The Effects of Authorial Strategies For Transforming Antiquity On The Place of The Renaissance in The Current Philosophical Canon

Ada Palmer¹
The Effects of Authorial Strategies for

Transforming Antiquity on the Place of the
Renaissance in the Current Philosophical
Canon
Introduction: How Humanists Hide Their Philosophy

In a manuscript preserved in Utrecht, the renowned fifteenth-century philologist
Pomponio Leto embarks upon a short discussion of what differentiates the human
animal from other beasts. Critiquing Aristotle, he claims that a human is not defined
by Reason (ratio) since, he says, most people do not labor actively in philosophy and
are thus ignorant of what Reason consists of, so it is instead only the possession of
speech that differentiates humans from brute beasts (“solo sermone a brutis diffe-
ret”).² This alternative to the traditional ‘rational animal’ definition of humanity
would certainly make a respectable entry in a survey of the history of natural philos-
ophy, as would Leto’s subsequent discussion of the relative roles of heat, moisture,
force (“vis”), life (“vita”), and passion or desire in the generation of living things, ex-
amined through the influences of Venus, Mars, and Vulcan. But for these ideas of
Leto’s to have a chance of entering broader discussions of natural philosophy, either
 I wish to thank the Transformationen der Antike research project at the Humboldt University in
Berlin and my colleagues in the Classical Transformations group at Texas A&M who organized the
three immensely stimulating conferences whose papers and discussions combined to produce this
chapter; editors Craig Kallendorf and Patrick Baker, whose feedback helped me lick the raw draft
into this much expanded final form, as Pliny would say a fresh-born, shapeless bear cub needs;
my colleague in philosophy here at the University of Chicago, Agnes Callard, who very generously of-
fered me the perspective of her discipline; the Franke Institute for the Humanities, whose Faculty Fel-
lowship Program made our interdisciplinary collaboration possible; the Villa I Tatti Harvard Univer-
sity Institute for Italian Renaissance Studies, where much of the initial reading and research was
done; James Hankins and Alan Charles Kors, who between them introduced me to most of the
works and thinkers treated here; and Jo Walton, Lauren Schiller, Mack Muldofsky, and Natalie Par-
rish, who aided my research.
 Manuscript notes in the hand of Pomponio Leto, preserved on the flyleaf of Lucretius, De rerum
natura (Verona: Paulus Fridenperger, 28 September 1486), ISTC il00333000, Utrecht, Universiteitsbi-
bliotheek, Litt. lat. X fol. 82 (Rariora). Full text and translation appear in Ada Palmer, “The Use
and Defense of the Classical Canon in Pomponio Leto’s Biography of Lucretius,” in Vitae Pomponia-
nae, biografie di autori antichi nell’Umanesimo romano (Lives of Classical Writers in Fifteenth-Century
Roman Humanism), proceedings of a conference hosted by the Danish Academy in Rome and the
American Academy in Rome, 24 April 2013, Renaessanceforum (Forum for Renaissance Studies, Uni-
versities of Aarhaus & Copenhagen) 9 (2015): 87– 106, accessible at http://www.renaessanceforum.
dk/rf_9_2015.htm, consulted 11 October 2018.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110638776-011
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164 Ada Palmer
in the Renaissance or later scholarship, they must overcome one critical barrier: the
fact that Leto himself took intentional steps to make it extremely difficult to read
them.
These discussions appear in Leto’s thousand-word discussion of the Roman Epi-
curean Lucretius, a text that is traditionally described as a vita or biography of the
poet, and thus better known to historians of biography and poetry than of philoso-
phy, although barely a fifth of the text treats Lucretius and the majority focuses on
questions of natural reproduction. Leto begins the short passage with the following
declaration, written, like many humanist opening sentences, in unnecessarily com-
plicated Latin, ostentatiously displaying Leto’s mastery of rare vocabulary and un-
usual grammatical forms:
Marcus [Terentius] Varro, father of Roman letters, taught that three things must be treated for all
subjects: ancestry (origo), merit (dignitas), and skill (ars). In the present work, since we must
discuss philosophy, it may seem necessary to treat each of these topics; yet since the ancients,
both Greek authors and [we Latins], did not know whence understanding began, we cannot ad-
dress these issues historically, as their precept and ours demands.³
In other words, Leto introduces Varro’s precept of treating “origo,” “dignitas,” and
“ars” in order to say immediately that he cannot follow it, and he never returns to
Varro again. The passage seems like filler, added to pad out Leto’s introduction
and advertise his mastery of the passive periphrastic, but it is in fact something
more manipulative yet: it is a deception. By hailing Varro as the “father of Roman
letters,” Leto gives the impression that this “origo,” “dignitas,” and “ars” passage
must come from some important discussion of language and philosophy in Varro’s
De lingua Latina, an extremely rare work at the time, to which Leto – editor of the
1471 edition – had privileged access. In fact, the passage has been quoted deceptively
out of context and comes from a completely irrelevant section of Varro’s De re rustica,
in which he proposes to discuss the “origo,” “dignitas,” and “ars” of different meth-
ods of animal husbandry.⁴ Leto’s manipulation of the passage intimidates the reader
by making Varro sound like a more important source than he is and by sending the
reader on a wild goose chase, in which he or she searches De lingua latina for a pas-
sage that does not exist and is left feeling intimidated and awed by Leto’s superior
knowledge. And this exercise in intimidation and self-promotion, couched in gratui-
tously difficult Latin, is only the first of thirty-seven classical references which the
reader must struggle to get through within the thousand words of Leto’s discussion
in order to tease out his comments on natural philosophy.
 Palmer, “The Use and Defense,” 98: “M. Varro, Romanae linguae parens, tria observanda rebus om-
nibus tradit: origo, dignitas, et ars. In praesenti opere, quum de philosophia nobis dicendum esset,
necessarium videri potuit de singulis disserere; et quoniam unde coepit sapientia veteres ignorave-
runt, et qui apud Graecos et qui apud nos scribunt, historice de ea re loqui, ut auctoritas illorum
vel nostrorum poscit, non possumus.”
 De re rustica II, i, 1.

