What was the intellectual environment of the renaissance

Even when our conduct starts out innocently, over time it becomes more and more bizarre, all the while becoming firmly fix within society through custom. Eventually, we lose all courage to oppose what custom mandates, and we just fall in line. How extreme does it get? He offers some examples here:. For Montaigne, custom has the power to shape our moral practices into an almost infinite variety of ways, and we then obediently follow those traditions that seem arbitrarily imposed on us.

The customs of our society shape both our behavior and also our conscience, which the very standard that we use to judge right and wrong:. The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom. Since everyone has an inward reverence for the opinions and manners approved of and received among his own people, no one can, without very great reluctance, depart from them, or apply himself to them without approval. Thus, the pressure on our conscience from social custom is so strong that it is virtually impossible to break free from it.

An important influence on the direction of philosophy during the Renaissance is the Protestant Reformation, which began in Germany as a localized rebellion against the Catholic Church of Rome that at the time controlled Christianity within Europe. Over the centuries the Church became increasingly corrupt as Popes fathered children with mistresses and lived more like worldly kings than spiritual leaders.

The instigator of the Reformation was a German monk named Martin Luther, who, fed up with corruption in the Roman Church, posted a document containing 95 Theses attacking is abuses. Culturally, the importance of the Protestant Reformation was that it loosened the grip that the Medieval Church had on European intellectual thought. The Church kept tight control over which sorts of books could be published, and which scientific and religious ideas were heretical and potentially punishable by death.

The Reformation created an intellectual environment outside the influence of medieval scholasticism and a centralized Church authority. Philosophers from Protestant countries set aside the writings of Aquinas and other official Catholic philosophers, and explored a vast array of theories that would otherwise have been considered forbidden.

Martin Luther was born in Eisleben, Germany. His father operated successful copper mines, and was determined to see his eldest son improve his life by becoming a lawyer. He spent long hours in prayer, fasting, and even whipping himself seeking to affirm his salvation, but all this did was to reinforce his sense of sinfulness. Nevertheless, he was soon ordained a priest and began teaching biblical theology at the newly founded University of Wittenberg. After disseminating his 95 Theses throughout Europe, the Church ordered him to recant his position, but he refused and was excommunicated from the Church.

Under the protection of a sympathetic German Prince, he went into hiding, during which time he translated the Greek New Testament into German. As the Reformation gained momentum in Germany and beyond, he returned to Wittenberg where he continued lecturing. Luther later married an ex-nun that he helped escape from her convent, and together they raised six children.

He died at age 62 of a crippling heart attack. Luther was well versed in medieval philosophy and its heavy emphasis on Aristotle. For Luther, as with many Renaissance thinkers, Aristotle came to represent the narrow-minded and authoritarian position of the Catholic Church, which forced conformity in thinking. In his efforts to break Christianity free from the rule of the Catholic Church, he concluded that the entire university curriculum also required serious overhauling, especially by rejecting its heavy reliance on books by Aristotle.

Oh that such books could be kept out of the reach of all Christians! The underlying problem for Luther is the intrusion of reason into the realm of religion, the very nature of which is beyond human understanding. When it comes specifically to philosophers, it is not just Aristotle that Luther rejects: many Greek philosophers had speculated about God, the soul, and the afterlife, but, not having access to the Bible, everything they said was uncertain and doubtful.

For Luther, then, religious understanding is grounded in faith, not reason, and both reason and philosophy just get in the way. However, French Protestant reformer, John Calvin — attempted just that. Born in Noyon, France, Calvin was educated in both scholastic and humanist thought, and at an early age published a commentary on the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca.

By his mid-twenties he maintained that France should break free from the Catholic Church, a view that forced him into exile for the remainder of his life. In Switzerland, still in his twenties, he completed the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion , which became the theological cornerstone of Presbyterianism and related Protestant denominations. For most of his adult life he resided in Geneva, where he played a dominant role in city affairs, transforming it into something like a theocratic government.

In that political capacity, he was involved in the arrest and execution of a rival Protestant reformer on the heretical charges of denying the doctrines of the trinity and infant baptism. Calvin died in Geneva at age The first is his notion of the sense of divinity , which is that everyone has an instinctive knowledge of God. He writes,. We hold to be beyond dispute that there exists in the human minds and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of divinity.

