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A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps #6
Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy
Peter Adamson explores the rich intellectual history of the Byzantine Empire and the Italian Renaissance.
Peter Adamson presents an engaging and wide-ranging introduction to the thinkers and movements of two great intellectual cultures: Byzantium and the Italian Renaissance. First he traces the development of philosophy in the Eastern Christian world, from such early figures as John of Damascus in the
eighth century to the late Byzantine scholars of the fifteenth century. He introduces major figures like Michael Psellos, Anna Komnene, and Gregory Palamas, and examines the philosophical significance of such cultural phenomena as iconoclasm and conceptions of gender. We discover the little-known
traditions of philosophy in Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian. These chapters also explore the scientific, political, and historical literature of Byzantium. There is a close connection to the second half of the book, since thinkers of the Greek East helped to spark the humanist movement in Italy.
Adamson tells the story of the rebirth of philosophy in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We encounter such famous names as Christine de Pizan, Niccol� Machiavelli, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo, but as always in this book series such major figures are read alongside contemporaries who
are not so well known, including such fascinating figures as Lorenzo Valla, Girolamo Savonarola, and Bernardino Telesio. Major historical themes include the humanist engagement with ancient literature, the emergence of women humanists, the flowering of Republican government in Renaissance Italy, the
continuation of Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy alongside humanism, and breakthroughs in science. All areas of philosophy, from theories of economics and aesthetics to accounts of the human mind, are featured. This is the sixth volume of Adamson's History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps,
taking us to the threshold of the early modern era.
Peter Adamson presents an engaging and wide-ranging introduction to the thinkers and movements of two great intellectual cultures: Byzantium and the Italian Renaissance. First he traces the development of philosophy in the Eastern Christian world, from such early figures as John of Damascus in the
eighth century to the late Byzantine scholars of the fifteenth century. He introduces major figures like Michael Psellos, Anna Komnene, and Gregory Palamas, and examines the philosophical significance of such cultural phenomena as iconoclasm and conceptions of gender. We discover the little-known
traditions of philosophy in Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian. These chapters also explore the scientific, political, and historical literature of Byzantium. There is a close connection to the second half of the book, since thinkers of the Greek East helped to spark the humanist movement in Italy.
Adamson tells the story of the rebirth of philosophy in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We encounter such famous names as Christine de Pizan, Niccol� Machiavelli, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo, but as always in this book series such major figures are read alongside contemporaries who
are not so well known, including such fascinating figures as Lorenzo Valla, Girolamo Savonarola, and Bernardino Telesio. Major historical themes include the humanist engagement with ancient literature, the emergence of women humanists, the flowering of Republican government in Renaissance Italy, the
continuation of Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy alongside humanism, and breakthroughs in science. All areas of philosophy, from theories of economics and aesthetics to accounts of the human mind, are featured. This is the sixth volume of Adamson's History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps,
taking us to the threshold of the early modern era.
483 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2022
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464 people want to read
About the author
Peter S. Adamson
30 books125 followersPeter Scott Adamson is an American academic who is professor of philosophy in late antiquity and in the Islamic world at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich as well as professor of ancient and medieval philosophy at Kings College London.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 19, 2024
"Those who reject philosophy are doomed to engage in it. If you tell a philosopher that philosophy is a waste of time and can’t possibly prove anything, the philosopher will brighten up and say, “What an interesting philosophical claim that is! What’s your argument for it?”
"Like Rodney Dangerfield, obsessive collectors get no respect. The word “trainspotter,” which refers to a railway enthusiast, is in British English synonymous with “loser,” and there is indeed something slightly tragic about someone who spends all their free time looking for things the rest of us find pointless. We’ve all shaped our faces into a frozen smile and uttered a forced “wow” when being shown, say, a neighbor’s collection of Star Wars figurines or a cousin’s treasure trove of memorabilia from the career of Donny and Marie Osmond. At such moments, I remind myself that I too am prone to the collector’s impulse. I refer not to my complete edition of Buster Keaton’s silent films, for which I make no apologies, but to my embarrassingly large collection of books about ancient and medieval philosophy. The roots of addiction were planted early in my own career, when a young man who was considering studying philosophy looked around my office and said, “So I guess you’re new here?” When I asked how he knew this, he said, “Because you hardly have any books.” That was about twenty years ago. Nowadays, a visitor might reasonably conclude that I am preparing for a cataclysm in which all of Western civilization is destroyed, with the lucky exception of my office, so that future historians will be able to reconstruct the early history of philosophy using nothing but my private library. What they will make of my knee-high, plastic, dancing James Brown doll, I hesitate to guess."
