Humanism
Main article: Renaissance humanism Renaissance humanism was a European intellectual movement that was a crucial component of the Renaissance, beginning in Florence in the latter half of the 14th century. The humanist movement developed from the rediscovery by European scholars of Latin literary and Greek literary texts. Initially, a humanist was simply a scholar or teacher of LatinIn some ways Humanism Renaissance humanism was a European intellectual movement that was a crucial component of the Renaissance, beginning in Florence in the latter half of the 14th century. The humanist movement developed from the rediscovery by European scholars of Latin literary and Greek literary texts. Initially, a humanist was simply a scholar or teacher of Latin was not a philosophy per se, but rather a method of learning. In contrast to the medieval scholastic Scholasticism is derived from the Latin word scholasticus , which means "that [which] belongs to the school", and was a method of learning taught by the academics (scholastics, school people, or schoolmen) of medieval universities circa 1100–1500. Scholasticism originally started to reconcile the philosophy of the ancient classical mode, which focused on resolving contradictions between authors, humanists would study ancient texts in the original, and appraise them through a combination of reasoning and empirical evidence. Humanist education was based on the programme of 'Studia Humanitatis', that being the study of five humanities: poetry Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning. Poetry may be written independently, as discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama, hymns or lyrics, grammar In linguistics, grammar refers to the logical and structural rules that govern the composition of sentences, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics, history History is the study of the past, with special attention to the written record of the activities of human beings over time. Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of research which uses a narrative to examine and analyse the sequence of events, and it often attempts to investigate objectively the patterns of cause, moral philosophy Ethics is a branch of philosophy which seeks to address questions about morality, such as what the fundamental semantic, ontological, and epistemic nature of ethics or morality is (meta-ethics), how moral values should be determined (normative ethics), how a moral outcome can be achieved in specific situations (applied ethics), how moral capacity and rhetoric Rhetoric is one of the arts of using vocation as a means to entertain or persuade. Along with grammar and logic or dialectic, rhetoric is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. From ancient Greece to the late 19th Century, it was a central part of Western education, filling the need to train public speakers and writers to move audiences to. Although historians have sometimes struggled to define humanism precisely, most have settled on "a middle of the road definition... the movement to recover, interpret, and assimilate the language, literature, learning and values of ancient Greece and Rome".[34] Above all, humanists asserted "the genius of man ... the unique and extraordinary ability of the human mind."[35]
Humanist scholars shaped the intellectual landscape throughout the early modern period. Political philosophers such as Niccolò Machiavelli Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian philosopher, writer, and politician and is considered one of the main founders of modern political science. He was a diplomat, political philosopher, musician, poet and playwright, but, foremost, he was a Civil Servant of the Florentine Republic. In June of 1498, after the ouster and execution of and Thomas More Sir Thomas More , also known as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, author, and statesman who in his lifetime gained a reputation as a leading Renaissance humanist scholar, and occupied many public offices, including Lord Chancellor (1529–1532). More coined the word "utopia", a name he gave to the ideal, imaginary island nation revived the ideas of Greek and Roman thinkers, and applied them in critiques of contemporary government. Machiavelli's contribution, in the view of Isaiah Berlin Sir Isaiah Berlin, OM was a philosopher and historian of ideas, regarded as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. He excelled as an essayist, lecturer and conversationalist; and as a brilliant speaker who delivered, rapidly and spontaneously, richly allusive and coherently structured material, whether for a lecture series, was a decisive break in western political thought allocating a unique reasoning to politics and faith and perhaps making him the father of the social sciences. Pico della Mirandola Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an Italian Renaissance philosopher. He is famed for the events of 1486, when at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy and magic against all comers, for which he wrote the famous Oration on the Dignity of Man which has been called the "Manifesto of who lived to only twenty-three years wrote what is often considered the manifesto of the Renaissance, a vibrant defence of thinking, the Oration on the Dignity of Man. Theologians, notably Erasmus Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (October 27, 1466/1469, Rotterdam – July 12, 1536, Basel) was a Dutch Renaissance humanist and a Catholic Christian theologian. His scholarly name Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus comprises the following three elements: the Latin noun desiderium ("longing" or "desire"; the name being a genuine and Martin Luther Martin Luther changed the course of Western civilization by initiating the Protestant Reformation. As a priest and theology professor, he confronted indulgence salesmen with his 95 Theses in 1517. Luther strongly disputed their claim that freedom from God's punishment of sin could be purchased with money. His refusal to retract all of his writings, challenged the Aristotelian Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest Philosophers of all time and one of the status quo, introducing radical new ideas of justification In Christian theology, justification is God's act of declaring or making a sinner righteous before God. The concept of justification occurs in many books of the Old and New Testaments and faith Faith in Christianity, as in other Abrahamic religions, centers on a belief in God, a belief in the reality of a transcendent domain that God administers as his kingdom, and in the benevolence of God's will or plan for humankind. Christianity differs in that it centers on a belief in the ministry of Jesus, and in his place as the prophesied Christ, (for more, see Religion below).
Matteo Palmieri lived between 1406 and 1475 and is an exemplar of the Florentine humanist. He is best known today for his erudite promotion of the ideology of civic humanism Classical republicanism is a form of republicanism originating from and inspired by the governmental forms and writings of classical antiquity. After a gaping centuries-long period of neglect due to unique arrangements of medieval feudalism lasting till the Renaissance, its main ideas were recovered and went on to flourish during Classicism and. Palmieri's written works drawn on Roman philosophers and theorists, especially Cicero Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. Cicero is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists, who, like Palmieri, lived an active public life as a citizen and official, as well as a theorist and philosopher and also Quintilian Marcus Fabius Quintilianus was a Roman rhetorician from Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing. In English translation, he is usually referred to as Quintilian, although the alternate spellings of Quintillian and Quinctilian are occasionally seen, the latter in older texts. Strongly committed to a deep and broad education Palmieri believed this would dispose people to public engagement and enhance the human capacity to do good deeds and contribute to the community. Although holding public office between 1432 and 1475 he is best remembered for these writings extolling the ideal of humanism as combination of learning with civic or political action. Possibly the most succinct expression of his perspective on humanism is in a 1465 poetic work La città di vita (The City of Life), but an earlier work Della vita civile (On Civic Life) is more wide-ranging. Composed as a series of dialogues set in a country house in the Mugello countryside outside Florence during the plague of 1430, Palmieri expounds on the qualities of the ideal citizen. The dialogues concern how children develop mentally and physically, how citizens can conduct themselves morally, how citizens and states can ensure probity in public life, and an important debate between on the difference between that which is pragmatically useful and that which is honest.
<<Table of Contents The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Florence in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historic era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform across Europe, this is a general use of the | Next>> | Show All>>
