Mertonians and Parisians
Explanation:
Visto che è sabato sera, e sulla BBC non c'è nulla e la Regina si prepara celebrare il giubileo e non mi ha invitato ho deciso di copiarti un articolo dall'Encyclopaedia Britannica. Nel testo ho evidenziato il termine "Mertonians" mettendolo tra virgolette
Modern developments From the Renaissance to the 18th century
In the 15th century Italy became the focal point at which various forms of Aristotelianism converged. Certain links between Italian universities and religious schools and the University of Paris had already flourished for a long time. In the late 14th century Paolo Nicoletti (Paulus Venetus) returned from Oxford to Padua after having absorbed the new logic and physics of the "Mertonians"
and the radical nominalism of Ockham and after having increased his acquaintance with the French Averroistic trend; works by the Englishmen and by Paolo were textbooks in Italian universities for many generations. At the end of the century a number of Spanish and Italian Jews were passing on, in Latin, still more texts of Averroës on Aristotle, as well as the Jews' own recent contributions to Aristotelian learning.A more spectacular contribution of books, linguistic and didactic competence, and stimulating debates came with an influx of Greek scholars into the Western sphere. They were attracted by the humanists' craving for classical learning, the theological discussions between Orthodox and Roman Catholic leaders, and the relative freedom offered by the Republic of Venice and by Florence to those who were taking refuge from Turkish domination. Many manuscripts were taken to Italy, and many were transcribed in Italy by the Greeks, who also taught the Greek language to the Italian scholars. An editorial masterpiece by Aldus Manutius, an early printer, publisher, and editor, at the end of the 15th century made accessible to many almost the complete Greek corpus of Aristotle's works. A great number of Greek and Latin scholars--such as Bessarion, John Argyropoulos, Leonardo Bruni, and Lorenzo Valla--produced new translations of those texts; others translated many works on Aristotle previously unknown in Latin.As soon as printing had been established (that is to say, by the late 15th century), editorial activity was directed to the production of many complete as well as partial editions of the Latin versions of Aristotle and Averroës in both their older and newer versions from the Greek, the Arabic, and the Hebrew. At the universities of Padua and Bologna and at Ferrara and Venice, Averroists such as Agostino Nifo and Nicoletto Vernia and independent interpreters such as Pietro Pomponazzi were dominating the philosophical scene. For Pomponazzi, Aristotle, whether right or wrong, had to be studied directly by way of his own works and not by way of his interpreters; yet he did not think that Aristotle had a monopoly on knowledge, and for this reason his mistakes concerning facts needed to be exposed.There were others who followed Aristotle in his vast scientific achievements or searched his works for a clearer formulation of scientific methods. It was this scientific spirit that kept alive the interest in Aristotle's methodology and in his philosophy of nature down to the time, in the 17th century, when William Harvey, the English physician who discovered the circulation of the blood, was lecturing on Aristotle's books on animals and Galileo was writing on science and logic.In a less apparent form, Aristotelianism, still strongly entrenched in most European schools, continued to have its effect on the most modern philosophers. The methodology of Francis Bacon, English philosopher, scientist, and statesman, grew out of it, and his basic metaphysical concepts were borrowed from Aristotle, although he was critical of the distorted version of Aristotelianism in the academic circles of his day. The Polish astronomer Copernicus was still attached to the perfection of circular movements. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German Rationalist and mathematician, not only admired Aristotle's logic but also built his own metaphysics of individuals ("monads") around the theory of matter and form. Like Aristotle, political theorists such as Jean Bodin in France carried on their inquiries into the nature of the state by studying existing organizations and their natural backgrounds.In the literary field, Aristotle's Poetics, practically unknown until 1500, was now read and analyzed in both the Greek and Latin versions; its doctrines were compared and partly made to harmonize with the then-prevailing views of the ancient Roman poet Horace, and Aristotle's view that art imitates nature prevailed for many over the conflicting theory that stressed the creativity of the poet. The doctrine of the unities of action, place, and time--though actually a later development resulting from forced interpretations of Aristotle--ruled over the work of many writers of tragedies (e.g., Gian Giorgio Trissino in Italy, Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille in France, and, to a certain extent, Goethe in Germany). Many critics (including the English critics from Sir Philip Sidney to Matthew Arnold) accepted those rules, although few English poets--the great exception was John Milton--welcomed them. A lesser influence was exercised by Aristotle's Rhetoric outside the field of systematic theory.Scholasticism in these centuries belonged to the history of Aristotelianism. All over western and central Europe and also in Spanish America the continuance of Scholasticism ensured that higher education remained generally within an Aristotelian framework. Remarkable work was produced by Scholastics in the fields of commentaries and of detailed interpretation; Pedro de Fonseca, the "Portuguese Aristotle," in the 16th century and Sylvester Maurus, author of short but pithy commentaries on all of Aristotle's works, in Rome in the 17th are noteworthy examples. Insofar as the different Scholasticisms were living and interesting philosophical movements, however, they had more to do with newer philosophies than with Aristotle.Martin Luther's rebellion against Rome, on the other hand, involved a rebellion against Scholastic philosophy and its distorted Aristotelian structure, although not against Aristotle. In fact, when Luther's follower Philipp Melanchthon undertook to reorganize the curriculum for higher education, a more genuine, humanistic Aristotle emerged as the great master of philosophy, independent of theology. Once again, as in the early 13th century in Paris, Aristotle took pride of place, particularly in the realms of logic and ethics, and to a lesser extent in metaphysics and natural philosophy.The anti-Aristotelianism of the 16th to 18th century touched only a small part of the real Aristotle. Partly it was a reaction against Scholasticism, as though this had faithfully represented Aristotle's own philosophy. Thus, Aristotle was wrongly accused of extreme formalism, irresponsible use of syllogisms consisting of empty or irrelevant concepts, a multiplication of pseudo-real entities, and the application of "scientific" methods to facts that could be vouched for only by faith. For other critics the whole of Aristotle's canon stood condemned because of his unsatisfactory account of local movement and the consequences it had in the areas of mechanics, dynamics, cosmology, and astronomy. His downfall in the 17th century was the result, above all, of his failure to create, in the 4th century BC, a language that allowed him to describe the forms of things and events (i.e., their knowable aspects) in mathematical formulas and of his failure to lay sufficient stress, in his philosophy of experience, on the need for experiments.Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc___
Buon fine settimana
Giuseppe (Melecci)
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Note added at 2002-06-01 21:38:35 (GMT)
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Nota: da Aristotelismo
Mertoniani dal tardo 13o al 15o secolo (scusa la mancanza di sovrascrittura dello \"o\").
