Abstract
This article studies some key moments in the long tradition of the critique of scholastic language, voiced by humanists and early-modern philosophers alike. It aims at showing how the humanist idiom of “linguistic usage,” “convention,” “custom,” “common” and “natural” language, and “everyday speech” was repeated and put to new use by early-modern philosophers in their own critique of scholastic language. Focusing on Valla, Vives, Sanches, Gassendi, Hobbes, and Leibniz, the article shows that all these thinkers shared a conviction that scholastic language, at least in its more baroque forms, was artificial, unnatural, uninformative, ungrammatical, and quasi-precise. The scholastics were accused of having introduced a terminology that was a far cry from the common language people spoke, wrote, and read. But what was meant by “common language” and such notions? They were not so easy to define. For the humanists, it meant the Latin of the great classical authors, but this position, as the article suggests, had its tensions. In the later period it became even more difficult to give positive substance to these notions, as the world became, linguistically speaking, increasingly more pluralistic. Yet the attack on scholastic language continued to be conducted in these terms. The article concludes that the long road of what we may call the democratization of philosophical language, so dear to early-modern philosophers, had its roots – ironically perhaps – in the humanist return to classical Latin as the common language.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Pasnau (2011), 115.
- 2.
Pasnau (2011), 211 and 210 (on Scotus’s analysis of the inherence of accidents in a substance).
- 3.
For discussion see Nauta (2009), 211–212.
- 4.
For a modern discussion see Hanfling (2000).
- 5.
- 6.
Bruni in Griffiths et al. (1987), 213–229; Botley (2004), 41–62.
- 7.
Marsh (1979), 101–103.
- 8.
- 9.
“Omnis enim huiusmodi questio, qua se philosophi theologique disputando torquent, de vocabulo est;” Valla (1982), 405.
- 10.
- 11.
Nauta (2009), 274–279.
- 12.
- 13.
Ibid., 67–69.
- 14.
Ibid., 69–71.
- 15.
- 16.
Vives (1979), 69.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
- 19.
Pasnau (2011), 115–134, and 634–635.
- 20.
De prima philosophia I, in Vives (1782–90; repr. London, 1964), vol. 3, 193.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
- 23.
Sanches, Francisco (1988), 103 (Latin)/186 (English).
- 24.
Ibid., 104/189.
- 25.
- 26.
Sanches, Francisco (1988), 92/168.
- 27.
Ibid., 119/216–217.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Ibid., 121/219.
- 30.
Ibid., 97/177.
- 31.
Ibid., 101/183 (“almost every enquiry is about a name”); cf. 95–96/174; 97/177, and elsewhere.
- 32.
Ibid., 177 n. 34; my translation.
- 33.
Ibid.; my translation.
- 34.
Ibid., 171 for this and the next quotation.
- 35.
Lupoli (2009), 151 sees even “that (intrinsically anti-humanistic) resetting pattern (…) of philosophical reflection which was to characterize the Cartesian or ‘modern’ approach to philosophy in the seventeenth century.”
- 36.
- 37.
- 38.
Gassendi, Pierre (1972), 26. Cf. one of the titles of Valla’s Dialectical Disputations, Retractatio totius dialecticae cum fundamentis universae philosophiae.
- 39.
Pasnau (2011), 93–94.
- 40.
Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos, in Gassendi (1658), III, 151B.
- 41.
Gassendi (1658), III, 103; trans. Gassendi, Pierre (1972), 27.
- 42.
Gassendi (1658), III, 110A.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
Ibid.: “Quod vero interdum respondent loquendum esse ad rigorem, prorsus non diffiteor: quando sic apposite, vel nescientes, nominant suam illam insipidam marcidamque frigiditatem. Certe si cum tanto rigore isti Latine loquuntur, parum est M. Tullius, vel T. Livius loquutus Latine.” (110B). Gassendi also gives here an etymology of “res” that he may have derived from Valla (“res” from “reor, reris,” or from “ratus, rata, ratum”); Valla (2012), 124.
- 45.
- 46.