This is so since, to prevent any person from pretending ignorance, God himself has given all people some idea of his Godhead. He constantly renews and occasionally enlarges our memory of this. A consequence of our instinctive knowledge of God is that our own conscience condemns us when we fail to worship God or live devoutly.

Thus, whether we are saved or not, according to Calvin, is entirely up to God, and we have no free choice over the matter. Calvin agrees that God indeed has foreknowledge, however he insists that it has nothing to do with predestination. God sets the agenda for who is saved and who is damned, not us. By predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every person. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation.

Accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that each person has been predestined to life or to death. For Calvin, God not only singles out individual people for salvation or damnation, but he can also select entire communities for either fate. Recall the issue of faith vs. At the one end of the spectrum, theologians like Tertullian held that religious truth must be discovered through faith alone, with no guidance from reason. This is the faith-alone position.

Further down the spectrum, Aquinas held that reason can independently discover many of the truths that we learn through faith. Still, for Aquinas, we absolutely need faith, and he does not advocate anything like a reason-alone position that denies the value of faith. In this section we will look at the extremes of this debate in the writings of two early modern philosophers: Edward Herbert of Cherbury on the reason-alone side, and Blaise Pascal on the faith-alone side.

Edward Herbert of Cherbury was a British nobleman and diplomat, and considered the father of Deism. He is best remembered in philosophy for his proposed five common notions of religion.

Born into an aristocratic family in a small village in central England, he was the eldest of ten children and, at age 13 upon the death of this father, he became the head of his household.

For the benefit of his heirs, he wrote an autobiography that covers is life until age 41, in which he displays vanity and a desire for confrontation. He was raised in a culture of dueling and, while he invited opportunities to duel, typically to defend the honor of women, it seems that many were averted and, if any did transpire, none resulted in death.

At 18 he was a member of the English Parliament, and in later years held government posts as a sheriff, a soldier, and an ambassador to Paris. During the English Civil War, begun in , he attempted to remain neutral. However, he reluctantly joined the Parliamentarians against the Royalists, when the Parliamentarians seized his property in London and threatened to sell it if he did not give them access to his castle for military purposes.

On his deathbed, he asked his friend, who was an Archbishop, to perform the sacrament of last rites, stating that it might do him some good, but and could do him no harm. The Archbishop refused under those terms and left. Herbert is often recognized as the founder of Deism, which was a philosophical approach to religion during the eighteenth-century with the general theme that God created the world but thereafter left it alone, without interfering in the laws of nature that he established.

While individual deists had their own unique positions, some more radical than others, they typically were hostile to divine intervention through miracles, prophecy or revealed scripture and they held that there was no religious truth above reason.

In essence, Herbert is advocating a religion that is based solely on rational principles, without any faith beliefs in divine revelation.

His motive for taking this view was his inability to accept the concept of a good God who would condemn the vast majority of humans to eternal punishment simply because they followed other religions. Considering how nature provides us all with food and clothing, it makes no sense to say that "the same God, either could or would, leave any man quite destitute either by nature or grace of the means of obtaining a more happy state" Ancient Religions of the Gentiles , 1.

There is, he says, a true religion that is discoverable to everyone through the natural use of reason. Herbert describes the main elements of this true religion of nature in his first philosophical work, On Truth Some of these common notions we know automatically, without any assistance from reason, and five of these deal specifically with religion.

They are, 1 there exists a supreme God, 2 we should worship him, 3 the best form of worship consists of proper moral behavior, 4 we should repent for our immoral conduct, and 5 we will be rewarded or punished in the afterlife for our conduct on earth. These, he argues, form the basis of the true and universal religion. Priority: known by natural instinct, prior to any other knowledge.

Immediacy: notions formed immediately when hearing the appropriate words. The result, then, is that we all have these five common notions of religion embedded in our nature, and they serve as the basis for the true and universal religion.

Herbert admits that God might reveal himself to particular people, but such revelations cannot extend beyond those people or form the basis of any religion. In later publications he argued that priests are the primary villains of the true religion for tainting religion with claims of divine revelation:.

