Brian Copenhaver

The period 'from Petrarch to Descartes' is the locus of a non-Anglophone canon for the history of philosophy. Petrarch's invective On his Own Ignorance spared 'scholastics' while assailing 'Aristotelians' and never mentioning the 'humanists' who now star in textbook accounts of the renaissance. Erasmus updated the name-calling in his Antibarbarians, where he promoted the classics and attacked theologians for bad dogma - but not philosophers for bad arguments. Theology was also his target in the Praise of Folly, which Christianized Plato's pagan program of meditation - a regimen that practiced death by isolating the soul from the body. Ignatius and the early Jesuits made meditation methodical and taught it in their schools and colleges - eventually hundreds of them - like La Flèche, where Descartes spent most of his boyhood.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola had his 900 Conclusions printed late in 1486, just a few weeks before Pope Innocent VIII attacked thirteen of them. Did Pico intend to provoke the Vatican? If not, what was his aim, what were his means and what was the product? The Conclusions looks like a miscellany, just as Pico described it. But disorder was only on the surface, in line with a purpose explicitly stated: keeping the holiest truths hidden. Pico’s informants about esoteric wisdom included more than two dozen authorities—some named as individuals, others unnamed, some ancient, others medieval—listed in the first of two parts of the Conclusions. Not named at all were contemporaries and near contemporaries who introduced the prince to these sages from the past.