Cf. a similar position in Campanella’s Metaphysica, as discussed by Paganini (2009).
- 47.
See e.g. Vives (1971), 31 and 125 (expressing a negative view of Epicurus ).
- 48.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Ibid., 46 and Hobbes (2012), 122.
- 51.
- 52.
- 53.
Nauta (2002).
- 54.
Paganini (2003), 211.
- 55.
In private correspondence Noel Malcolm writes to me that in his transcriptions of the Hardwick Hall library catalogues he cannot find any reference to any work by Valla except his Latin translation of Thucydides. Of course, one would expect a well-educated man such as Hobbes to have encountered the Elegantiae at some stage, but still Malcolm sees no distinctive debt to it in Hobbes’s writings.
- 56.
- 57.
Curley in Hobbes (1994), x.
- 58.
- 59.
Quoted by Laerke (2009), 942 n. 25.
- 60.
Leibniz (1969), 123 for this and the following quotation.
- 61.
Ibid., 124.
- 62.
Ibid., 126 for this and the following two quotations.
- 63.
On this see Laerke (2009).
- 64.
Leibniz (1969), 121–122.
- 65.
Leibniz in Nizolio, Mario (1956), vol. 1, 30.
- 66.
These last sentences are taken from Nauta (2012), 62.
- 67.
- 68.
There are several articles pertinent to this theme in Ford et al. (2014).
- 69.
The ideal of stylistic plainness also had strongly political and religious connotations; on these debates on rhetoric in seventeenth-century England, see Vickers (1985). Royalists and Conformists used it as a weapon to marginalize nonconformist sects. Such wider dimensions of the debates on language between humanists and scholastics are explored by Moss (2003) and in D’Amico (1983), dimensions which I have hardly touched on in this article.
Bibliography
Botley, Paul. 2004. Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti and Desiderius Erasmus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bruni, Leonardo. 1987. In The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni: Selected Texts, ed. Gordon Griffiths et al. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies in Conjunction with the Renaissance Society of America.
Caluori, Damian. 2007. The Scepticism of Francisco Sanchez. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 89: 30–46.
Camporeale, Salvatore. 1972. Lorenzo Valla: Umanesimo e teologia. Florence: Nella Sede dell’Istituto Palazzo Strozzi.
Casini, Lorenzo. 2009. Self-Knowledge, Scepticism and the Quest for a New Method: Juan Luis Vives on Cognition and the Impossibility of Perfect Knowledge. In Renaissance Scepticisms, ed. Gianni Paganini, José R. Maria, and José R. Maria Neto, 33–60. Dordrecht: Springer.
D’Amico, John F. 1983. Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Ford, Philip, et al. 2014. Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World. Leiden: Brill.
Frede, Michael. 1987. The Ancient Empiricists. In Essays on Ancient Philosophy, ed. Frede Michael, 243–260. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gassendi, Pierre. 1972. The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi, ed. and trans. Craig B. Brush. New York: Johnson Reprint.
Gassendi, Pierre. 1981. Institutio logica (1658), ed. and trans. Howard Jones. Assen: Van Gorcum.
Hanfling, Oswald. 2000. Philosophy and Ordinary Language: The Bent and Genius of Our Tongue. London: Routledge.
Hobbes, Thomas. 1994. Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Hobbes, Thomas. 2012. Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Isermann, Michael. 1991. Die Sprachtheorie im Werk von Thomas Hobbes. Münster: Nodus-Publikationen.
Joy, Lynn S. 1987. Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laerke, Mogens. 2009. The Problem of Alloglossia. Leibniz on Spinoza’s Innovative Use of Philosophical Language. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17: 939–953.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 1969. Philosophical Papers and Letters. Trans. Leroy E. Loemker. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Leijenhorst, Cees. 2002. ‘Insignificant Speech’. Thomas Hobbes and Late Aristotelianism on Words, Concepts and Things. In Res et Verba in der Renaissance, ed. Ian Maclean and Eckhard Kessler, 337–368. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Lupoli, Agostino. 2009. Humanus animus nusquam consistit: Doctor Sanchez’s Diagnosis of the Incurable Human Unrest and Ignorance. In Renaissance Scepticisms, ed. Gianni Paganini and José R. Maria Neto, 149–181. Dordrecht: Springer.