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The Effects of Authorial Strategies for Transforming Antiquity 165
Leto’s critique of Aristotle here is one example out of thousands in which an orig-
inal humanist contribution to philosophy is hidden, almost inaccessibly, in the web
of the humanist’s own style. Intentionally difficult Latin prose, intimidatingly dense
classical references, and innovative ideas hidden within a commentary on a classical
author are three components of a set of self-fashioning techniques that humanists
used to impress patrons, intimidate rivals, and differentiate their community –
trained in classical literature and a signature classical Latin prose style – from scho-
lastics and other intellectual competitors. Yet, as a consequence of such strategies,
the body of original contributions to philosophy that the humanists generated is
veiled and difficult to penetrate, especially since the humanists often deny that
their own innovations are innovations by ascribing them to classical sources.
More is at stake here than style. Perhaps nothing has shaped later attitudes to-
ward humanist contributions to philosophy as much as the fierce denunciations of
earlier Renaissance thought advanced by the seventeenth-century philosophical
movements led by Descartes and Francis Bacon. Yet if Descartes and Bacon em-
ployed their most powerful rhetoric to characterize their scholastic and Renaissance
predecessors as slavish, error-ridden, and valueless, the humanists had done exactly
the same thing, employing their most powerful rhetoric to denounce scholasticism.
In fact, the two periods in the history of European thought that are studied least by
philosophers today – the pre-scholastic Middle Ages and the pre-seventeenth-centu-
ry Renaissance – are both victims of the same self-fashioning technique, in which
innovators define their movements as a break from the recent past: first the ‘Dark
Ages,’ as conceived and demonized by Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, and their peers;⁵
and then the Renaissance, similarly denounced by Descartes and Bacon. If Bacon
and Descartes scored a long-term victory – jumpstarting a new age of philosophy
that is still widely studied and responded to by philosophers today – humanist
thought, while victorious in its own time, did not. Key to this difference in long-
term influence are the techniques of authorial self-fashioning in the two movements,
especially the way they balance their claims to originality with their obvious reuse of
earlier material, especially classical material. After all, Plato is every bit as present in
Descartes’ dualist model of the soul as he is in Marsilio Ficino’s, yet we do not call
Descartes a Platonist. The stark differences between the self-fashioning strategies of
these two movements, and the deep impact those strategies have had on the modern
reception of early modern philosophy, become clear when works of Renaissance and
seventeenth-century thinkers are interrogated using the concept of multi-directional
or allelopoietic transformation. Authors of each movement used different signature
transformation types to advertise or hide moments when they addressed or reused
the ideas of their predecessors, especially the ancients, and these strategies have,
in turn, played a profound role in shaping today’s philosophical canon.
 For an overview of this process, see Giuseppe Bisaccia, “Past / Present: Leonardo Bruni’s History of
Florence,” Renaissance and Reformation 21.1 (1985): 1– 18.

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166 Ada Palmer
Periphrasis: A Glance at Today’s Philosophical

Canon
Before beginning my examination of transformation strategies, I want to step aside
and present some actual data about how much attention different philosophical
movements receive in current teaching and scholarship on philosophy. A glance at
which thinkers and movements dominate the current philosophical canon will
help show the real stakes of what I claim is more than simply a question of style.
It is commonly acknowledged that philosophy of the earlier Renaissance (i. e., the
fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries) is comparatively underrepresented in
the current study and teaching of philosophy, but it is a question worth examining
with concrete data.⁶ I shall not attempt, in this periphrasis, to paint a deep and com-
prehensive portrait of the field of philosophy today, but I can provide a snapshot
through two small samples: first, to examine teaching, a survey of the authors as-
signed as primary-source readings in fifty recent introductory courses offered by phi-
losophy departments; and second, to sample research, a survey of the authors and
time periods treated in academic books on philosophy published in the sample
year of 2014.
My data on book publication come from the 439 books listed in the 2014 cata-
logues of books designated as ‘Philosophy’ by the top ten academic presses in this
field.⁷ Of these 439 books, sixteen, or 4 %, treat topics with no historical component,
and forty, or 9 %, treat longue-durée questions involving philosophers from multiple,
disparate periods. My data on teaching come from a survey of fifty syllabuses from
introductory-level courses offered by philosophy departments at English-speaking
colleges and universities between 2010 and 2015,⁸ including both survey courses
 It is not possible to footnote “conversations with many people over breakfast or between panels at
the Renaissance Society of America, 2008 – 2015,” but one of my aims in this paper is to examine,
with the lens of transformation theory, questions about the status of Renaissance philosophy today
that I have heard raised repeatedly by scholars of the Renaissance. The question of how Renaissance
thinkers are viewed within the discipline of philosophy has much to teach us about the effects of
form on the transmission of thought, the process of canon formation, periodization, and the relation-
ships between philosophical adversaries. Yet this is a question that those who know the Renaissance
well cannot approach in print without seeming to bemoan the marginalization of our particular spe-
cialty. I hope that the reader will take this paper as it is intended, as an analysis of what I believe is a
telling and important aspect of intellectual transmission, and not as a criticism.
 Oxford University Press (184 books), Cambridge University Press (114 books), Blackwell (twenty-
one books), Harvard University Press (seventeen books), MIT Press (four books), Routledge (fifty-
eight books), Princeton University Press (twenty books), Cornell University Press (two books), Univer-
sity of Chicago Press (ten books), and Yale University Press (nine books). I selected these ten presses
by comparing several review articles on the state of the publishing field and accepting their consen-
sus on the top outlets.
 My choice to include only courses from Anglophone institutions necessarily biases the study to-
ward figures in the English tradition, and an examination of courses conducted in other languages –

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and topical courses offered at the introductory level, on topics such as ethics, polit-
ical philosophy, or religious thought.⁹ The philosophical merit of individual authors
is not my concern when examining syllabuses, since anyone who has designed sur-
vey courses knows that there are always many more worthy topics than weeks; rather
the question is what patterns emerge in the eras and authors that are kept or cut
when philosophy faculty do the painful work of trimming long lists to short ones
and sorting what is appropriate for beginning students from what is better left for
advanced courses.
Simple percentages make clear the preeminence of Plato, Aristotle, and post-
1600 philosophy, both in scholarship and on syllabuses.
In the course readings, Hellenistic sources do not appear, since they comprise
less than 1 % of assigned texts, while no non-scholastic medieval sources of four-
teenth- and fifteenth-century texts appeared on the fifty syllabuses at all.¹⁰ It is im-
portant to remember that most of these introductory philosophy courses do not have
historical or geographic coverage among their goals. Instructors often select read-
ings, not as samples of times or places, but in order to introduce questions that
are still seen as ‘live’ in contemporary philosophy, so the resulting selections are
less surveys of past philosophy than surveys of contemporary questions examined
through the first texts that introduced them.
The philosophers treated in published books can be represented in parallel form
if we temporarily exclude the 12 % of books on longue-durée and time-independent
topics, and consider only those focused on specific philosophers or narrow periods.
especially Italian – would certainly demonstrate different patterns, but I chose to examine only An-
glophone institutions, partly in order to have a more homogenous sample, and partly because the
prominence of English as a language of international scholarship means that the canon taught at
English-speaking institutions exerts a unique international influence. The majority of syllabuses
were gathered online, especially those from public institutions that are often required by law to
make syllabuses public, but I am grateful to the many faculty who helped or sent me theirs directly:
Bernhard Nickel (Harvard), W. James Simpson (Harvard), Thomas Pogge (Yale), Shelly Kagan (Yale),
Jonathan Pittard (Yale), Joel Revill (Brown), Tobias Albert Fuchs (Brown), Charles Larmore (Brown),
Iain Laidley (Brown), Rafeeq Hassan (Williams), Andrew C. Dole (Amherst College), Justin B. Shad-
dock (Wesleyan), Steven P. Gerrard (Williams), Jana Sawicki (Williams), and Daniel Z. Korman (Uni-
versity of Illinois).
 Thirty-two of the courses sampled were titled “Introduction to Philosophy,” while fourteen were
topical and four were temporally bounded introductions, either to “Ancient and Medieval,” to
“Early Modern,” or to “Modern” philosophy; both “Modern” courses began with Descartes. I did
not include non-western, geographically specific courses, such as introductory Chinese philosophy,
although my investigation showed that such courses are rarely offered at the introductory level. Ex-
cluding contemporary thinkers, the only non-western authors assigned in any of these courses were
Confucius and Mencius.
 Here, and in the corresponding pie chart about publications, I include the few treatments of an-
cient China with the pre-Socratics for chronological reasons. No other non-western thinkers are treat-
ed sufficiently to affect the percentages.

