Abstract
The chapter is divided into two main parts. In the first, I offer some general remarks on the elusive place of Renaissance philosophy within the larger disciplines of philosophy, philosophy of history and history of philosophy. In the second part, I rely on a specific case study – Rudolph Goclenius’s dictionaries of philosophy (published in 1613 and 1615) – to emphasize the value and importance of the philosophical production during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As a thinker straddling two centuries, Goclenius demonstrates how the contribution of seventeenth-century philosophers, with their innovative ideas about language, science and religion, cannot be properly understood without taking into account the philosophical work elaborated during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Rather than perpetuating the image of these two centuries as impoverished and unoriginal in terms of ideas and commitments, Goclenius helps us to have a more historicized and positive consideration of eclectic contaminations among philosophical trends, the influence exercised by the classical tradition, the persistence of scholastic ways of arguing and the decisive impact of philological methods.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
Rorty, Schneewind and Skinner (1984).
- 4.
Zambelli (2012 [1994]), 384.
- 5.
Celenza (2004).
- 6.
Cranz (2006).
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
On the relationship – mainly of a pragmatic nature – between metaphysics and theology in Lutheran contexts, see Jensen (1990), 25: “In the late sixteenth century, for Lutherans in particu lar, metaphysics became subordinate to theology in a far more direct way [than it used to be in the thirteenth century], and no secret was made of this subordination. The principles of metaphysics were derived from theology and proved a posteriori”.
- 10.
Goclenius (1980 [1613]), 24ab.
- 11.
Ibid., 16.
- 12.
Ibid., 210b.
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
Quoted in Goclenius (1980 [1613]), sig.)()(1v.
- 16.
On the history of the adjustment of intellectual knowledge to sensible reality through the category of “representation” (species), see Spruit (1994–1995).
- 17.
Goclenius (1980 [1613]), 215b-216a.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
Goclenius (1980 [1613]), 209a.
- 21.
Ibid., 208ab.
- 22.
Ibid., 209a.
- 23.
Ibid., 960ab. On dispositio recipiendi, see 565b. See also Goclenius (1980 [1615]), 161b-162a, s.v. “Πάθος”.
- 24.
Goclenius (1980 [1613]), 209b; 989b.
- 25.
Ibid., 963a.
- 26.
Ibid., 209ab.
- 27.
Ibid., 206b.
- 28.
Ibid., 974ab.
- 29.
Ibid., 981b.
- 30.
- 31.
Goclenius (1980 [1613]), 978b.
- 32.
Ibid., 966a.
- 33.
Ibid., 966b.
- 34.
Ibid., 206b. See also Goclenius (1980 [1615]), 73b-74a, under “Ἐνάργεια”. For Cicero on evidentia, see Academicae quaestiones, II, vi, 17.
- 35.
- 36.
Goclenius (1980 [1613]), 955a.
- 37.
Respectively, Goclenius (1980 [1613]), 962a; 565a; 569ab.
- 38.
Ibid., 174a.
- 39.
Ibid., 964ab.
- 40.
Goclenius (1980 [1615]), 282-371b.
- 41.
Goclenius (1980 [1613]),172b.
- 42.
Ibid., 173a.
- 43.
Ibid., 172b.
- 44.
On copiousness in early modern culture, see Shinn and Vine (2014).
- 45.
Goclenius (1980 [1613]), 324–328.
- 46.
Ibid., 328b.
- 47.
On Ficino’s commentaries on Dionysius, see now Allen (2015).
- 48.
Goclenius (1980 [1613]), 326.
- 49.
- 50.
See now Blair (2010).
- 51.
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Giglioni, G. (2016). What’s Wrong with Doing History of Renaissance Philosophy? Rudolph Goclenius and the Canon of Early Modern Philosophy. In: Muratori, C., Paganini, G. (eds) Early Modern Philosophers and the Renaissance Legacy. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 220. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32604-7_2
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