Maclean, Ian. 2006. The ‘Sceptical Crisis’ Reconsidered: Galen, Rational Medicine and the Libertas Philosophandi. Early Science and Medicine 11: 247–274.
Marsh, David. 1979. Grammar, Method, and Polemic in Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantiae. Rinascimento 19: 91–116.
Moss, Ann. 2003. Renaissance Truth and the Latin language Turn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Murr, Sylvia. 1992. Foi religieuse et ‘libertas philosophandi’ chez Gassendi. Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 76: 85–100.
Nauta, Lodi. 2002. Hobbes the Pessimistic? Continuity of Hobbes’s Views on Reason and Eloquence Between The Elements of Law and Leviathan. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 10: 31–54.
Nauta, Lodi. 2007. Lorenzo Valla and the Rise of Humanist Dialectic. In The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. James Hankins, 193–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nauta, Lodi. 2009. In Defense of Common Sense: Lorenzo Valla’s Humanist Critique of Scholastic Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Nauta, Lodi. 2012. Anti-essentialism and the Rhetoricization of Knowledge: Mario Nizolio’s Humanist Attack on Universals. Renaissance Quarterly 65: 31–66.
Nauta, Lodi. 2015. The Order of Knowing: Vives on Language, Thought, and the Topics. The Journal of the History of Ideas 76: 325–345.
Nizolio, Mario. 1956. De veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi contra pseudophilosophos, ed. Quirinus Breen. 2 vols. Rome: Bocca.
Osler, Margaret J. 2003. Early Modern Uses of Hellenistic Philosophy: Gassendi’s Epicurean Project. In Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Jon Miller and Brad Inwood, 30–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Paganini, Gianni. 2003. Hobbes, Valla and the Trinity. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11: 183–218.
Paganini, Gianni. 2009. Tommaso Campanella: The Reappraisal and Refutations of Scepticism. In Renaissance Scepticisms, ed. Gianni Paganini, José R. Maria, and José R. Maria Neto, 275–303. Dordrecht: Springer.
Pasnau, Robert. 2011. Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Popkin, Richard. 2003. The History of Scepticism, from Savonarola to Bayle. Revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rummel, Erika. 2000. The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Sanches, Francisco. 1988. That Nothing is Known, ed. and trans. Elaine Limbrick and Douglas F. S. Thomson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sanches, Francisco. 2007. Quod nihil scitur/Dass nichts gewusst wird, ed. and trans. Kaspar Howald et al. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
Seigel, Jerrold E. 1968. Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sommerville, Johann P. 1992. Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Tavoni, Mirko. 1984. Latino, grammatica, volgare: Storia di una questione umanistica. Padua: Antenore.
Valla, Lorenzo. 2012. Dialectical Disputations. ed. and trans. Brian P. Copenhaver and Lodi Nauta. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vickers, Brian. 1985. The Royal Society and English Prose Style: A Reassessment. In Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Brian Vickers and Nancy Struever, 1–76. Los Angeles: The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
Vives, Juan Luis. 1782–90. Opera Omnia, ed. Gregorio Myans y Siscar. 8 vols. Valencia: Monfort (reprint London, 1964).
Vives, Juan Luis. 1971. De tradendis disciplinis. In Vives: On Education. Trans. Foster Watson. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield.
Vives, Juan Luis. 1979. Against the Pseudodialecticians. Trans. Rita Guerlac. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Wels, Volkhard. 2000. Triviale Künste: Die humanistische Reform der grammatischen, dialektischen und rhetorischen Ausbildung an der Wende zum 16. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Weidler.
Witt, Ronald G. 2000. In the Footsteps of the Ancients. The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni. Leiden: Brill.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nauta, L. (2016). The Critique of Scholastic Language in Renaissance Humanism and 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_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32604-7_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-32602-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-32604-7
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)