It is my established opinion, therefore, that the heathens accounted these five articles as common principles and selected and separated them from all the rest, and recorded them in their interior court as incontrovertible truths; and whatever else the priests added from their oracles, revelations and dreams, they either gave them reception only as probabilities, or else totally rejected them as smelling too rank of cheat and imposture.

Thus, while heathen religions might at first seem silly, on closer inspection they are legitimate reflections of the true religion. Ultimately, for Herbert, religion should be grounded in reason, not in faith. At the opposite extreme of the faith and reason spectrum is Pascal. We have already seen that both Montaigne and Luther rejected the role of reason in religious matters and are thus advocates of the faith-alone position.

It was Pascal, though, who during this period of time offered the most sophisticated defense of the faith-only view, that fully rejects any contribution of reason. Blaise Pascal — was born in Clermon, France, and after the early death of his mother was educated in Greek and Latin by his father.

As a youth he showed a special capacity for mathematics, and at age 16 he published a work on that subject. At around age 19 he invented the first calculating machine, hoping it would help his father compute taxes at his government job.

His early interests also extended to science and he became active in the raging debate of the time about whether a vacuum could exist. In his early thirties he had a second and more intense religious conversion after almost dying in a carriage accident. He thereafter affiliated himself with Jansenists, writing in their defense on various religious controversies. Pascal suffered debilitating illnesses through most of his adult life, which ultimately led to his early death at age It was during his final years that he wrote his major contribution to philosophy, an unfinished work in outline form that only appeared in print after his death under the title Thoughts in Pascal never identified himself as a philosophical skeptic, and, in fact, a key theme in his Thoughts is to show the inadequacies of skepticism.

Still, he writes with a gloomy conviction that our knowledge of the world around us is so severely limited that we cannot know anything with certainty. One reason for this, he argues, is that human beings are trapped between two infinities, where we are too small to understand the immensity of the infinite universe, but too large to know anything about the levels of reality buried within the tiniest particles of matter that descend to infinity.

The world in which we live is just a thin layer that lies between these extreme infinities, and this makes us completely ignorant of the overwhelming majority of what is actually out there. What is worse, he argues, we have limited abilities to understand that thin layer of reality in which we do exist. We cannot sense extremes in light, sound, length, heat and cold, but only a tiny spectrum of each.

We cannot even understand our own human nature since a human being is a complex organic whole that consists of countless tiny parts in both body and mind, and we can never gain access to those parts. Pascal is also skeptical about our ability to discover absolute principles of morality and justice, and, like Montaigne, he sees an almost endless variety of cultural practices about what is right or wrong.

For example, on one side of a mountain or river infanticide may be morally permissible, yet on the other side impermissible. However, in one small way he departs from skeptics like Montaigne who think that the brute force of custom by itself drives our behavior.

Instead, he argues, we individually follow the moral traditions handed down to us because we think that they are right:. Montaigne is wrong. Custom should be followed only because it is custom, and not because it is reasonable or just. But people follow it for this sole reason, that they think it just. Otherwise they would follow it no longer, even if it were the custom; for they will only submit to reason or justice.

Custom without this would pass for tyranny; but the sovereignty of reason and justice is no more tyrannical than that of desire. They are principles natural to man. Custom, then, is not an absolute tyrant over our moral behavior, and, instead, we willingly adopt custom because we think that our traditions are reasonable and just.

This, though, is still a small consolation since we are clueless about what true justice is. He writes that throughout his life he has seen ever-shifting attitudes about what true justice might be, and he concludes from this that our human nature itself is in continual change Perhaps, he says, religious believers might find merit in such proofs but, as they stand on their own, they are very weak, and serve only to provoke contempt in people who read them.

Reason is incapable of demonstrating the existence and nature of an infinite God for the simple reason that our minds are limited by our finite existence. Pascal answers this with his famous wager:. You have two things to lose: the true and the good. And you have two things to stake: your reason and your will; that is, your knowledge and your complete happiness.

And your nature has two things to shun: error and misery. Your reason is not more wounded, since a choice must necessarily be made in choosing one rather than the other. Here a point is eliminated. But what about your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in taking heads that God exists. Let us weigh these two cases. If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager without hesitation, then, that he is.