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168 Ada Palmer
Diagram 1: Syllabus Pie Chart.
Diagram 2: Book Publication Pie Chart.

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The general patterns are very similar, although contemporary and eighteenth-
century authors receive somewhat less attention in scholarship than teaching, and
the nineteenth century receives more attention. Hellenistic, non-scholastic Medieval
thought, and the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, are present in scholarship, and
scholastic thought receives substantially less attention in publication than in teach-
ing, largely reflecting how frequently St. Anselm’s ontological proof is assigned as a
companion reading to Descartes.¹¹
Diagram 3: Vertically-oriented Bar Chart.
 Among these 439 books, 90 % treated exclusively Europe, Europe and America, or Europe and the
Middle East. Philosophy outside the western tradition was treated in seven books on Chinese philos-
ophy, six books on Indian philosophy, six specifically on Middle Eastern philosophy (rather than on
Europe and the Middle East), five on other parts of the world, and twenty-two on global or interna-
tional questions, almost exclusively modern.

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170 Ada Palmer
A more detailed breakdown of reading and scholarship by century treated expos-

es deeper patterns.¹² The absence of the Renaissance is even more visible here, as is
the absence of the pre-scholastic Middle Ages, although this chart does not include
the four books published in 2014 on topics in medieval philosophy that cannot be
assigned to a single century. Except for selections from Dante in a topical course
on “Revolution, Reform, and Conservatism in Western Culture,”¹³ no author later
than Thomas Aquinas appears on syllabuses before the sixteenth century, which is
represented exclusively by works outside or critical of mainstream humanism and
scholasticism: The Prince, Martin Luther, Luther’s debates with Erasmus, More’s Uto-
pia, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene appear once or twice on various syllabuses, while a
course exclusively on the Early Modern period included Montaigne and, extending
into the seventeenth century, Galileo.¹⁴ As for research, while several longterm stud-
ies include the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries among others, Cambridge Univer-
sity Press’s Pico della Mirandola: New Essays, edited by M. V. Dougherty, was the
only book published in 2014 focusing on the fifteenth century that was marketed
by its publisher specifically as a philosophy text.¹⁵ Philosophy books treating mainly
the sixteenth century included seven on Machiavelli, one each on Erasmus and Tho-
mas More, two on Montaigne, and, looking forward again, one on Galileo.
As the labels above suggest, many of the more heavily represented centuries ac-
tually reflect the dominance of a particular individual. The fifty courses assigned pri-
mary source readings by 165 different authors,¹⁶ including ninety-two representatives
of earlier eras of philosophy, and seventy-three figures from contemporary philoso-
phy, comprising 44 % of all the readings.¹⁷ In comparison, of 212 philosophers who
 Here authors whose output spanned two centuries are assigned to the century in which they pro-
duced more or exerted more influence; to the century in which they produced the particular work as-
signed, as in the case of Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents, twentieth century) and Machiavelli
(The Prince, sixteenth century); or, in marginal cases, to the later century. Books spanning multiple
centuries are omitted from this chart, unless they focused on a single author.
 Offered at Harvard University by W. James Simpson.
 “Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy,” offered at Brown by Charles Larmore.
 Harvard University Press did include the author’s own Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (2014)
in its philosophy listing, although it was published in the I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance
series, marketed mainly in history, and treats the sixteenth century as well as the fifteenth.
 The fifty courses among them included 522 reading assignments, averaging 10.44 readings per
course. When multiple works from one author were assigned in one course, I counted them as sep-
arate readings if they were read at separate points in a syllabus (for example, if two different works
by John Locke were assigned a month apart), but as a single reading if several excerpts or short works
were read together or in close succession (for example, a collection of several Platonic dialogues).
 Since this study aims to group philosophers by the period of philosophical conversation in which
they exerted the most influence, rather than counting only living philosophers as “contemporary,” I
define as a representative of contemporary thought any author born after 1920 who lived past the year
1989. The latest authors I categorize as non-contemporary are Charles Hartshorne (1897– 2000), Han-
nah Arendt (1906 – 1975), Louis Althusser (1918 – 1990), P. F. Strawson (1919 – 2006), and Frantz Fanon
(1925 – 1961).

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were major subjects of philosophy books published in 2014, sixty-eight, or only 32 %,

were contemporary philosophers.¹⁸ The range of contemporary and twentieth-centu-
ry authors discussed and assigned is very broad, since recent philosophy has not yet
undergone a process of canon-formation,¹⁹ and there is similar diversity in late an-
tiquity, but the other centuries are usually dominated by one or a few figures:
Diagram 4: Scatterplot of Teaching.
As this makes clear, individual authors often monopolize the teaching of a par-
ticular century. Pre-Socratic, Roman, and early Christian thought are exceptions, rep-
resented by a range of authors.²⁰ In contrast, Augustine, Boethius, Maimonides, and
 By “major subject,” I mean that a philosopher was either the sole subject of a book, or one of two
subjects in a book comparing two philosophers – for example, a book comparing Anselm and Des-
cartes.
 The most frequently assigned contemporary author was Peter Van Inwagen (assigned twelve
times), followed by Thomas Nagel (eight times), Harry Frankfurt (seven times), James Rachels,
Peter Singer, and Susan Wolf (six times each), Judith J. Thompson (five times), Robert Nozick and Wil-
liam Rowe (four times each), and Martha Nussbaum, John Hick, and John Searle (three times each).
The contemporary authors treated by the most books were Michel Foucault (seventeen) and Jacques
Derrida (fifteen), followed by Gilles Deleuze (fourteen), John Rawls (seven), Williard Van Orman
Quine (seven), Emannuel Levinas (five), and Thomas Kuhn (five); no other contemporary philosopher
was the subject of more than four books.
 On syllabuses for general courses, the Roman period is represented only by representatives of
Greek schools, such as Agrippa the Skeptic, Epictetus, and Sextus Empiricus, while Cicero, Seneca,
and other Roman authors, as well as Christians before Augustine, appear only in topical courses,
such as those on political or religious thought. Pre-Socratic authors assigned in courses include Her-
aclitus and Parmenides in survey courses, and Sophocles and Euripides in courses on moral thought
or reform. One reading from Confucius was assigned in a course on “Philosophy as a Way of Life”
offered at Wesleyan by Stephen Angle, which is also the only syllabus to include Lucretius and Sene-
ca. Other Roman and early Christian assignments include Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid, all in W. James
Simpson’s “Revolution, Reform, and Conservatism in Western Culture” course at Harvard; Cicero