"In the popular imagination, the middle ages were a time ofunremitting repression. The threat ofpersecution and book burnings ensured that intellectuals would stay well within the bounds of accepted orthodoxy, which is why medieval philosophers were rather uncreative and tradition-bound in comparison to the innovative thinkers of the Enlightenment. This cliché is basically wrong, though it contains a grain of truth. Of the three medieval philosophical traditions we’ve covered in this book series, it is least applicable to the Islamic world. There, political persecution of philosophy was almost unheard of, in part because there was no obvious institutional framework for enforcing religious orthodoxy. Things were rather different in the Latin West, where we do see reprimand or imprisonment of philosophers including Peter Abelard and Roger Bacon. Worse was the fate of Marguerite Porete, who not only saw her writings destroyed but was ultimately executed for heresy.1 For the most part, though, philosophers were not punished for heresy, for the excellent reason that they were not heretics. Another popular conception has it that any philosopher worthy ofthe name should challenge the beliefs oftheir society. But in fact the vast majority of philosophers, in the middle ages and still today, argue in support of widely held beliefs, seeking to clarify and explore the consequences of commonly accepted doctrines rather than trying to undermine them."
"Just as we know God only through His outward activities, so we can know any person only through his or her activities, not in his or her essence. This means that our relationships with other people are inevitably just that: relational. As Yannaras put it, “the person is known as existential otherness through the ‘rational’ otherness of the relations it constitutes.”
"Alongside such accusations, George does mention more substantive philosophical failings in Plato. Having translated Plato’s Laws, he is well placed to critique the Platonic political theory.10 In a remarkable section of his diatribe, he attacks the elitist and xenophobic elements of that theory. He is appalled by provisions in the Laws that prevented aliens from settling permanently in the ideal city. George reflects explicitly on his own life story here, remarking that it would be unjust to exile him from his new Italian homeland just because he hails from Crete. He praises the ancient Romans and, remarkably, the Ottomans of his own day for their cosmopolitanism, their willingness to integrate citizens of different ethnic groups and backgrounds into a single state. Furthermore, George rails against the way Plato calls for a strict division of the classes, something we also know from the Republic. How will the citizens ever be united in bonds offriendship ifone class is permanently and significantly disadvantaged, and why would the upper class ever look on their inferiors with anything but disdain? Not a bad question even today.
But most extraordinary is George’s point that Plato, or his philosopher-rulers, have no business prescribing to all citizens how they should spend their lives. Who is Plato to say that a humble laborer may not aspire to gain wealth and standing in his community? George’s argument may reflect the greater social mobility of Renaissance Italy, and resonates with ideas we’ll consider later under the heading of “civic humanism” (Chapter 38). But he sometimes sounds remarkably like the modern-day philosophy student who, having grown up in a Western liberal democracy, is confronted with the totalitarian paternalism of the Republic. Consider the following lines: “Isn’t man free? ...Don’t you see that judgments differ, that pains and pleasures differ? Perfectly honorable things which I find pleasant you snatch away from me and substitute things you find pleasant.”
"Peter Singer was giving Pico more than his fair share of credit, or blame, when he named him and the other humanists as pioneers of speciesism. The superiority ofthe human to the beast was a well-worn trope ofancient and medieval philosophy, grounded in the Aristotelian and Stoic conviction that reason is distinctive ofhumankind. So the humanists were actually being fairly traditional when they encouraged us to turn away from our animal natures. It’s advice that appears pervasively in the period."
