s freedom to shape itself1466 or 1469–1536Desiderius ErasmusDutch humanist scholar, editor of the Greek New Testament1469–1527Niccolò MachiavelliFlorentine diplomat who studied power as it actually works1533–1592Michel de MontaigneFrench magistrate who invented the essay as self-examinationKey texts
Where it came from
Grew out ofPlatonismMarsilio Ficino’s complete Latin Plato (1484) and his Florentine circle made Plato, read through Neoplatonism, a rival to Aristotle and a source for Pico’s vision of human dignity.Reacted against
ScholasticismHumanists attacked the schoolmen’s technical Latin and endless logical disputes as barren, preferring eloquence, history and moral philosophy.Grew out of
Pyrrhonism & Academic skepticismSextus Empiricus, printed in Latin in 1562, supplied Montaigne with the arguments of his skeptical “Apology for Raymond Sebond”.
What it led to
Carried on bySocial contract theoryMachiavelli’s secular, unsentimental study of power prepared the ground for Hobbes’s attempt to found the state on human nature rather than divine right.