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“Hispanic scholastic philosophy” in this chapter designates a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stream of philosophy which flowed out of medieval universities, increased to a torrent on the Iberian peninsula, then poured into other regions of Europe, America, Africa, and Asia. Arising in the wake of Spanish and Portuguese explorations and conquests, which at the end of the fifteenth and through the sixteenth century brought radically new, and usually bloody, encounters between European and non-European peoples, it was at its core concerned with such encounters. Other background themes were furnished by the Counter-Reformation, especially the reforms of the Council of Trent (1545-63) and its aftermath; the late Renaissance debates among philosophers, humanists and skeptics; and the revival of Thomistic texts and thought. Two subjects stand out as particularly important and influential: (1) moral and juridical philosophy centering on “the law of nations” (the jus gentium). and (2) theoretical philosophy, which included Aristotelian physics but culminated in metaphysics. For present purposes the birth year of Hispanic philosophy was 1526, when Francisco de Vitoria, OP (1492-1546), was elected to the Cátedra de Prima in theology at Salamanca and began lectures on the “Second Part of the Second Part” (IIa-IIae) of the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. This introduced the Summa as the principal textbook in theology and also inaugurated a Thomistic revival in theology and in philosophy at Salamanca, then elsewhere. Choosing a terminal date for Hispanic philosophy here is more arbitrary, but a plausible one is 1718, when Miguel Viñas, SJ (1642-1718) died. It may immediately be noted that while Vitoria taught in Spain and belonged to the older religious order of the Dominicans, Viñas was a Jesuit who taught at Santiago in Chile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Renaissance there were two main approaches to the study and teaching of language. Though the period is traditionally associated with the development of humanism, scholasticism was far from dead. University arts courses continued to be based on the Aristotelian Organon and the specialized textbooks of late medieval logic. In Italy, the cradle of humanism, this logic was imported from the mid-fourteenth century onward where it flourished throughout the fifteenth century, with Paul of Venice's Logica parva as one of the most important textbooks. Apart from a host of technical logical issues which were being discussed, broader issues continued to provoke debate, such as whether words signify concepts or things and whether language was naturally or conventionally significant, and there was no lack of subtle answers. However hostile to the “pettifogging schoolmen” they professed to be, early modern philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke were obviously indebted to their ideas, and often their own theories consisted in a simplification and revision of scholastic terminology and distinctions without radically changing the linguistic paradigm. The rise and growth of humanism, however, is the most visible sign of change in the Renaissance (though its origins went back to the late thirteenth century), and it is to the humanists' reform of the arts of the trivium that this chapter is devoted. Obviously, this is a huge theme, and no attempt has been made here to cram into the space of one book chapter all the important names and their works - Valla, Agricola, Erasmus, Sturm, Vives, Lefèvre d'Étaples, Latomus, Melanchthon, Ramus, to mention just a few key figures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The predominant view of historians was once that the philosophy of Aristotle, after spreading throughout Latin Christendom in the wake of the great wave of translations from Greek and Arabic begun around 1125, reached its greatest diffusion in the thirteenth century, came to a profound crisis in the fourteenth, and then suffered in the fifteenth under the challenge of Platonism. As a result, Aristotelianism in the Renaissance survived in only a few “conservative” strongholds - such as the universities of Padua, Coimbra, and Cracow - before it was finally swept away by the coming of modern philosophy and science. Thanks to the work of historians like John Herman Randall, Eugenio Garin, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Charles Schmitt, and Charles Lohr, research in the last sixty years has shown that such an image of the development of European thought is so one-sided as to be substantially false. The point here is not merely to insist on the notable expansion of Aristotelianism in the fourteenth century - for in that century, far from declining, Aristotelian philosophy reinforced its position by consolidating its fundamental role in university instruction, by linking its fate to that of influential philosophical and theological schools, and by obtaining for the first time the explicit support of the papacy. One must go still further and insist that, if the greatest intellectual novelty of the Renaissance was the rediscovery of little-known and forgotten philosophical traditions, Aristotelianism nevertheless remained the predominant one through the end of the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Another species of mitigated scepticism, which may be of advantage to mankind . . . is the limitation of our enquiries to such subjects as are best adapted to the narrow capacity of human understanding . . . A correct Judgment . . . avoid[s] all distant and high enquiries, confines itself to common life, and to such objects as fall under daily practice and experience, leaving the more sublime topics to the embellishment of poets and orators, or to the arts of priests and politicians.” (David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, XII) / It is apt to be forgotten by students of the Renaissance that the abstract noun “humanism,” with its cognates in Latin and the modern languages, is not attested for the period of the Renaissance itself, but began to be widely used only in the early nineteenth century. It was in the latter period, under the influence of Hegel, that the modern addiction to reifying ideologies and social trends using nouns formed from -ismos, the Greek suffix indicating nouns of action or process, began to take hold. Humanismus, humanisme, and umanesimo, the German, French, and Italian forms of the word respectively, eventually embraced two broad families of meaning. The first family understood humanism in the sense of classical education: the study of ancient literature in the original languages. It was in this sense that Georg Voigt in his seminal work, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Altertums oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus (1859), retrofitted the word to signify the Renaissance movement to revive classical studies. In Italy the word umanesimo broadened its meaning somewhat to include Italy's literary production in the Latin language from Petrarca to Pietro Bembo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION Few histories of medicine are without an evolutionary approach. Histories adopting this approach are not now generally ‘whiggish’, but they invariably give much attention to signposts indicating the direction of the road and bearing legends such as ‘mechanism’ or ‘circulation’. Many of these directional milestones are clustered in England and the United Provinces of Holland, and, even in the seventeenth century, medical mechanism could be seen by a major figure in Paris as so much modern Dutch nonsense. But as we have seen, Learned and Rational Doctors were successful in the familiar territory of traditional natural philosophy where they did not need signposts or milestones. This was mostly the case in Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain, and we have glanced at some probable religious reasons for this. In Spain in particular, the universities were happy to do without the new doctrines from England and Holland, and viewed with suspicion the instrument of their dissemination, the tertulia, which were private associations. In 1700 the rector of the University of Seville wrote to his counterpart in Osuna urging the destruction of a tertulia.These organisations co-operated, he said, with the object of destroying the Aristotelianism and Galenism of the schools. There were also political and economic circumstances that seem to bear on the matter. The economic centre of gravity of Europe was moving north. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All the order of teaching is troubled and the doctrine of Physick is endeavrd and learned altogether preposterously and confusedly, without any certain method. With these words Jacobus de Back reported the confusion in the schools at the collapse of traditional natural philosophy. He had taken his MD in Franeker in 1616, when medicine and natural philosophy were still sisters, as they had been throughout the Latin tradition. But by the 1630s not only were philosophers seeing a battle between Aristotelianism and the mechanical philosophy, but within medicine some of the major doctrines of Hippocrates and Galen had been shown to be wrong. De Back felt the pull of old loyalties and declared that he still belonged to the ancient physicians; but clearly they were going to need another re-evaluation to show that they still had authority in a changed society. How had this crisis come about? Rather than retell a traditional story of a revolution in natural philosophy, let us look at its relation to medicine from the point of view of the Rational and Learned Doctor, who still wanted to be successful. EPIDEMICS CHANGE MEDICINE The two great epidemics, the plague and the French Disease, left marks on European medicine. While the Learned and Rational Doctors struggled to get to grips with these new and unknown, or at least improperly labelled diseases, laymen took practical measures such as quarantine and isolation of the affected, and built hospitals to contain them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION The Latin medical tradition was a long time in forming. Medicine remained Greek with Galen, and might have become Latin with Celsus, but the loss of the Western Empire a little over two centuries after Galen's death meant the end of any elaborate form of Roman medicine. All of Celsus and most of Galen remained unknown until the Middle Ages. Learned and rational medicine survived in a Greek form in the Eastern Empire, which lasted a thousand years longer than the Western. The Eastern Empire tried to recover the Western by establishing exarchates, for example in Italy, and it seems to have been in such places that some Greek medical works were translated into Latin. There were two main centres of teaching in the east, Constantinople and Alexandria; there was an Alexandrian medical tradition in the Salerno area in the sixth and seventh centuries, and it is known that the Abbey of Montecassino received a copy of the Aphorisms as a gift in the tenth century. In the mid-twelfth century there were schools in Salerno favoured by Jews; there were Greek monasteries in the area; and the political and economic growth of Salerno also favoured its cultural development. But in the seventh century Alexandria was taken over for a brief period by the Persians and then by the Islamic Arabs, who very rapidly swept through North Africa, up through Spain (beginning in 711) and into Occitania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]