"A striking feature here is the tacit assumption that the total amount of wealth in a given community, or in the world as a whole, is fixed. The advocate of progressive tax in Guicciardini’s dialogue offers a very Florentine image to illustrate: if you have a certain amount of cloth for a certain number of people, and use it to make elaborate robes for a few of these people, there won’t be enough left to clothe everyone.21 If the poor gain, the rich must lose, and vice versa. There is no hope here of a rising tide that might lift all boats. It’s the economic equivalent of the zero-sum political world envisioned by Machiavelli, and by Guiccardini himself. Power and resources move from some hands to others, but they never increase overall. Indeed, this was assumed even in the fantasy context of the Renaissance utopias, which speak of wealth passing around freely from hand to hand but not of everyone getting rich. Perhaps to achieve this, everyone would have to become a philosopher. For, like Xenophon’s Socrates, philosophers know that true wealth lies in knowing what you really need, and having no less than that."
"He wrestled with the nature of the mind throughout his career, eventually reaching the conclusion that there is only one capacity for abstract, truly intellectual thought, which is shared by all humankind. The intellect’s operation is universal, because its knowledge consists in grasping general realities or “universals.” By contrast, other forms of cognition, like sensation and imagination, grasp particulars and their properties. You can see, or imagine, an individual giraffe, but you must use your intellect to grasp the universal nature that belongs to all giraffes. Averroes did not see how this universal nature could be received in a physical organ like the brain.6 You can collect sensory images in the brain, remember them, fabricate new images you haven’t experienced, like a giraffe eating broccoli, and even think about particulars to make plans for the future: what might you do if your pet giraffe refuses to eat its vegetables? But your brain cannot be the seat of universal thoughts. This fits well with something Averroes could find stated clearly in Aristotle, namely that the intellect’s activity is not realized in any bodily organ. If the intellect’s work takes place outside my bodily organs, Averroes thought, then it must not belong to me, or any other individual embodied person. The intellect is universal, and belongs to everyone."
"Like Rodney Dangerfield, obsessive collectors get no respect. The word “trainspotter,” which refers to a railway enthusiast, is in British English synonymous with “loser,” and there is indeed something slightly tragic about someone who spends all their free time looking for things the rest of us find pointless. We’ve all shaped our faces into a frozen smile and uttered a forced “wow” when being shown, say, a neighbor’s collection of Star Wars figurines or a cousin’s treasure trove of memorabilia from the career of Donny and Marie Osmond. At such moments, I remind myself that I too am prone to the collector’s impulse. I refer not to my complete edition of Buster Keaton’s silent films, for which I make no apologies, but to my embarrassingly large collection of books about ancient and medieval philosophy. The roots of addiction were planted early in my own career, when a young man who was considering studying philosophy looked around my office and said, “So I guess you’re new here?” When I asked how he knew this, he said, “Because you hardly have any books.” That was about twenty years ago. Nowadays, a visitor might reasonably conclude that I am preparing for a cataclysm in which all of Western civilization is destroyed, with the lucky exception of my office, so that future historians will be able to reconstruct the early history of philosophy using nothing but my private library. What they will make of my knee-high, plastic, dancing James Brown doll, I hesitate to guess."
"In the popular imagination, the middle ages were a time ofunremitting repression. The threat ofpersecution and book burnings ensured that intellectuals would stay well within the bounds of accepted orthodoxy, which is why medieval philosophers were rather uncreative and tradition-bound in comparison to the innovative thinkers of the Enlightenment. This cliché is basically wrong, though it contains a grain of truth. Of the three medieval philosophical traditions we’ve covered in this book series, it is least applicable to the Islamic world. There, political persecution of philosophy was almost unheard of, in part because there was no obvious institutional framework for enforcing religious orthodoxy. Things were rather different in the Latin West, where we do see reprimand or imprisonment of philosophers including Peter Abelard and Roger Bacon. Worse was the fate of Marguerite Porete, who not only saw her writings destroyed but was ultimately executed for heresy.1 For the most part, though, philosophers were not punished for heresy, for the excellent reason that they were not heretics. Another popular conception has it that any philosopher worthy ofthe name should challenge the beliefs oftheir society. But in fact the vast majority of philosophers, in the middle ages and still today, argue in support of widely held beliefs, seeking to clarify and explore the consequences of commonly accepted doctrines rather than trying to undermine them."