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172 Ada Palmer
Aquinas are the only representatives of their centuries, and St. Anselm’s ontological
proof is accompanied solely by the response to it by Gaunilo of Marmoutiers. Anselm
usually accompanies Descartes – the most popular author on syllabuses after
Plato²¹ – who accounts for 35 % of seventeenth-century readings,²² while Hume
and Kant each account for 29 % of the eighteenth-century readings,²³ and John Stuart
Mill almost matches Aristotle in popularity, accounting for 37 % of nineteenth-centu-
ry material.²⁴ While the patterns by century remain, disparities between teaching and
research are marked in the case of several individuals:
Diagram 5: Scatterplot of Publications.
Aristotle is assigned much less universally than Plato, but is the subject of more
publications. St. Anselm and John Stuart Mill are assigned much more often than
they are studied, and both Descartes and Thomas Aquinas also stand out more in
and Sallust in Harvey Mansfield’s “Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy” course at Harvard;
and Origen, Athenagoras of Athens, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian in a “Christianity and Phi-
losophy” course at Wesleyan (instructor not listed). Roman-era authors treated in published books
include Aenesidemus of Cnossus, Livy, Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, Alexander of Aphrodi-
sias, and Plotinus.
 It is worth observing that the Republic constituted 37 % of the Plato readings assigned, with all
other dialogues totaling 64 %.
 Locke accounts for 18 % (ten courses use the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and three
assign other works by Locke), Pascal 13 %, Hobbes 10 %, and Francis Bacon 4 %.
 Of the remainder, English thought accounts for 25 % (readings from George Berkeley, William
Paley, Thomas Reid, and, assigned once each, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Butler, Francis Hutcheson,
and Edmund Burke), and the French Enlightenment for 16 % (works by Rousseau and Baron D’Hol-
bach were assigned four times each, Candide twice, and an excerpt from Montesquieu once), while
one introductory survey (offered at Texas A&M University by Patrick Anderson) includes Thomas Jef-
ferson.
 Nietzsche accounts for 15 %, William Kingdom Clifford’s 1877 “The Ethics of Belief” 13 %, and
other nineteenth-century authors, including William James, Marx, Kierkegaard, Bentham, Hegel,
Thoreau, and Mark Twain, for the remaining 35 %.

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class readings than research. Kant is assigned only slightly more than Hume, but is
the subject of more than twice as many publications, outstripping even Aristotle. Fi-
nally, a number of favorites of current scholarship – Spinoza, Hegel, Marx,
Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida – are virtually
absent from introductory philosophy courses.²⁵ The most acute disparities are high-
lighted in the graph below, which shows all philosophers who were the subjects of
more than ten books, or who stood out as very frequent presences on syllabuses:
Diagram 6: Research vs. Presence in Classes Double Bar Graph.
These comparisons reveal many fruitful details, but, as we return from this per-
iphrasis to the question of the place of the Renaissance in the philosophical tradi-
tion, two findings in particular stand out. The first is the confirmation that the
pre-seventeenth-century Renaissance, and humanism in particular, are indeed virtu-
ally silenced. Machiavelli receives substantial attention, while Pico, Thomas More,
Erasmus, Luther, Montaigne, and Galileo occasionally surface in the flow of scholar-
ship, but all of these together comprise less than 3 % of scholarship and 2 % of read-
ings, while there are eighteen philosophers who are individually subjects of more
publications than the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries combined.²⁶ These
 The presence of Foucault and Marx on this list – certainly authors widely assigned to students in
other disciplines – is a valuable reminder of how specific the perspective offered by these philosophy
department activities is.
 These in order are Kant, Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Descartes, Hume, Spinoza,
Locke, Foucault, Wittgenstein, Augustine, Derrida, Aquinas, Leibniz, Marx, and Deleuze. Philoso-

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174 Ada Palmer
data also make clear the supremacy of seventeenth-century voices, which by them-
selves command almost as much attention as all pre-seventeenth-century thought
combined. By far the most prominent representation of humanism in philosophy
today is not the work of any humanist, but the seventeenth-century critique of hu-
manism, especially by the preeminent Descartes.
Both the earlier Renaissance and the seventeenth century saw themselves as pe-
riods of intense and exciting philosophical dynamism, and produced masses of new
philosophical writings that their authors and audiences expected to echo forward
through the ages. As for why the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries have been
silenced and the seventeenth-century emerged victorious, the intentionally intimidat-
ing mode of expression used by Pomponio Leto in the passage above, which made it
so difficult for us to access the philosophy hidden within, becomes more than a ques-
tion of style: it becomes a question of survival. Authorial self-fashioning, Renais-
sance and post-Renaissance, has had a profound effect on the longevity of philo-
sophical writing. And, if there is a single root from which the most consequential
differences between humanist and seventeenth-century philosophical style spring,
it is how both eras present their relationship to the legacy of antiquity.
Section 1: Innovation Masked
Around 1433, Pomponio Leto’s teacher Lorenzo Valla completed a philosophical dia-
logue, some fifteen years in the making, called De summo bono, On the Highest Good,
or, in another revision, De voluptate, On Pleasure. ²⁷ The dialogue examines the role
of pleasure-seeking as a guide to human life, proposing it as a better alternative to
traditional ideas of virtue. Through the interlocutor who dominates the first two sec-
tions, assigned the identity of the poet Maffeo Vegio, Valla advances the position that
observation of human behavior shows that, contrary to the claims of Plato and the
Stoics, people do not by nature love virtues, and the virtues practiced by famous phi-
losophers like Socrates, Zeno, Cicero, and Seneca lead them to misery, not happi-
ness.²⁸ Inverting the Aristotelian model of virtues as the mean between two vices,
Valla has the Vegio character argue that nature seems to favor vices, having created
two vices for each virtue: guile and folly to counter prudence, and prodigality and
phers assigned more often than all Renaissance readings combined (which really means all six-
teenth-century readings) include Plato, Kant, Descartes, Hume, Aristotle, Mill, Anselm, Aquinas, Pas-
cal, Bertrand Russell, Augustine, Hobbes, Locke, and J. L. Mackie.
 Letters indicate that Valla conceived the idea for a dialogue on the Highest Good around 1418, in
response to the explorations of the sumum bonum by Leonardo Bruni, while a letter from Panormita
to Valla, probably dated 1530, mentions the completed first draft; see Lorenzo Valla, On Pleasure, De
Voluptate, trans. A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella Lorch, Janus series, 1 (New York: Abaris Books, 1977),
19, 22, 43 n. 10.
 Valla, On Pleasure, 66 – 67.

