HoP 352 - The Teacher of Our Actions - Renaissance Historiography
Bruni, Poggio, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini explore political ideas and historical method in works on Roman and Italian history.
Bruni, Poggio, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini explore political ideas and historical method in works on Roman and Italian history.
Peter celebrates reaching 350 episodes by explaining a single sentence in Machiavelli's "Discourses."
Did “civic humanism” really make republicanism a newly dominant political theory in the Italian Renaissance?
Pico della Mirandola and Giannozzo Manetti praise humans as the centerpiece of the created world. But what about the other animals?
The rediscovery of Epicurus, Lucretius, and Sextus Empiricus spreads challenging ideas about chance, atomism, and skepticism.
Lorenzo Valla launches a furious attack on scholastic philosophy, favoring the resources of classical Latin.
Bessarion and George Trapenzuntius, rival scholars from the Greek east who helped inspire the Italian Renaissance.
Was Gemistos Plethon, the last great thinker of the Byzantine tradition, a secret pagan or just a Christian with an unusual enthusiasm for Platonism?
Philosophical themes in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and “Troilus and Criseyde,” as well as Langland’s “Piers Plowman.”
The scholastic and mystic Meister Eckhart sets out his daring speculations about God and humankind in both Latin and German.
The hipster’s choice for favorite scholastic, John Buridan, sets out a nominalist theory of knowledge and language, and explains the workings of free will.
Scotus, Ockham, and Bradwardine ask how we can be free if God knows and chooses the things we will do in the future.
William of Ockham on freedom of action and freedom of thought.
A conversation with Tom Pink about medieval theories of freedom and action.
Scotus argues that morality is a matter of freely choosing to follow God’s freely issued commands.
Scotus develops a novel theory of free will and, along the way, rethinks the notions of necessity and possibility.
An interview with Martin Pickavé on voluntarism in Henry of Ghent.