Renaissance Readings of the Corpus Aristotelicum (review)

Marianne Pade, editor. Renaissance Readings of the Corpus Aristotelicum. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2001. Pp. 261. Paper, $34.00.

Aristotle's philosophy did not suffer a sudden demise with the rise of Renaissance humanism, as many accounts would have us believe. Nor did the Renaissance lack important developments in philosophy, as analytic historians of philosophy implicitly claim by the absence of philosophers in their canon during this period. Rather, in order to understand the content and contexts of Renaissance and early modern philosophy, one must be acquainted with Aristotelianism and its varieties during the period from roughly 1400 to 1600. That thesis is the unarticulated moral of this collection of essays.

This volume contains the proceedings of a conference by the same name that took place in Copenhagen in April 1998. The thirteen papers in the collection survey a number of disciplines—political philosophy, ethics, mixed mathematics, classical learning, natural philosophy, theories of the soul, the study of plants, and metaphysics—showing in most cases that there was a significant influence of Aristotelianism at the same time that that philosophy was often modified in light of new learning.

The highlight of the volume is Eckhard Kessler's paper, "Metaphysics or Empirical Science? The Two Faces of Aristotelian Natural Philosophy in the Sixteenth Century." Kessler discusses an apparent inconsistency in Aristotle's writings on natural philosophy on the identity of natural beings: the metaphysical approach found in the Physics and the naturalistic approach found in On Generation and Corruption and the Meteorology. In the Physics, the object of study is defined in terms of the metaphysical principles of matter and form, which, by the Renaissance period, was enhanced by the concept of substantial forms. By contrast, the more naturalistic approach defined the subject matter of natural philosophy in terms of the interaction of the first qualities—the hot, the cold, the dry, the moist—and called for an empirical approach to natural knowledge. Kessler argues, "the emancipation of natural philosophy from metaphysics did not start with the revival of atomism in the seventeenth century, but with the revival of a strong naturalistic tendency as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century" (80). Examining the writings of Frascatoro, Cardano, and Telesio, Kessler points to the shifting disciplinary boundaries and the development of an empirical rather than metaphysical approach to natural philosophy during this period.

Other papers also point to emerging changes in disciplinary boundaries during the Renaissance. David Lines argues that the humanists' philological approach to Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics led to their treating it more as a work of literature than as a practical science. Dealing with the issue of shifting disciplinary boundaries more generally, Heikki Mikkeli concentrates on different conceptions of the classification of knowledge, and in particular the untraditional inclusion of the practical arts and the mechanical arts. Significantly, the classification of knowledge based on the seven liberal arts gradually disappeared during the first half of the sixteenth century, a development which Mikkeli interprets as linking Renaissance humanism directly to the Scientific Revolution. Marianne Marcussen defends a similar thesis in arguing that Aristotle's distinction between pure and applied mathematics may have influenced the Renaissance development of perspective.

Renaissance discussions about the immortality of the soul derived from the revival of the writings of the third century Aristotelian Alexander of Aphrodisias, whose denial of the soul's immortality was revived by Pietro Pomponazzi in the early sixteenth century. Pomponazzi's heretical views provided the intellectual context for many Renaissance and early modern arguments about the nature and immortality of the soul.

The study of plants, according to Peter Wagner, seems to have been less influenced by lingering Aristotelianism than other areas. Here, the proliferation of hitherto unknown species discovered during the explorations of the New World resulted in the need for new criteria of classification. Although Aristotelian (or, more accurately, Theophrastian) categories were no longer directly applicable to the needs of Renaissance herbalists, the...