History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps

HoP 401 - Word Perfect - Logic and Language in Renaissance France

Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Julius Caesar Scaliger fuse Aristotelianism with humanism to address problems in logic and literary aesthetics.

HoP 398 - Pearls of Wisdom - Marguerite of Navarre

A Renaissance queen supports philosophical humanism and produces literary works on spirituality, love, and the soul.

HoP 397 - Do As the Romans Did - French Humanism

We begin to look at philosophy in Renaissance France, beginning with humanists like Budé and the use of classical philosophy by poets du Bellay and Ronsard.

HoP 391 - Everything is Mine and Nothing - Lipsius and the Revival of Stoicism

Justus Lipsius draws on Seneca and other Stoics to counsel peace of mind in the face of political chaos, but also writes a work on how such chaos can be avoided.

HoP 390 - Born to Be Contrary - Toleration in the Netherlands

Amidst religious conflict in the Netherlands, Dirck Coornhert pleads for religious toleration and freedom of expression.

HoP 389 - The Acid Test - Theories of Matter

Schegk, Taurellus, Gorlaeus, and Sennert revive atomism to explain chemical reactions, the composition of bodies, and the generation of organisms.

HoP 387 - Helen Hattab on Protestant Philosophy

An interview with Helen Hattab on the scope and impact of scholastic philosophy among Protestants.

HoP 386 - Perhaps Not Wrong - Cornelius Agrippa

Was Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa a dark magician, a pious skeptic, or both?

HoP 376 - Books That Last Forever - Erasmus

The “learned piety” of Desiderius Erasmus, the greatest figure of northern humanism.

HoP 373 - Lords of Language - Northern Humanism

Rudolph Agricola, Juan Luis Vives and other humanist scholars spread the study of classical antiquity across Europe and mock the technicalities of scholastic philosophy.

HoP 371 - European Disunion - Introduction to the Reformation

How humanism and scholasticism came together with the Protestant Reformation to create the philosophy of 15-16th century Europe.

HoP 368 - Boundless Enthusiasm - Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno’s stunning vision of an infinite universe with infinite worlds, and his own untimely end.

HoP 367 - Brian Copenhaver on Renaissance Magic

Our guest Brian Copenhaver joins us to explain how Ficino and other Renaissance philosophers thought about magic.

HoP 362 - Just What the Doctor Ordered - Renaissance Medicine

Connections between philosophy and advances in medicine, including the anatomy of Vesalius.

HoP 360 - Dag N. Hasse on Arabic Learning in the Renaissance

An interview with Dag Nikolaus Hasse on the Renaissance reception of Averroes, Avicenna, and other authors who wrote in Arabic.

HoP 358 - Of Two Minds - Pomponazzi and Nifo on the Intellect

Pietro Pomponazzi and Agostino Nifo debate the immortality of the soul and the cogency of Averroes’ theory of intellect.

HoP 357 - David Lines on Aristotle's Ethics in the Renaissance

An interview with David Lines on the role of Aristotle in Renaissance ethics.

HoP 350 - The Sentence - Machiavelli on Republicanism

Peter celebrates reaching 350 episodes by explaining a single sentence in Machiavelli's "Discourses."

HoP 348 - The Sweet Restraints of Liberty - Republicanism and Civic Humanism

Did “civic humanism” really make republicanism a newly dominant political theory in the Italian Renaissance?

HoP 344 - The Count of Concord - Pico della Mirandola

Pico della Mirandola argues for the harmony of the ancient authorities, draws on Jewish mysticism, and questions the value of humanist rhetoric.