Philosophers of the Renaissance ed. by Paul Richard Blum (review)

473 BOOK REVIEWS Philosophers of the Renaissance. Edited by PAUL RICHARD BLUM. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010. Pp. 323. $36.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8132-1726-0. This volume contains twenty essays covering Renaissance philosophers from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. For the most part, each chapter focuses on one thinker, offering a portrait of the philosopher’s biography, literary production, and philosophical contributions. Apart from one new chapter, the essays were first published in German in 1999, and they have been revised for the English edition with updated bibliographical information. The essays collectively offer concise, reliable overviews written by well-established scholars and specialists in the field of Renaissance intellectual history. The authors do not seek to present novel or controversial views of the thinkers examined, but to provide reliable portraits and to correct common misperceptions about Renaissance philosophers. The collection is uniformly of very high quality, and the portraits emphasize the epistemological, metaphysical, cosmological, and, to a lesser extent, moral thought of a great variety of Renaissance philosophers. Some of the figures covered in this volume are quite well known. Niccolò Machiavelli, Nicolaus Cusanus, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, and Michel de Montaigne each receive a chapter. One chapter collectively treats the Byzantine thinkers George Gemistos Plethon, George of Trebizond, and Cardinal Bessarion, who each produced works in the mid-fifteenth century giving rise to a controversy over the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle. Some chapters cover thinkers probably better known for their contributions to other disciplines than to philosophy: the artistic polymath Leon Battista Alberti and the Protestant Reformer and theologian Philipp Melanchthon. Several essays examine figures who to varying degrees have acquired reputations as antiAristotelians , such Petrus Ramus, Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, and Tommaso Campanella. Other chapters in turn chronicle the life and works of those who belong to the Aristotelian tradition, such as Pietro Pomponazzi and Jacopo Zabarella. The remaining chapters concern Ramon Lull, Lorenzo Valla, Agrippa von Nettesheim, Juan Luis Vives, and Francisco Suárez. BOOK REVIEWS 474 As the book covers figures taken from a period of five centuries, some justification may be sought for the inclusion of those whose lifetimes appear within periods traditionally described as medieval or early modern. One might even question, for instance, whether there exists a period of Renaissance philosophy of sufficient distinction to merit a position between medieval and modern thought. Collectively, the chapters seem quite attuned to such concerns. For example, Emmanuel J. Bauer contributes an essay on Francisco Suárez (d. 1617), one of the latest figures treated in the volume, and while the chapter underscores the Thomistic, Scotist, and nominalist strains in Suárezian metaphysics, Bauer argues persuasively that Suárez employs a revolutionary new method. This new method “unites a mode of presentation that is oriented to the questions themselves with an illumination of the truth that is based on the history of the problems; the latter is inspired by humanist scholarship” (243). With such a method, we are told, Suárez “moves on the border between the methodology of medieval scholasticism and of the philosophy of the modern period” (ibid.). On Bauer’s account, Suárez’s humanist orientation separates him from the medieval tradition and he produces the “first comprehensive systematic presentation of metaphysics” (246). Such a concern for locating Renaissance thinkers in relation to their medieval predecessors and modern successors is further exemplified in the many chapters that argue that a particular philosopher retrieves a distinctive position of the past or anticipates some doctrine more commonly identified with better-known modern philosophers. The volume provides many examples. One chapter notes that a particular aspect of Cusanus’s thought “entails a Copernican revolution before Kant” (48), and another observes that “Telesio’s philosophy even seems to have left its traces on Thomas Hobbes” (170). Montaigne is championed as a “precursor of the modern theory of identity” (197), and we hear that the empiricism present in Agrippa von Nettesheim’s occult philosophy “points toward the modern period” (131). Additionally, Vives’s novel account of the human soul “is not breaking with tradition entirely” because it presupposes much from medieval faculty psychology...