"Just as we know God only through His outward activities, so we can know any person only through his or her activities, not in his or her essence. This means that our relationships with other people are inevitably just that: relational. As Yannaras put it, “the person is known as existential otherness through the ‘rational’ otherness of the relations it constitutes.”
"Alongside such accusations, George does mention more substantive philosophical failings in Plato. Having translated Plato’s Laws, he is well placed to critique the Platonic political theory.10 In a remarkable section of his diatribe, he attacks the elitist and xenophobic elements of that theory. He is appalled by provisions in the Laws that prevented aliens from settling permanently in the ideal city. George reflects explicitly on his own life story here, remarking that it would be unjust to exile him from his new Italian homeland just because he hails from Crete. He praises the ancient Romans and, remarkably, the Ottomans of his own day for their cosmopolitanism, their willingness to integrate citizens of different ethnic groups and backgrounds into a single state. Furthermore, George rails against the way Plato calls for a strict division of the classes, something we also know from the Republic. How will the citizens ever be united in bonds offriendship ifone class is permanently and significantly disadvantaged, and why would the upper class ever look on their inferiors with anything but disdain? Not a bad question even today.
But most extraordinary is George’s point that Plato, or his philosopher-rulers, have no business prescribing to all citizens how they should spend their lives. Who is Plato to say that a humble laborer may not aspire to gain wealth and standing in his community? George’s argument may reflect the greater social mobility of Renaissance Italy, and resonates with ideas we’ll consider later under the heading of “civic humanism” (Chapter 38). But he sometimes sounds remarkably like the modern-day philosophy student who, having grown up in a Western liberal democracy, is confronted with the totalitarian paternalism of the Republic. Consider the following lines: “Isn’t man free? ...Don’t you see that judgments differ, that pains and pleasures differ? Perfectly honorable things which I find pleasant you snatch away from me and substitute things you find pleasant.”
"Peter Singer was giving Pico more than his fair share of credit, or blame, when he named him and the other humanists as pioneers of speciesism. The superiority ofthe human to the beast was a well-worn trope ofancient and medieval philosophy, grounded in the Aristotelian and Stoic conviction that reason is distinctive ofhumankind. So the humanists were actually being fairly traditional when they encouraged us to turn away from our animal natures. It’s advice that appears pervasively in the period."
"A striking feature here is the tacit assumption that the total amount of wealth in a given community, or in the world as a whole, is fixed. The advocate of progressive tax in Guicciardini’s dialogue offers a very Florentine image to illustrate: if you have a certain amount of cloth for a certain number of people, and use it to make elaborate robes for a few of these people, there won’t be enough left to clothe everyone.21 If the poor gain, the rich must lose, and vice versa. There is no hope here of a rising tide that might lift all boats. It’s the economic equivalent of the zero-sum political world envisioned by Machiavelli, and by Guiccardini himself. Power and resources move from some hands to others, but they never increase overall. Indeed, this was assumed even in the fantasy context of the Renaissance utopias, which speak of wealth passing around freely from hand to hand but not of everyone getting rich. Perhaps to achieve this, everyone would have to become a philosopher. For, like Xenophon’s Socrates, philosophers know that true wealth lies in knowing what you really need, and having no less than that."
"He wrestled with the nature of the mind throughout his career, eventually reaching the conclusion that there is only one capacity for abstract, truly intellectual thought, which is shared by all humankind. The intellect’s operation is universal, because its knowledge consists in grasping general realities or “universals.” By contrast, other forms of cognition, like sensation and imagination, grasp particulars and their properties. You can see, or imagine, an individual giraffe, but you must use your intellect to grasp the universal nature that belongs to all giraffes. Averroes did not see how this universal nature could be received in a physical organ like the brain.6 You can collect sensory images in the brain, remember them, fabricate new images you haven’t experienced, like a giraffe eating broccoli, and even think about particulars to make plans for the future: what might you do if your pet giraffe refuses to eat its vegetables? But your brain cannot be the seat of universal thoughts. This fits well with something Averroes could find stated clearly in Aristotle, namely that the intellect’s activity is not realized in any bodily organ. If the intellect’s work takes place outside my bodily organs, Averroes thought, then it must not belong to me, or any other individual embodied person. The intellect is universal, and belongs to everyone."