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greed to counter generosity, which proves that what we call vices are actually the
forces nature intends to govern human action.²⁹ The project – common to many clas-
sical sects and elements of the Christian monastic tradition as well – of achieving
happiness through philosophical tranquility, using philosophical and ascetic exercis-
es to free one’s self from grief, pain, desire, and other strong emotions, Valla charac-
terizes as an unnatural and dehumanizing path that, like Medusa, turns people to
stone.³⁰ Rather than leading people to destruction, pleasure-seeking by its nature
leads people to do good and live well. Philosophy and study have their place in mak-
ing pleasures richer and more sophisticated, since a philosopher’s pleasure in con-
templating the heavens is greater than a non-philosopher’s, just as an educated view-
er contemplating two statues takes greater pleasure in them than a child ignorant of
art.³¹ Against the traditional objection that pleasure-seeking will lead to lawlessness
and selfishness, the dialogue suggests that laws are sufficient to encourage beneficial
deeds and discourage harmful ones, and that honor and nobility are themselves spe-
cies of pleasure, since good deeds are rewarded, not by inner tranquility, but by
praise and thanks.³²
Valla’s presentation of these ideas is consciously transgressive, and he even has
his main interlocutor praise adultery and criticize monastic celibacy,³³ in preparation
for the third book of the dialogue, in which other interlocutors rein in these more ex-
treme claims and demonstrate how this idea of pleasure as the natural governor of
human action can be brought into line with Christianity. Even as Christian orthodoxy
demands that Valla have other interlocutors rein in the firebrand character Vegio, the
group concludes that there is no difference between voluptas and spiritual delecta-
tion, and that nature is designed to offer humanity the path to both.³⁴ Boethius’s
struggles to understand Providence in the Consolatio Valla attributes to his false as-
sumption, shared with Plato and the Stoics, that good people should always be
happy and wicked people unhappy, since he did not understand that God and Prov-
idence provide the means by which pleasure can be generated, without guaranteeing
that it will.³⁵ God is the efficient cause of all pleasure, not a guarantor that every po-
tential pleasure will be achieved; that falls to the individual.³⁶
Many aspects of Valla’s innovative, naturalist, pleasure-centered Christian Prov-
idence and corresponding ethics are surprising in a work as early as 1433, in that they
seem to anticipate the rehabilitation of self-interest associated with the seventeenth
 Valla, On Pleasure, 62– 63.

 Valla, On Pleasure, 141.
 Valla, On Pleasure, 201.
 Valla, On Pleasure, 185, 187– 99.
 Valla, On Pleasure, 119 – 21.
 Valla, On Pleasure, 267.
 Valla, On Pleasure, 271.
 Valla, On Pleasure, 275.

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century and the rise of capitalism,³⁷ and even aspects of the radical libertinism asso-
ciated with the approach of the Enlightenment.³⁸ Yet, in those histories of radicalism
that do take a moment to acknowledge the De voluptate, Valla himself is not dis-
cussed as a contributor to the tradition, for a very simple reason: Valla lied about
the source of his ideas. The staying power of this lie is perhaps best demonstrated
by what is now earth’s most ubiquitous source on Lorenzo Valla: his Wikipedia page.
In De voluptate (On Pleasure), [Valla] contrasted the principles of the Stoics with the tenets of
Epicurus, openly proclaiming his sympathy with those who claimed the right of free indulgence
for man’s natural appetites…. Here for the first time in the Renaissance the ideas of Epicurus
found deliberate and positive expression in a work of scholarly and philosophical value.³⁹
From its beginning, Valla presents the De voluptate as a dialogue between an ‘Epicur-
ean’ and a ‘Stoic,’ accompanied by a Franciscan, a doctor, and a few other represen-
tatives of fifteenth-century learned culture. Throughout the text, the Maffeo Vegio
who voices Valla’s idea of a pleasure-oriented Nature calls himself an Epicurean
and constantly invokes and claims to be following Epicurus. His primary opponent
is labeled as a Stoic, and the whole debate purports to recapitulate the ancient rival-
ry between the Stoics and Epicureans. Yet, apart from the abstract concept of pleas-
ure as the highest good, none of the major ideas voiced by the Vegio character has
precedents in classical Epicureanism, or indeed in any classical philosophy, and he
explicitly rejects those few Epicurean convictions that were widely known in the fif-
teenth century: denial of Providence, denial of divine intervention in Nature, and de-
nial of the afterlife.⁴⁰
Valla’s Vegio is not an Epicurean, either by the rubric of a modern classics de-
partment or by the very vague understanding that a Renaissance lay reader had of
Epicureanism. Nor is it plausible that Valla himself believed that all these ideas
were genuinely Epicurean, since the dialogue itself frequently mentions points at
which the ‘Epicurean’ Vegio disagrees with Epicurus. Furthermore, Valla himself
 See Albert O. Hirschmann’s classic account in The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1977).
 See Tullio Gregory, “Pierre Charron’s ‘Scandalous Book,” in Atheism from the Reformation to the
Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter and David Wootton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 87–
110; and Don Cameron Allen, Doubt’s Boundless Sea: Skepticism and Faith in the Renaissance (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), chapter 6.
 Wikipedia, “Lorenzo Valla,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Valla, accessed 11 October
2015.
 Vegio regurgitates Aquinas’s proof of Providence from design (Valla, On Pleasure, 75), argues for
active gods who enjoy pleasure as humans rather than contemplative gods do (203), and is revealed
to believe in a Christian afterlife (259 – 61). Epicurean denial of the afterlife was infamous, and even
Dante singled out “Epicurus and his followers” as deniers of the afterlife (Inferno X, 13 – 15), while
“Epicurean” was sometimes used as a synonym for denial of Providence, especially during the Ref-
ormation; on Renaissance stereotypes about Epicureanism, see Palmer, Reading Lucretius, 15 – 17,
21– 25.

