It was only to be expected that the church accepted the moderate realism of Thomas Aquinas, while Roscelin’s nominalism was condemned already at the Council of Soissons in 1092.

Thus, despite the idealist character of the entire mediaeval philosophy, the confrontation of the lines of Plato and Democritus continued in it, although it was mostly expressed in logical terms. The mediaeval controversy on the nature of universals had a considerable impact on many philosophical doctrines, especially those of such major thinkers of the Modern Times as Hobbes and Locke. Elements of nominalism also occur in Spinoza, while the technique of the nominalist critique of the ontologism of universals was used by Berkeley and Hume in the shaping of the doctrine of subjective idealism. The realist proposition concerning the presence of general concepts in human consciousness later formed the basis of idealist rationalism of Leibniz and Descartes, while the idea of the ontological independence of universals was absorbed by classical German idealism.

Mediaeval philosophy made a significant contribution to further development of epistemology by working out and clarifying all the logically possible versions of the relations between the rational, the empirical, and the “a priori”—the relations which later became not just the theme of scholastic arguments but the basis for natural-scientific and philosophical knowledge.

Білет 11. The Renaissance: the ideas of Humanism and Philosophy of Science.

The growth of industry, commerce, navigation, and the military arts, the development of material production, conditioned the progress in the technical sciences, in natural science, mathematics, and mechanics. All this required the freeing of reason from scholasticism and a transition from purely logical problems to natural-scientific cognition of the world and man. This tendency was manifested in the views of the major thinkers of the Renaissance permeated with the idea of humanism.

The demolition of the medieval worldview was assisted too by the Reformation, which undermined the traditional authority of the Church, and ultimately drove authority back to individual interpretation and inner experience.

The fruitful rise of science in the West has been partly ascribed to the notion of God: because God is rational it is easy to think that the patterns underlying the functioning of the material world are rational. There may be something in this, especially with the revival of the mathematization of science, so that rationally describable processes could be looked on as mathematically describable. On the other hand, the large and admittedly fairly comfortable strait-jacket in which thought was held so long as Western Europe was dominated by a single and relatively unified Church was not perhaps so conducive to new critical thinking, such as was demanded by the growth of science. At any rate, with the Renaissance came new freedoms of thought. And this was due to a kind of inner dialectics in Western civilization.

For the great revival of excitement about Hellenism and in general Classical civilization - the new humanism - was not placed against a background of prior ignorance about the ancient world. In its own way Classical values had been quite well served by Arab and Latin translators, commentators and philosophers. But the scale of the new concern with the Classics was great. It was as though pagan civilization had hit back from its grave, and in a new key. Classical philosophy had already made one synthesis with Christianity, and the result had been Neoplatonist and in due course Aristotelian forms of theism. But now another wave rolled into the West, inspiring the arts as well as philosophy. The old contradictions in Western civilization gained a new life. It was the very contradictoriness and relative anarchy of the new culture emerging from the fourteenth century onwards that help to account for its being a matrix of science. In turn the new science could not fail to stimulate philosophy and the construction of new worldviews. How could the Copemican revolution not leave thinkers feeling disoriented? How could Galileo’s telescope not leave the whole of Aristotelian physics in ruins? How could new paintings in perspective not begin to affect the whole of optics, and how could this not fail to throw a different light upon the whole .process of seeing?

Education also had its role to play. The collection of texts proceeded apace during the Renaissance. The emergence of the printing press began to bring their price down, and to favor the swifter circulation of ideas. The examples of Cicero and Seneca could stimulate the ideal of the urbane and cultivated gentleman. Education was privatized and became an aristocratic pursuit, thus drifting away from the clerics who had previously been the prime educated class. From this time on the intellectuals were predominantly the ksatriyas rather than the brahmins of the Western world.

Nor should we forget that the Renaissance period was also the beginning of that huge expansion of Europe into Asia and the New World. This was anthropologically suggestive, and the existence of diverse other cultures was gradually to make its impact upon Europe. But it also brought a period of new wealth, which was to help to transform European economics, and supply a new class, the bourgeoisie, even more vigorous than the ksatriyas in developing education and ideas.

The influence of mystical and esoteric ideas upon the formation of the Renaissance may also be mentioned. The revived Platonism brought with it new interest in Neoplatonism. Moreover, the rediscovery of the old Hermetic stimulated new forms of esotericism which came to be combined with a refreshed Kabbalah.

Anylizing the philosophy of the Renaissance we can see a number of philosophies which were born in Europe in 15-18 centuries. They all had antischolastic, antichurch character and they raised man beleiving into his physical and spiritual potential. These philosophies were optimistic and full of life.

The main peculiarities of the Revival philosophy are as follows:

1. Anthropocentricism and humanism;

2. Opposition to Church and schoolasticism (though they did not deny God and religion, but Church as an organization, which appeared to become an intermediary between God and the beleivers);

3. An increasing interest in nature. A new, rather materialistic conception of the world appeared;

4. Growing social and political incentive, the idea of social equality;

5.The formation of cultural individualism.