July 26, 2023
Disclaimer ahead. I only read the first part of this book that concerned Byzantine philosophy as I am only interested in that at the moment. This was an okay read but nothing special. The author tried to give an intellectual overview of Byzantine philosophy and somewhat succeeded. To me the tone of the work was too colloquial which put me off. The author was trying to write a more popular level work and in that sense the book is a success but I was looking for something with more meat on the bones so to speak. I found the chapter on Byzantine political philosophy particularly fascinating but wanted more than what the author provided. I wanted to know just how much of a constraint the idea of being a "good emperor" had on the emperor himself. More about the role of the church and how they all interacted. The Byzantine Empire was not a democracy by any means but it seems like the idea of being a good emperor who has responsibility towards his people was a key part of Byzantine political philosophy. When the emperor was bad though, how much is it proper for the people or the church to try and reign him in? Questions such as that played in my mind as I read that chapter. I found this book to be a good jumping off point for further study so I appreciate the author for that.
July 4, 2024
This is the 6th volume in Peter Adamson's ongoing series, "A history of philosophy without any gaps," inspired by his podcast with the same title. All six entries are well worth your time, but I enjoyed this one particularly, for two reasons. First, I didn't know much about Byzantine philosophy and, as many others, I suspect, I just equated "Byzantine" with boring. Boy, was I mistaken! While still characterized by far too much interest in theology for a secularist like myself, the narrative was decidedly more engaging than I had anticipated. For some reason, the debate between iconoclasts and their critics particularly piqued my interest. Second, chapters 22-54 (i.e., the bulk of the book) are about Renaissance philosophy, and one simply cannot help but being fascinated by the Italian humanists, so I found myself voraciously reading what Adamson writes about Pico della Mirandola, Niccolò Machiavelli, Lorenzo Valla, Marsilio Ficino, Girolamo Cardano, and all the others (including a fair number of women). The most heartbreaking chapter is the next to the last, recounting the story of Giordano Bruno and his murder on the orders of the Papal Inquisition. The last chapter is about Galileo, to whom Adamson promises to return after having set the stage some more with his next book, on the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Stay tuned...
November 22, 2023
Another very solid installment in this series. It was a bit more of a slog than the Medieval one, but perhaps that's because I'm less interested in the Renaissance.
As usual, this work acts as a very good launching off point for discussing names both big and small in Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy. I'm not really inspired to read many of them, but at least I have a good list if/when I do decide to delve into them.
As usual, this work acts as a very good launching off point for discussing names both big and small in Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy. I'm not really inspired to read many of them, but at least I have a good list if/when I do decide to delve into them.
May 7, 2022
So much interesting detail recounted in a off-hand fashion. (much like his podcast series). Very nice to couple Byzantium and the Renaissance on the basis of its philosofers. I wonder how much of all these details the writer can keep in his own mind all the time?
August 3, 2022
I enjoyed this much more than the previous instalment on Indian Philosophy.
Much the same as the rest of the series: engaging and easy to read without dumbing things down too much. A worthwhile candidate for your bookshelf.
Much the same as the rest of the series: engaging and easy to read without dumbing things down too much. A worthwhile candidate for your bookshelf.
January 30, 2023
The last in an increasingly long series. But worth it. You wouldn't immediately think of a clear relationship between Byzantine and Renaissance philosophy but the author makes this clear right from the start. The usual thorough coverage with long lists of the not so famous writers and thinkers you may never have heard of. Along with known figures. The coverage has to be a bit rushed despite the available 600 pages or so - but the author does a surprisingly good job of touching on all the major themes.
As I read these volumes I become increasingly aware that they're all spinning around the same old questions - never really answered, just re-expressed. And the questions themselves are at heart surprisingly simple.
As I read these volumes I become increasingly aware that they're all spinning around the same old questions - never really answered, just re-expressed. And the questions themselves are at heart surprisingly simple.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews