Critique of the Renaissance Concept in Historiography

The conventional view of Renaissance philosophy:
- Flowering of humanism.
- Rejection of scholasticism and Aristotelianism.
- Renewal of interest in the ancients.
- Creation of prerequisites for modern philosophy and science.
Historiographical nihilism: The argument that there was no Renaissance, it's an invention by historians.
Periodisation is interpretation.
Historiography:
- Traditionally, the writing of histories.
- More recently, the study of how history is written.
Historiographical nihilism:
- Rejects or is skeptical of historiographical concepts like periodisation.
- Implies there can't be only one method of history.
- Using periodisation is good for learning, but they are always false.

'Renaissance philosophy' is often presented as a conflict between humanism and scholasticism and the characterization is deeply problematic because it's based on the assumption of a conflict between two philosophical traditions.
The terms 'humanism' and 'scholasticism' were invented later.
Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) never contrasted his rejections with humanism.
Johann Jacob Brucker's Historia critica philosophiae (1742-44):
- Didn't use 'Renaissance' or 'humanism'.
- Emphasized the ancient beginning of philosophy, a collapse in the Middle Ages, and a recovery of ancient wisdom in the Renaissance.
Brian Copenhaver explains that Brucker's ideal was developed from Cicero and called by him ‘humanitatis litterae’ or ‘humanitatis studia’.
Brucker sees himself as completing a project started by Petrarch: saving philosophy from the darkness of scholasticism.
The Middle Ages wasn't a decline, but was innovative.

The term 'humanism' was first used in the 19th century.
Jacob Burckhardt's Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) and John Addington Symonds’s Renaissance in Italy (1875-86) used 'humanism' and 'Renaissance' to discuss an era in art history.
These terms aimed to capture a clean break from the Middle Ages.
Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905-99) noted the difficulty of pinpointing what Renaissance philosophy is.
Renaissance humanism is a broad cultural and literary movement with philosophical implications but is not inherently philosophical.
Kristeller says that Renaissance philosophy is the period of Western European history from 1300 to 1600.
It is questionable that there ever really was a ‘movement’ other than in the mind of 19th- and early 20th-century historians.
Beliefs of humanists were similar to those during the 8th and 9th centuries and the 12th century when Aristotle and Avicenna were being translated into Latin. Also in the early Arabic philosophical tradition among the Syriac Christians who translated ancient philosophy into Arabic.
It makes sense to talk about ‘the long Middle Ages’, which began with the reintroduction of philosophy in the 8th century and continues into the Enlightenment.

Copenhaver and Charles Schmitt in Renaissance Philosophy (1992) note that the divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is artificial.
Much of the philosophy of the Renaissance was medieval philosophy.
The works of Thomas Bradwardine, William of Heytesbury, and Paul of Venice were printed, read, and discussed into the 16th century.
Averroes (Ibn Rushd) remained central to philosophy until the end of the 16th century.
They have largely dropped the division between ‘humanists’ and ‘scholastics’, at least in theory, if not in the thinkers they choose to cover.

Medieval philosophy is often shown to have interest for contemporary philosophers by reference to the problem of universals. A prominent position in this debate is nominalism.
Nominalism: all that exists are individuals, and that there are no abstract entities or universals outside the mind.
Aquinas (1225-74) also holds that everything that exists is individual, and that universals exist only in the mind.
To distinguish thinkers like Aquinas and Ockham from one another, one has to become much more detailed regarding individuation and cognition.
The thought that one can simply compare concepts developed in different contexts and in different times leads to the wrong conclusion.
It is more valuable that there are differences between contemporary nominalism and medieval nominalism, rather than seeing them as exactly the same thing.
The difference can teach us something about philosophy, while an identity cannot.

A similar metaphysics of the history of philosophy can be found in Claude Panaccio’s book Récit et reconstruction: Les fondements de la méthode en histoire de la philosophie (2019).
Concrete individuals and individual events are basic to the ontology.
Philosophical views, doctrines, ideas, and thoughts are construed as expressions of written or spoken utterances.
The basic elements of study for the historian are singular events of linguistic utterances.
Humans or places are referred to only in so far as they are connected to utterances.
History of philosophy becomes a domain of linguistic events given by space and time.
It's impossible to see a plausible singular development of history; instead, it contains breaks and discontinuities and any order to this domain can be given to it only by the historian.
The utterances are in a language, and as such they have meaning to the historian, a meaning that’s constructed from the language and the time and place of the utterance.
Historiographical nihilism falls out of this metaphysics, because any narrative constructed by the historian will be just that, a construction.
The ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Renaissance philosophy’ is exactly such a formation.

History of philosophy can be done either from what might be called ‘the top down’ or ‘the bottom up’.
Top-down:
- Gives a powerful narrative.
- Assumes general concepts that are fit into a historical narrative.
- Example: Arthur O Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being (1936).
- Lovejoy identifies the great chain of being in Plato and traces it into modern philosophy and it involves three principles: plenitude, continuity, and linear gradation.
- Plenitude: Anything that’s really possible will at one point be actual.
- Continuity: the Universe is a continuously connected series of events.
- Linear gradation: It contains a hierarchy from the most basic existence all the way up to God.
Bottom-up:
- Looks at the historical data first.
- Aims to build a narrative or a story from the ground up.
- The historian’s access to the data comes through filters:
  - A classical language or a text in manuscript.
  - The historian’s own presuppositions, prejudices, education, etc.
  - Historiographical concepts and periodisation.
- The historian needs imagination and experience to construct a plausible narrative.

It’s impossible to do the history of philosophy without certain presuppositions.
Interpretation can be plausibly built only from individual utterances.
Historiographical nihilism urges us to reject or be extremely skeptical of historical generalisations and historiographical concepts.
A period can be arbitrarily designated ‘the 16th century’ or ‘these philosophers’ followed by an enumeration, but then one has emptied the word ‘Renaissance’ of its meaning.