The main streams of the Renaissance philosophy:

1. Humanism.

2. Neoplatonism.

3. Philosophy of nature.

4. Social and political philosophy.

1. Humanism was born in Italy in the 14th century and later spread in Europe. In its genre it merged with literature, arts, it expressed its ideas in a methaphorical, figurative and artistic form. It was characterized by antischolastic and antichurch tendency, it aimed at demolishing God’s power and proving man’s value. Humanism glorified man’s dignity and sublimity. It was rather optimistic and life-asserted.

The vivid founders of Humanism was Dante Alyghery (1265-1321) who glorified Crtist in his works and at the same time he umnasked all the contradictions and ungraspable truths. He celebrated man in the harmony of his both devine and earthly nature. He believed in man’s innate kindness, his bright future.

He showed the new understanding of man and the world relatioship, according to which man is double determined by God through his belief and by nature through his reason. Dante did not contradict these aspects of man, rather he insisted on their combination, unity. They both determined man’s way to blessings. Dante’s humanism is non-ascetic. Man himself is responsible for his happiness. These are not inherited secure economic or social position but his own properties and merits that are decisive in evaluating him.

Petrarka( 1304-1374) proclaimed quite new ideas, which were contradictory to scholasticism. He affirmed the uniquness of human life, which was given to him only once, therefore man should live for himself but not for God. Man should be free both physicaly and spiritualy, he should have free choice for self-manifestation. He himself was responsible for his happiness. Man was beautiful both in appearance and in his spirituality. He should be happy and not to sacrifice himself to God. He did not insist on afterdeath life. Immortality could be achieved only in people’s memory.

Lorentzo Valla (1507-1557). Another philosopher of Italian Renaissance, who subverted the Church authority, critisyzed scholasticism for its untruthfulness, and artificial character. His philosophy was anthropocentrictic, he suggested a great value of human, though he rejected asketicism and renunciation. He challenged activeness in remaking the world, equality of man and woman and he supposed that the highest blessing and enjoyment was to satisfy people’s moral and material needs.

Philosophy of nature was born in XVI-XVII centuries in Europe, in Italy in particular. It was mainly concerned with materialistic views. This philosophy proved a new kind of worldview free of religion. They proposed a new picture of world in which God and nature and cosmos were a single whole. The Earth was not the center of the Universe. They insisted the possibility of knowing the world by sensual perception and reasoning but not by the revelation. The most brilliant representatives of such trend were Nicolas Copernicus, Yiordano Bruno and Galileo.

Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) studied in Cracow and in Italy, and was best known as a physician. But it was his new system in astronomy that brought him lasting fame. His heliocentric theory had many advantages, computationally, over the dominant Ptolemaic system. While some earlier thinkers had played with the idea that the earth went round the sun, Copernicus put the idea on a mathematical basis. His revolutionary view was not published till shortly before his death, but he had already expressed it widely, so that, at about the same time as the Protestant Reformation, here was another upheaval in thinking which was to have a profound impact spiritually, since it displaced humanity from the center of the cosmos. It was the symbolic and metaphysical effect of Copernicus that brought clashes between his worldview and that of the Churches. The Reformers were as much, maybe more, anti- Copernican as many Catholics, because they saw in it a challenge to a range of biblical texts.

The symbolic effects of Copernicus can be seen perhaps most plainly in the work of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), burnt at the stake for heresy, and some of its metaphysical effects in the thinking of Galileo Galilei (1464-1542), who also ran into problems with the Inquisition. Bruno drew much of his inspiration from the Hermetic writings, and while he thought that this ancient alternative religion might flourish within the structures of Catholicism, his vision was not primarily a Christian one. He saw the cosmos as a boundless living thing, somewhat after the manner of Cusanus, and he considered that there were innumerable other worlds. The whole he saw as in motion. He was thus greatly attracted by Copernicus’ theory, though he rather despised Copernicus as being a mere mathematician who did not see the secret and mysterious significance of his theory. On his return to Italy in 1591, from extensive travels in England, Germany and other parts of Europe, he was arrested by the Inquisition. Though after his first trial in Venice he recanted he was transferred to prison in Rome and in due course tried again. This time he would not recant and was burnt.

Galileo was quite a different kind of person. He saw mathematics as a useful tool in astronomy and other sciences, and his various discoveries in mechanics led him to be highly critical of Aristotelianism. His use of the telescope revealed the mountainous character of the moon and four satellites around Jupiter. This destroyed the Aristotelian distinction between celestial and sublunary substances. He stressed the importance of empirical observation, and broke free from the opposition between Platonism and Aristotelianism: a true appraisal of the nature of physical nature could not be arrived at either by authority or by deductive metaphysics. He considered that religion and science should be kept apart - they had differing languages. He was thus critical of those who tried to settle questions in science by appeal to the Bible. In due course he was tried by the Roman Inquisition and was confined to house arrest. Even so he managed to complete and smuggle out his last work “Two New Sciences”, which was published in Holland (here, by the way, we see one of the positive consequences of the fragmentation of Europe: it was not possible, especially with the printing press, to keep anyone universally censored).