The options that Pascal lays out in the wager are these:. Believe Don't believe. God exists infinite happiness nothing. God doesn't exist nothing nothing. If I gamble by believing in God, I might gain infinite happiness, whereas if I gamble by not believing in God I gain nothing.

Instead, it is an appeal to my feelings, my desire to be happy. For Pascal, the wager is only the first step towards belief in God insofar as it simply establishes my desire to believe. By itself, the wager can never give me a sincere belief, and, at best, it just gives me a selfish hope. The second step towards genuine belief is for me to put myself in a position where I can be touched by God through a religious experience, then sincerely believe through faith.

To that end, he says, I should do what other believers have done: participate in religious rituals. Go to church and use holy water as though I believe in them, and the mere practice of these things will open me to an experience that will enable me to truly believe.

European science dramatically advanced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period that historians now refer to as the scientific revolution.

While scientists during the late middle ages were making discoveries, a tipping point occurred in the area of astronomy when Copernicus published his sun-centered theory of the cosmos, which overturned the prevailing earth-centered model that dated back to the time of Aristotle. This sparked innovations in all areas of science, including the development of more sophisticated scientific instruments. In addition to the particular discoveries that were made, scientists also developed methods of scientific investigation, which they felt would help them push the boundaries of knowledge more systematically.

In this section, we will look at both of these aspects of the scientific revolution, that is, particular discoveries that had important philosophical implications and discussions of scientific method.

The champion of the scientific method and acclaimed father of modern science was Francis Bacon He was born in London into a noble household, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, began his career in the field of law, and progressively climbed the ranks within British government, eventually holding the position of Lord Chancellor. At around age 60 his career and reputation plummeted. He was continually in debt throughout his adult life and often sought desperate means for paying off is creditors, which ultimately led to him being charged with political corruption.

For this he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London, fined a substantial sum of money, and barred from his place in the British Parliament. He died at the age of 65 after becoming ill when stuffing a chicken with snow to test whether that would slow down its decay. Bacon published works on a range of subjects in science, history, and moral philosophy. He envisioned composing a lengthy plan to reorganize all of the sciences, and, of the few portions that he did complete, the most famous is the New Organon By incorporating this term into his title, Bacon was boldly advertising that he was offering a new approach to logic that aimed to replace the outdated one of Aristotle.

The important feature of deductive arguments, such as the above, is that the meaning of the conclusion is completely contained within the premises. Further, as long as the premises are true, the conclusion follows with absolute necessity, with no exception whatsoever. Induction is an entirely different strategy that involves generalizations based on observations, such as this:. What is central to inductive arguments such as the above is that specific instances are used as evidence for a universal conclusion.

That is, the premises only tell us about two rocks, and the conclusion generalizes about all similar rocks; as such the conclusion goes well beyond the information contained in the premises. This means that the conclusion does not follow with absolute necessity, but only with a specific degree of probability. Bacon argues that induction is much more suitable for science than deduction is. In science, we begin with observations, and from these try to extract more general truths about nature.

Because of their reliance on deductive logic, scientists of the past have barely penetrated into the inner recesses of nature. Suppose, for example, that several students on campus get sick to the stomach. To determine the cause, we should first examine what they all have in common, such as them having eaten the tuna casserole in the school cafeteria.

Again, with the stomach illness on campus, we should examine what all non-sick students have in common, such as them not having eaten the tuna casserole. Third, there is the table of degrees: examine instances in which a phenomenon is present in varying degrees and note what circumstances also vary.

As science moved forward, it inevitably raised questions about the compatibility of religion and science, a new twist to the longstanding issue of the relation between faith and reason.

One scientist was caught directly in the middle of this sensitive transition from the old system to the new one: Galileo Galilei — Born in the Italian city of Pisa, at a young age Galileo was multi-talented, playing the lute and organ taught by his father, a professional musician , building toys, and doing skilled painting.

But none of these were to be his calling in life. Leaving this for lack of funds, he then switched fields to mathematics. Though a devout Catholic, Galileo fathered three children out of wedlock. Feeling that his two daughters were thus unmarriageable, he sent them to a convent at an early age, where they remained the rest of their lives. His son, however, was later legitimized and allowed to marry. When he published a work defending the sun-centered system, opposition arose against him within the Catholic Church on the grounds that his views ran contrary to scripture and Church authority.

