Humanism

This is an original and timely volume that examines the distinctive and important role played by humanism in the development of early modern philosophy. Focusing on individual authors as well as intellectual trends, this collection of essays portrays the humanist movement as an essential part of the philosophy of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This monograph demonstrates why humanism began in Italy in the mid-thirteenth century. It considers Petrarch a third generation humanist, who christianized a secular movement. The analysis traces the beginning of humanism in poetry and its gradual penetration of other Latin literary genres, and, through stylistic analyses of texts, the extent to which imitation of the ancients produced changes in cognition and visual perception.
The volume traces the link between vernacular translations and the emergence of Florence as the leader of Latin humanism by 1400 and why, limited to an elite in the fourteenth century, humanism became a major educational movement in the first decades of the fifteenth. It revises our conception of the relationship of Italian humanism to French twelfth-century humanism and of the character of early Italian humanism itself.
"In the Footsteps of the Ancients is the recipient of the Jacques Barzun Prize 2001 in Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society.
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Paul Sheehan attempts to redefine Modernist narrative for the twenty-first century. According to Sheehan, Modernism presents a major form of critique of the fundamental presumptions of humanism. By pairing key Modernist writers with philosophical critics of the humanist tradition, he shows how Modernists sought to discover humanism's inhuman potential. He reveals the crucial link between the Modernist novel's narrative concerns and its philosophical orientation in a book that will be of interest to scholars of Modernism and literary theory.

Available in English for the first time, Imperfect Garden is both an approachable intellectual history and a bracing treatise on how we should understand and experience our lives. In it, one of France's most prominent intellectuals explores the foundations, limits, and possibilities of humanist thinking. Through his critical but sympathetic excavation of humanism, Tzvetan Todorov seeks an answer to modernity's fundamental challenge: how to maintain our hard-won liberty without paying too dearly in social ties, common values, and a coherent and responsible sense of self.Todorov reads afresh the works of major humanists--primarily Montaigne, Rousseau, and Constant, but also Descartes, Montesquieu, and Toqueville. Each chapter considers humanism's approach to one major theme of human existence: liberty, social life, love, self, morality, and expression. Discussing humanism in dialogue with other systems, Todorov finds a response to the predicament of modernity that is far more instructive than any offered by conservatism, scientific determinism, existential individualism, or humanism's other contemporary competitors. Humanism suggests that we are members of an intelligent and sociable species who can act according to our will while connecting the well-being of other members with our own. It is through this understanding of free will, Todorov argues, that we can use humanism to rescue universality and reconcile human liberty with solidarity and personal integrity.Placing the history of ideas at the service of a quest for moral and political wisdom, Todorov's compelling and no doubt controversial rethinking of humanist ideas testifies to the enduring capacity of those ideas to meditate on--and, if we are fortunate, cultivate--the imperfect garden in which we live.

The claim, central to many interpretations of the Renaissance, that humanists introduced a revolution in the classroom is refuted in Robert Black's masterly survey, based on over 500 manuscript school books. He shows that the study of classical texts in schools reached a high point in the twelfth century, followed by a collapse in the thirteenth as universities rose in influence. It was not until the later 1400s that humanism had a significant impact in the schoolroom, as Italian teaching, particularly at elementary levels, remained strongly traditional throughout the fifteenth century.

Drawing on a colourful range of examples, including Aristotle, Nietzsche, Darwin, Primo Levi, Virginia Woolf & Graham Swift, 'On Humanism' reflects on a much discussed but little understood philosophical viewpoint.

Sceptres and Sciences argues convincingly that previous research on the Hispanic Late Baroque has underweighted the ideologies of ethnicity and empire embedded in Cartesianism and French neoclassicism. "... a masterful work of scholarship... should become essential reading in the field of Colonial and Spanish Enlightenment Studies."—Bulletin of Hispanic Studies

This volume discusses humanist aspects of medieval and Renaissance intellectual life and thought and of their appropriation by modern history and literature. It charts the humanist representations of the scholarly enterprise, the self-representation of the intellectual, the representation of individuality in humanist literature, as well as the problem field of Renaissance humanism as an ideological programme of educational, moral, and political reform. The volume is particularly useful for medievalists and Renaissance scholars, as well as for historians specialised in the history of medieval and Renaissance art, medicine music and education.