From Aristotelianism
From the late 13th century through the 15th century
The suspicion that reading Aristotle might lead to heresy became stronger when the closer study of his texts and of Averroës\' interpretations enhanced the admiration for The Philosopher and increased the following of The Commentator, as these two thinkers were known respectively. Siger de Brabant was the most redoubtable of many Averroistic Aristotelians. What came to be called Averroism was in fact a tendency to accept genuine or consistent Aristotelian tenets, particularly those concerning the eternity of the world, the unity of the intellect, and the ability of humans to achieve happiness on earth. Ecclesiastical condemnations of propositions considered false or dangerous and threats against the holders of doctrines implied by these propositions gave a more definite status to the Averroists, although many propositions condemned at Paris and Oxford in 1270 and 1277 had nothing to do with Aristotle and little with Averroës. The effect of the condemnations soon became visible: it took the form of a separation between the teaching of \"philosophy\" in the faculty of arts and the teaching of \"truth\" in the faculty of theology. This separation became rigid, with the ambiguous result that two \"truths\"--truth of coherence in philosophical contexts and revealed truth--were thought to coexist.At the turn of the century, however, Dante\'s powerful poetical vision could still merge the Averroists\' Aristotle, who claimed that natural truths were self-sufficient, and Thomas Aquinas\' Aristotle, who endorsed many of the truths of faith. For Dante, as for Averroës, Aristotle was the embodiment of total human knowledge--\"the master of them that know.\" A remarkable index of Dante\'s commitment to Aristotelianism is the fact that he placed Siger de Brabant, by that time condemned for his Aristotelian heresy, in Paradise. In Aristotle\'s Nicomachean Ethics Dante found moral guidance (he even said that this work \"showed man his true happiness\"), and in Aristotle\'s scientific books he found the key to understanding the workings of nature. In some aspects of Averroës\' theory of a universal human Intellect combined with the Stoic-Aristotelian principle that all men are by nature citizens of one city, he found the basis of the Empire, seeing it as the one polity (civilitas) for the whole human race.The 14th century was no less Aristotelian than the 13th. Some scholars have indeed claimed that Aristotelianism collapsed, but such an assertion does not take into account the non-Aristotelian components of previous philosophies and the permanent acceptance of Aristotelian doctrines in the new ones. Form, matter, causality, and the idea of a universe in which events occurred with regularity but were not necessitated provided the Aristotelian frame of the system of Duns Scotus. The nominalism (or \"terminism\") of William of Ockham, an English Franciscan, his rejection of \"useless entities,\" his metaphysics of a world of individual self-contained things, and his conceptualism gave neat, though extreme, expression to Aristotle\'s theory of language, the economy of nature, and the primacy of individuals in existence and of universals in intellectual knowledge. He followed Aristotle closely in his views on the scientific coordination of notions. He was more faithful to Aristotle than either Thomas Aquinas or Averroës when he said that Aristotle did not give a clear lead on the question of the immortality of the soul. The various schools of Scholastic philosophy--Thomism, Scotism, Ockhamism--that asserted themselves in the 14th century and that lived on had a common Aristotelian basis, but they had different ways of interpreting it (see also Scholasticismand Christianity).Averroistic Aristotelianism flourished in this century in connection with, or independently of, the other trends. The Italian medical faculties at Bologna and Padua were lively centres of logical and philosophical studies; for example, Peter of Abano, a professor of medicine at Padua who had been trained at Paris, pushed Aristotle\'s cosmology to the brink of determinism in human affairs and used his logic to suggest that Christ\'s death was only apparent. Political science, which had been a field for lofty speculations or restrained exercises in the analysis and exposition of texts, became important for those who practiced politics and those who wanted to satisfy, under the aegis of Aristotle\'s doctrine, the potentialities of human beings for happiness. John of Paris wanted France to be self-sufficient, self-controlling, and without interference from the pope; John of Jandun, a successor of Siger de Brabant, upheld Aristotle\'s Politics in all its worldliness; and Marsilius of Padua, John of Jandun\'s friend in Paris, followed Aristotle in his insistence that government had no supernatural origins but arose naturally from the needs of the governed and that priests should be considered in the same way as members of a guild in a city, without special privileges.Perhaps with less attachment to the details of Aristotle\'s doctrines and with a keen critical sense, the
Mertonians, a group of logician-philosophers based in Merton College, Oxford (e.g., Thomas Bradwardine, William of Heytesbury), and encyclopaedists,
scientists, and philosophers in France (e.g., Jean Buridan and Nicholas Oresme) made laborious efforts to express science wholly in terms of mathematics, to quantify changes in quality, and to determine the nature of continuity in movement and the acceleration and speed of falling bodies. Their starting points were the Physics and the other texts of Aristotle. In a similar (almost mathematical) spirit, many of the same men carried logic even further than Ockham had done into the fields of logical calculus, paradoxes, and sophisms. Thus one may say that Aristotle was not abandoned but expanded.
Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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