An edict was issued requiring him to renounce his theory, which he did. He was sentenced to imprisonment, then commuted to house arrest, where he lived another eight years, producing more writings before becoming blind. It took another one hundred years for Galileo to be fully acquitted by the Church, when it authorized the publication of his complete scientific works.

When aggressively putting forward his views on astronomy, Galileo was well aware that he was entering territory controlled by the Church. He responded by arguing that science and religion are different arenas of knowledge and should be kept separate. The immediate problem was that the Church was taking an overly-literal interpretation of biblical passages in support of the old earth-centered system, such as passages about the movement of the sun.

The role of scripture and religion is to teach us truths about salvation, which would not be available to us by any other means than divine revelation. This is precisely the case with astronomy, he argues, since the scriptures say virtually nothing about the subject. Thus, scientific investigation should not begin with scripture, but with experimentation:.

In discussing natural phenomena we ought not to begin with texts from Scripture, but with experiment and demonstration. For, from the Divine Word, both Scripture and Nature do alike proceed. And I can see that that which experience sets before our eyes concerning natural effects, or which demonstration proves to us, ought not on any account to be called in question, much less condemned, upon the testimony of Scriptural texts, which may under their mere words have meanings of a contrary nature.

Accordingly, Galileo argues, Church officials should not presume to tell scientists what they are to believe. First, under the older sun-centered system, the universe was of finite size: at the outer edges all the stars were attached to a single orbital sphere that rotated around the earth at its inner core.

Under the new system, though, the universe is infinitely large, with stars strewn everywhere across the sky, and the earth is no longer the physical center of things.

Second, under the old system, heavenly bodies such as the sun, moon and planets were thought to be made from perfect eternal substances that were vastly different in composition from the finite and imperfect material stuff that made up the earth. Under the new system, though, heavenly bodies are stripped of their eternal nature and instead composed of the same finite stuff as the earth. Third, under the old system, God was seen as an active force in the daily functioning of the universe, and the ultimate source of all motion.

Under the new system, though, the physical universe is potentially self-sustaining. Born in Grantham, England, Newton was educated at Cambridge University and spent many years teaching there, gaining an international reputation through his mathematical and scientific publications.

His Principia Mathematica , one of the greatest contributions to science, presented groundbreaking theories on motion, gravity, and the movement of the planets. To assist him in making the mathematical calculations in the Principia , Newton developed the calculus, but kept this a secret for several decades until German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz developed then published his own version of the system. This resulted in a protracted controversy between them over who was the true inventor; the consensus today is that they both invented it independently.

He died at age For, even a few tiny differences in the size and gravity of the planets would throw them into irregular orbits. To make this system, therefore, with all its motions, required a cause which understood and compared together the quantities of matter in the several bodies of the sun and planets and the gravitating powers resulting from thence And to compare and adjust all these things together in so great a variety of bodies, [such a design] argues that cause to be, not blind and fortuitous, but very well skilled in mechanics and geometry.

The universe exhibits a high degree of precision in mechanics and geometry. It is improbable that this precision resulted from chance. Therefore there is a creator of the universe who is skilled in mechanics and geometry. God clearly tried hard to make the universe self-sustaining. But did he succeed in making it completely self-sustaining? Newton is less clear about this, and he suggests that it depends on differing views of the universe itself that we might reasonably adopt.

For example, if the universe is of finite size, then God is needed to prevent all the celestial bodies from converging on each other through gravity and making a single lump of stuff. On the other hand, if the universe is infinitely large, then God might have evenly spaced out all celestial bodies so that, by evenly tugging each other in all directions, they stay in place.

In that case, God would not need to continually intervene to keep the universe from collapsing in on itself. The secularizing force of the Renaissance also impacted the dominant conception of morality during the middle ages, namely, natural law theory.

We will look at the views of two early modern philosophers who developed non-religious views of natural law: Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. Hugo Grotius — was born in the Dutch city of Delft, where he was a child prodigy thanks to the educational influence of his father, a city official and curator of Leiden University. He attended the University at age 11, and, while on a diplomatic mission to France at age 15, the King there praised him as the miracle of Holland.

Beginning in his late teens, he assumed various positions in the Dutch government that involved issues of international laws and treaties and began writing on the subject. Imprisoned for three years for his role in a religious controversy, he dramatically escaped with the help of his wife by hiding in a book case.

He took refuge in France for ten years, and then resumed his career in the Dutch government once the political climate there became safe. He died from exhaustion at the age of 62 after being shipwrecked while on a diplomatic mission. Its central theme is that natural law establishes the just conditions for declaring and engaging in war. In this way, natural law is a secular phenomenon, not a divinely-created one. Natural law, he argues, is on the same level as truths of mathematics insofar as the denial of the laws of nature would be contradictory.

Now, God is a rational being, and so too are we human beings. As such, God and humans are both bound by that high moral standard of rationality, and our actions are judged right or wrong accordingly. According to Grotius, there is a highest moral principle of natural law which is embedded in our rational nature, namely, that we should be sociable. This means that we should live in peace with one another and uphold the social order. From this general moral obligation of sociability, we can infer five more specific rules of natural law, each of which is central to preserving social stability: 1 do not take things that belong to others; 2 restore to other people anything that we might have of theirs; 3 fulfill promises; 4 compensate for any loss that results through our own fault; 5 punish people as deserved.

According to Grotius, the above five principles of natural law are not only at the core of all morality, but they form the main ingredients of social and political obligation, within our individual countries and between countries internationally.

The basis of all international law, he argues, is that we must fulfill the agreements that we make with others as expressed in the famous Latin phrase pacta sunt servanda , pacts must be respected ; this is a direct application of the third principle of natural law above.

When situations arise that force us into war with a neighboring country, these principles also underlie the justness of our behavior towards our enemy.

Grotius is thus advocating a position of just war theory , that is, the attempt to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable wars. For Grotius, natural law theory gives us the exact litmus test we need for making that distinction.

The first involves the just causes of war, that is, why we might be justified in waging war with any country to begin with. He says that there are three main just causes: to defend ourselves against attack, to seek reparation for some harm that an enemy country has done to us, and to punish a country for inflicting us with some harm.

Some wars result merely from the desire to inflict cruelty, completely disconnected with any good reason, and such acts of aggression are clearly unjustified. While every country that engages in war attempts to justify its actions, many justifications are only pretexts which do not stand up to moral scrutiny.

The second component of his just war theory concerns the types of combat techniques that we might rightfully use against our enemy. Can we kill enemy prisoners? Can we kill civilians? Can we lay waste to an entire countryside? For Grotius, there is a moral mandate of moderation that requires us to temper our actions during war. First, we need to preserve the lives of the innocent whenever possible:. Though there may be circumstances, in which absolute justice will not condemn the sacrifice of lives in war, yet humanity will require that the greatest precaution should be used against involving the innocent in danger, except in cases of extreme urgency and utility.

Grotius is here drawing a fundamental distinction between combatants and noncombatants, which in contemporary just war theory is referred to as the principle of discrimination.

For Grotius, innocent noncombatants include women, children, and religious ministers. Killing these would serve no military purpose, and would be nothing short of cruel. Protection also needs to be extended to farmers, merchants and artisans whose activities help sustain the society itself.

Killing off this segment of the population would permanently cripple a country and would not be justified on military grounds. In addition to the principle of discrimination, Grotius also articulates a principle that we now call proportionality : destruction should not extend any further than is necessary to make the aggressor pay for his offence. Now, driving off some of our cattle, or burning a few of our houses, can never be pleaded as a sufficient and justifiable motive for laying waste the whole of an enemy's kingdom.

Polybius saw this in its proper light, observing, that vengeance in war should not be carried to its extreme, nor extend any further than was necessary to make an aggressor atone justly for his offence. And it is upon these motives, and within these limits alone, that punishment can be inflicted. But except where prompted to it by motives of great utility, it is folly, and worse than folly, to needlessly hurt another.

Any destruction that goes beyond these three situations is unjustifiable. We access the basic principles of natural law through human reason, and this guides both our individual moral conduct and the rules we devise for international law. Natural law tells us under what conditions we might justifiably wage war against a foreign country, and it also tells us what kind of warfare tactics are morally justifiable when we engage the enemy.

A second great contributor to a new conception of morality and natural law was Thomas Hobbes — , who took a more skeptical approach to the subject than did Grotius. Born in Wiltshire, England, Hobbes was raised by an uncle when his father, a disgraced clergyman, deserted his family. After completing his university education at Oxford, for several decades he worked as a private tutor for distinguished families, one of his pupils being a future King of England.

During that time he continued his studies in Greek and Latin classics, traveled through Europe, and became acquainted with some of the greatest minds of the time. His efforts culminated in his greatest book, Leviathan , which immediately drew harsh criticism for its skeptical and anti-religious implications.

Fearing imprisonment for heresy, he fled England for a few years; upon his return, he was prohibited for a time from further publication. He continued writing until his final years when he died from a stroke at the age of The standard view of the subject since the middle ages was the dualist position that the universe contains both material things like rocks, and non-physical spirits such as God and human souls.

Hobbes denied this view, holding that the universe is comprised entirely of material stuff. The very notion of an immaterial spirit is groundless, he says, and the first conception of it arose from an abuse of language:.

All of the contents of my mind consist only of physical stuff in motion, including thoughts, perceptions, desires, emotions, pleasures, pains. To understand human conduct, then, means understanding the operations of the human physical machine. Hobbes sets out his political philosophy by considering how humans behaved in a time before the creation of civil governments. However, this unregulated liberty led to a condition of war of everyone against everyone in the battle for survival.

He describes this condition of brutality in one of the most famous passages in philosophy:. In such condition, there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The conflict between people is so entrenched that it grinds all social progress to a halt, and all I can do is wait for my neighbor to attack and kill me, or try to get to him first.

In this condition there is no natural basis for justice or morality:. To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent, that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are none of the [instinctive] faculties, neither of the body nor mind. First, there are limited resources that we all desire for our survival.

Second, human beings are naturally selfish, and do not have the psychological capacity to help other people merely out of the goodness of their hearts. All of my actions aim to benefit me, and are selfishly motivated. Today philosophers call this position psychological egoism. Renaissance artists and architects applied many humanist principles to their work. For example, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi applied the elements of classical Roman architecture—shapes, columns and especially proportion—to his own buildings.

The magnificent eight-sided dome he built at the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral in Florence was an engineering triumph—it was feet across, weighed 37, tons and had no buttresses to hold it up—as well as an aesthetic one.

Brunelleschi also devised a way to draw and paint using linear perspective. That is, he figured out how to paint from the perspective of the person looking at the painting, so that space would appear to recede into the frame. Later, many painters began to use a technique called chiaroscuro to create an illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat canvas.

By the end of the 15th century, Italy was being torn apart by one war after another. At the same time, the Catholic Church, which was itself wracked with scandal and corruption, had begun a violent crackdown on dissenters. In , the Council of Trent officially established the Roman Inquisition. In this climate, humanism was akin to heresy.

The Italian Renaissance was over. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Generally described as taking place from the 14th century to the 17th century, the Renaissance promoted the rediscovery of classical philosophy, Known as the Renaissance, the period immediately following the Middle Ages in Europe saw a great revival of interest in the classical learning and values of ancient Greece and Rome.

Against a backdrop of political stability and growing prosperity, the development of new Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, architect, inventor, and student of all things scientific. The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a Black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted.

Lasting roughly from the s through the mids, the period is According to Machiavelli, the ends always justify the means—no matter how cruel, calculating or immoral those means might be. Beyond their goal of crushing Italian Axis forces, the Allies wanted to draw German troops away from Michelangelo was a sculptor, painter and architect widely considered to be one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance — and arguably of all time. His work demonstrated a blend of psychological insight, physical realism and intensity never before seen.

His contemporaries The Medici family, also known as the House of Medici, first attained wealth and political power in Florence in the 13th century through its success in commerce and banking.

The plague ravaged large cities and provincial towns in northern and central Italy from to , killing more than 45, people in Venice alone and wiping out more than half the population of cities like Parma and Verona. But strikingly, some communities were spared. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. The New Humanism: Cornerstone of the Renaissance Thanks to the patronage of these wealthy elites, Renaissance-era writers and thinkers were able to spend their days doing just that.

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