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was working on the dialogue during the very years that the key Epicurean sources of
antiquity – Lucretius’s De rerum natura and the Epicurean sections in Diogenes Laer-
tius – were rediscovered, yet Valla seems to have made no effort to avail himself of
these Epicurean sources, contenting himself with the references in Cicero and Sene-
ca, and, above all, focusing on his own new ideas about what philosophy might fol-
low from the principle that pleasure is the highest good.⁴¹ Valla did not attempt to
reconstruct classical Epicureanism. De voluptate does not “[contrast] the principles
of the Stoics with the tenets of Epicurus,” as Wikipedia proclaims, nor does it give
“deliberate and positive expression” to the “ideas of Epicurus,” since the tenets of
Epicurus are absent or overturned in the course of the narrative, and Boethius,
Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, and many other thinkers are treated
much more directly in the dialogue than Epicurus. Valla’s ‘Stoic’ similarly does not
profess monism, determinism, or any of the signature tenets of real Stoicism, but
stands generally for the many thinkers, influenced by ancient Stoic thought, who ad-
vocate self-mastery and the rejection of emotions and pleasures. ‘Epicureanism’ and
‘Stoicism’ here are labels, shortcuts for referring to the pleasure-as-the-highest-good
thesis and for exploring the opposition between ascetic, pleasure-rejecting philoso-
phy and a rehabilitated moral hedonism. They legitimize Valla’s radical project by
invoking an antique precedent, but the names of the schools are actually masks
for original ideas, transparent veils that the reader is intended to see through.
Classical masks like the ones Valla employs are common in humanist writings,
and yet later centuries have tended to take the classical trappings of such works at
face value, seeing them as attempts to recreate ancient thought and – since they dif-
fer – failed attempts. It is an easy mistake to make, since the humanists themselves
encourage us to make it. The most famous signature of Renaissance philosophy –
then and now – is its revival of antiquity. In language, architecture, music, science,
speech, and thought, the humanists strove to imitate the ancients; they profess this
in every preface and oration, going to great lengths to advertise their debts to the
classics and to deny any novelty in their creations. They had good reason to do so.
In the fifteenth century, as enthusiasm for the classical revival convinced scholars
and patrons across Italy and then Europe that the secrets of philosophy, virtue,
good government, imperial stability, and even theology lay locked in the lost
works of the ancients, a discovery of something novel from antiquity carried much
more weight, and drew larger audiences, than anything conceived in the inferior
 Since it seems that Valla was working on De voluptate from around 1418 through 1433, as he
wrote, he very probably would have heard that his then-friend Poggio Bracciolini and Poggio’s asso-
ciate Niccolò Niccoli had the first recovered manuscript of Lucretius’ De rerum natura in Florence, yet
Valla seems to have made no effort to visit it, nor to access the Epicurean content in Diogenes Laer-
tius that was also available in Florence starting in the 1420s, thanks to a manuscript retrieved by Au-
rispa. Valla’s goal in the dialogue was not to reflect an authentic Epicureanism, but to reevaluate the
term as a label for his original speculations about what might flow from the thesis ‘pleasure is the
highest good’; see Valla, On Pleasure, 19, 22, 43 n. 10.

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present. Thus fifteenth-century humanists, when they did advance new ideas, tended
to borrow the labels of past schools: Platonism, Stoicism, Aristotelianism, and Epi-
cureanism. This makes it easy to dismiss their works: why read a clumsy and distort-
ed fifteenth-century digest of Plato or Epicurus when Plato and Epicurus themselves
stand ready on our shelves? But the humanist debt to the ancients is as much an ar-
tifact of self-presentation as of reality. Scholasticism is certainly deeply indebted to
classical thought, but despite its ‘slavish’ reuse of Aristotle, it does not present itself
as derivative in the way that humanist thought does (and is therefore studied much
more than humanist thought). Descartes, too, integrates elements from antiquity, no-
tably Aristotelian ideas of a priori first principles and very Platonic concepts of dual-
ism and the immaterial, immortal soul, into his philosophy. And while philosophers
of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries – humanist and scholastic – continued
Thomist and Scotist debates, Descartes also engaged closely with Anselm’s ontolog-
ical proof and the long scholastic tradition of proofs of the existence of God. But
while the content of Descartes’ Meditations is as close to Plato and Anselm as the
content of Valla’s De voluptate is to Epicurus and Epictetus, Descartes’ strategies
in how he presents his debts to antiquity are profoundly different. And it is here
that transformation theory can help us differentiate the various strategies for trans-
forming classical material that have had in turn such a profound impact on the
way earlier Renaissance and seventeenth-century thinkers are perceived today.
Section 2: Strategies of Integration
No philosopher has had such an absolute success in presenting his work as innova-
tion ex nihilo as Descartes, so with him we shall begin. Descartes’ strategy in integrat-
ing old ideas – whether from Plato or Anselm – is one of complete assimilation, com-
bined with the conscious erasure of his sources’ identities. He does not name
Anselm, Plato, Aristotle, or any of the predecessors he is borrowing from. A reader
familiar with them will recognize them, but Descartes places his unnamed assimila-
tions within an intimate and narrative framing text, in the style of Montaigne, de-
signed to incite a feeling of complicity in the reader. In approaching his Proof of
the Existence of God in the Meditations, Descartes has the reader share the emotional
and logical experience of his absolute doubt, and the steps from “cogito ergo sum” to
a dualist universe, immaterial, immortal soul, and benevolent God. While these con-
clusions are recognizable as modifications of Plato, Aristotle, and Anselm, by mak-
ing his readers feel the process of deriving them from nothing, Descartes makes their
own emotional and experiential memory endorse his claim that his ideas are origi-
nal; his readers accept that Descartes has derived these familiar concepts from noth-
ing, rather than from predecessors, because they felt included in the process.
Of course, Renaissance humanists like Leto and Valla, and indeed medieval
scholastics too, also often reuse earlier philosophical material without naming the
source. Yet their strategies, and their intentions in shaping their readers’ experiences,

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are different from Descartes’. In both the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance,
reading culture involved extensive memorization, and educated readers were expect-
ed to recognize phrases from authorities, which were encapsulated verbatim in the
flow of text. Snippets of the Church Fathers and biblical phrases in the familiar
Latin vulgate appear constantly in scholastic writings, and in many humanist texts
as well, with the expectation that audiences will recognize them even if the source
is not named. Attributed and unattributed phrases from classical authors likewise
pepper both scholastic and humanist works, serving in both eras as a proof of the
author’s general learnedness. When these passages are quoted without naming the
source, the authors do not – as Descartes did – seek to erase or deny their sources.
Their goal is rather the opposite: a reader’s ability to recognize quotations out of con-
text was a test of his or her worth as a scholar. Even Pomponio Leto, who employs
encapsulated quotations aggressively and even deceptively in texts like his Lucretius
vita, presents them sometimes named, and sometimes unnamed, but with the ex-
pectation that his learned peers will recognize them, that students will rush to
look them up, and that the ignorant will be justly shamed. Such encapsulated seg-
ments of earlier thought are valuable because they are borrowed, not despite
being borrowed.
While both humanists and scholastics encapsulated quoted phrases, scholastic
authors tended to treat classical authorities interchangeably with other authorities,
sometimes distinguishing Christian from pagan but paying little attention to the
dates of an author’s life, and without a sense that works from a particular period –
classical – were one united corpus that was somehow different in its potential and
value from works of other eras. Humanist writings in contrast strove to make the
reader constantly aware of when encapsulated passages, even unattributed ones,
were classical, since these carried a different weight and reinforced the author’s al-
legiance to the humanist movement. The tendency of competitive humanists like Leto
to use encapsulated classical passages as weapons, by deliberately quoting rare and
obscure works,⁴² was only amplified by the advent of print culture, when competition
for patronage and position was joined by competition for book sales, and editors of
classical texts competed to outdo rivals by packing their editions with more citations,
references, and supplements.⁴³ Scholastic cultures of textual encapsulation also be-
came more intimidating in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as library-building
projects and rediscovered texts increased the breadth of authorities read and encap-
sulated by Renaissance scholastics. All this means that, while Descartes’ strategy of
assimilating classical content is inviting and comfortable, because he leaves it un-
 Perhaps the best snapshot of humanist competitiveness, exclusivity, and the penchant toward in-
timidation comes in the correspondence of Leto’s teacher Valla, recently collected in a beautiful edi-
tion by Brendan Cook, Correspondence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
 For example, over the course of the sixteenth century, editions of the De rerum natura were ac-
companied by increasingly elaborate introductory letters and vitae, each of which strove to mention
more classical connections than previous editions; see Palmer, Reading Lucretius, chapters 4 and 5.

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180 Ada Palmer
named and explains the ideas he wants to use simply and clearly, the humanist strat-
egy of encapsulating classical content intimidates and excludes readers who have not
memorized large swaths of the classical Latin canon, and many Christian authorities
as well.
Humanists also tended to encapsulate on a macro scale, appropriating entire
classical texts and putting them to wholly new purposes. Much like their medieval
predecessors, humanists considered the commentary one of the most powerful schol-
arly forms, and often innovative, even radical ideas appeared for the first time in
commentaries, which wrapped original material around entire books of classical
thought while claiming simply to unpack the meaning of the original. Often the
meanings unpacked were altogether different. We have simple examples, such as
the 1563 commentary on Lucretius by Denys Lambin, which is actually a discourse
on Aristotelianism, demonstrating how the many seeming Epicurean ‘errors’ can
be brought into line with Aristotelian orthodoxies.⁴⁴ We have Marsilio Ficino’s
many commentaries on Plato, Plotinus, and pseudo-Dionysius, in which he sets
out an elaborate synthesis of Neoplatonism with Thomist Christian orthodoxy. Ma-
chiavelli’s Discourses, among the very few pre-seventeenth-century works that are
frequently studied in philosophy departments today, take the form of a discussion
on Livy. Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man is perhaps
the best-known work of fifteenth-century thought and is frequently employed
today as a sort of manifesto of humanism, but to seek Pico’s further development
of the same ideas, one must look to such works as his 1486 Commento sopra una can-
zona de amore, which takes the form of a commentary on his poet friend Girolamo
Benivieni’s poem about Ficino’s 1469 commentary on Plato’s Symposium – not an in-
tuitive place to seek original philosophy.⁴⁵
Another facet of the humanist integration of antiquity is the practice of borrow-
ing antique labels to disguise original work. Sometimes humanists knowingly invert-
ed ancient labels, as in Valla’s ‘Epicureanism,’ or the moment when Giordano Bruno
deceptively applied the label ‘Aristotelianism’ to his explicitly un-Aristotelian con-
cept of Nature in the Camoeracensis Acrotismus. ⁴⁶ Other humanists presented them-
selves sincerely as members of a particular classical school, such as the many Aris-
totelians active at the University of Paris throughout the Renaissance and the famous
 See Karine Durin’s excellent work on heterodox content hidden in commentaries by sixteenth-
century Spanish humanists, and Tatiana Tsakiropoula-Summers, “Lambin’s Edition of Lucretius:
Using Plato and Aristotle in Defense of De Rerum Natura,” Classical and Modern Literature 21.2
(2001): 45 – 70.
 Paul Richard Blum, “Popular Platonism: Giovanni Pico with Elia del Madigo against Marsilio Fi-
cino,” in Sol et Homo, Mensch und Natur in der Renaissance, ed. Sabrina Ebbersmeyer et al. (Munich:
Fink, 2008) 421– 22.
 Paul Richard Blum, “Giordano Bruno: l’Aristotele dissimulato,” in Verità e dissimulazione. L’infi-
nito di Giordano Bruno tra caccia filosofica e riforma religiosa, ed. M. Traversino (Naples: Editrice Do-
menicana Italiana, 2015), 173 – 91.

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self-declared Platonist Marsilio Ficino. When humanist philosophers tell us that their
powerfully original ideas are actually from Plato, Aristotle, or Epicurus, it is easy to
believe them. The seventeenth century also reuses ancient labels, but here the self-
fashioning frame is different. The provocative title of Bacon’s Novum organum could
not be a more overt classical reference, although it does not seek to revaluate Aris-
totle and present a new Aristotelianism, but to attack and replace Aristotle, an act
of creative destruction. The techniques of humanists who buried their heterodoxy
deep in commentaries are likewise used again by Pierre Bayle in his enormously in-
fluential Historical and Critical Dictionary, which hides its radical claims in enor-
mous, interweaving footnotes. Bayle distorts the subjects he claims to define in his
Dictionary every bit as much as Bruno and Valla distorted Aristotelianism and Epi-
cureanism, but Bayle frames his classical materials as topics he is talking about, en-
tries discussing Manichaeism or Pyrrho, rather than attitudes he is voicing or prac-
ticing, thus making his work seem more original than humanist philosophy. Bayle’s
work is also, like Descartes’, intentionally penetrable, explicating all its references
and building his new arguments out of the discussion, rather than leaving encapsu-
lated references naked as a test of the reader’s learnedness. His explanations are
quite transformative themselves, often bordering on obfuscation as he uses figures
from Catullus to Rufinus as launching points for radical new analysis, but he still
provides the reader with a sufficient sense of what he means by these terms, so a
student can comfortably read Bayle with few footnotes beyond his own. Bayle is a
good example of a figure who exerted enormous influence in his day, was largely for-
gotten in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, and was later rediscovered
and brought back into the forefront of scholarship.⁴⁷ Bayle’s strategy of hiding his
originality in footnotes and periphrases to evade censors was effective in his own
time, but detrimental later as his strangely structured works proved less approacha-
ble than the more direct digests of his peers. His revival has been facilitated by the
fact that, like Descartes, his interwoven footnotes still explicate their references, a
much easier format than an intentionally intimidating humanism saturated with
an ever-multiplying array of encapsulated authorities.
Section 3: Strategies of Rejection
The origin myths, as we may call them, of humanism and of the ‘new philosophy’ of
Descartes and Francis Bacon are remarkably similar. Both defined themselves as rev-
olutionary rejections of the methods and practices of the preceding generations, es-
pecially of scholasticism, which dominated the university system in 1600 as much as
 See the works of Elisabeth Labrousse, especially “Reading Pierre Bayle in Paris,” in Anticipations
of the Enlightenment in England, France and Germany, ed. Alan C. Kors (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 7– 16.

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182 Ada Palmer
in 1350. If Petrarch managed to transform the Ciceronianism that was already being
studied in centers such as Bologna and Arezzo into something that seemed novel
and powerful, something that would launch idealists on dangerous voyages to
seek lost manuscripts and persuade princes to fund said costly expeditions, he
gained sufficient fame to do so largely through his fierce and widely publicized po-
lemics against the scholastics. Similarly, if Descartes made educated Europe see his
proof of the existence of God as new, instead of one more in a long tradition of such
proofs, his work seemed different largely because of his claim to an absolute sepa-
ration between scholasticism and himself.
Both humanist and seventeenth-century claims to break with scholasticism are
as much authorial self-fashioning as reality. The transformations of Plato and Aristo-
tle in humanist commentaries are mitigated by the transformations of Plato and Ar-
istotle in scholastic writings, just as much as by the earlier transformations of early
Christians and late classical Neoplatonists. The records surrounding libraries like
that of San Marco in Florence make it abundantly clear that the humanists were vora-
cious readers of scholastic texts, but this is not mentioned in their own descriptions
of their educational program and rarely acknowledged in basic treatments of human-
ism today.⁴⁸ For example, Ardis Collins and others have demonstrated how the ‘Pla-
tonism’ in Marsilio’s Ficino’s Platonic Theology is packed with unattributed proofs
and premises taken from Thomas Aquinas.⁴⁹ Yet, much as Plotinus the ‘Platonist’ de-
clared his allegiance to Plato and erased his nearly equal debt to the Aristotelian tra-
dition, so Ficino and other humanists advertised their connections to the classics,
but not their debts to scholastic authorities, in titles and manifestos. Of course,
when Ficino wrote his Platonic Theology, Thomas Aquinas and other authorities
were so ubiquitous that most of Ficino’s readers would have recognized Thomist ar-
guments out of context, just as they recognized encapsulated quotations from Cicero
or scripture. Yet, when humanists encapsulate both classical and later material, they
advertise their encapsulations of antiquity with names and labels such as ‘Platonist,’
tags that declared their membership in the humanist movement. Elements from
scholasticism were not so often flagged and tended to be completely assimilated
and translated into new language rather than encapsulated intact, since humanism
defined itself in opposition to scholasticism and had no incentive to advertise its link
to its adversaries. When seventeenth-century opponents of scholasticism and hu-
manism reused scholastic and classical material, they similarly did not name their
sources, translating concepts entirely rather than encapsulating quotations, as
 The often-downplayed influence of Christian authorities on the humanists has enjoyed increased
scholarly interest recently, as well as conspicuous calls for more research in this area, as summarized
in Antony Grafton’s Margaret Mann Phillips Lecture, “Renaissance Humanism and Christian Antiqui-
ty: Philology, Fantasy, and Collaboration,” delivered at the Renaissance Society of America Meeting
in Berlin, 27 March 2015.
 Ardis B. Collins, The Secular is Sacred: Platonism and Thomism in Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic The-
ology, Archives internationales d’histoire des idées, 69 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).

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when Descartes’ Meditations uses Aristotle and Anselm, presenting its sources in as-
similated form.
While Descartes and the humanists alike reused scholastic material while declar-
ing themselves adversaries of scholasticism and denying their debts to it, their sim-
ilar modes of transforming scholasticism were partnered with radically different strat-
egies in expressing their opposition to it. In the case of Petrarch, in staple works like
his Invectives and letters, his rejection of scholasticism can be characterized as an act
of negation, an explicit and active repudiation in which he describes overtly the ac-
curate but tedious Aristotelian proofs of the scholastics, and argues that the passion-
ate rhetoric of antiquity is more beautiful and persuasive.⁵⁰ Staple texts like his De
ignorantia are crammed with vivid characterizations of scholastics, such as “my judg-
es are so captivated by their love of the mere name of Aristotle that they consider it a
sacrilege to differ with whatever ‘He’ said on any subject,” or “Let all the Aristoteli-
ans everywhere hear me. You know how readily they will spit on this lonely, strange,
and meager booklet, for their breed is prone to insults.”⁵¹ As a result, it is challeng-
ing if not impossible to describe Petrarch’s work and the origins of humanism with-
out also describing scholasticism and humanism’s adversarial relationship with it.
Thus while humanist rhetoric may sometimes create a false narrative in which hu-
manism replaced scholasticism instead of coexisting with it, scholasticism, and
the details of its questions and practices, are constantly present when one reads hu-
manism’s foundational texts. Early humanist writing carries its adversaries with it
and requires knowledge of them, even while making them seem worthless. This is
likely much of why, even though Petrarch is recognized now and in the Renaissance
as the main initiator of the humanist movement, his works are rarely used to teach
humanism, and much later works like those of Pico, or Castiglione’s The Courtier, are
preferred.
Descartes, in contrast, is invariably used to teach and study Cartesianism, de-
spite the reams of material produced by his followers. Descartes’ approach to his
predecessors is less an act of overt negation than of creative destruction, framed as
sweeping away something old to erect something new, much like tearing down an
old building to raise a new one, a comparison Descartes makes at length in the open-
ing of Part II of his Discourse on Method. ⁵² There, as in the Meditations, Descartes
does not describe his opponents at length, but focuses on his project of beginning
 Petrarch, De ignorantia 22.

 Petrarch, De ignorantia 104 and 106, trans. David Marsh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003), 313 – 15.
 Discourse on Method, Part II, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1952), 44b-45a. Descartes presents his plan for the Discourse by beginning with his
analysis of cities and architectural accumulation, observing that “ … there is very often less perfection
in works composed of several portions, and by the hands of various masters, than in those on which
one individual alone has worked” (44b), and that “many people cause their own houses to be
knocked down in order to rebuild them …” (45a).

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184 Ada Palmer
the philosophical process from nothing. Contrast, for example, these passages in
which Descartes criticizes humanism and scholasticism to the way that Petrarch
voiced his criticisms:
I considered that I had already given sufficient time to languages and likewise even to the read-
ing of the literature of the ancients. For … when one is too curious about things which were prac-
ticed in past centuries, one is usually very ignorant about those which are practiced in our own
time.⁵³
But in examining them I observed in respect to Logic that the syllogism and the greater part of
the other teaching served better in explaining to others those things that one knows … than in
learning what is new. And although in reality Logic contains many precepts which are very true
and very good, there are at the same time mingled with them so many others which are hurtful
or superfluous, that it is almost as difficult to separate the two as to draw a Diana or a Minerva
out of a block of marble which is not yet roughly hewn.⁵⁴
So vague is Descartes’ sketch of what he is opposing that it can almost be called a

silencing, or Ignoranz, so his rivals suffer a sort of damnatio memoriae, not just by
passing unnamed – after all, Petrarch does not name particular Aristotelian adversa-
ries – but by being described so vaguely that they do not seem to be particular peo-
ple or movements. Someone who reads these passages without prior knowledge of
humanism and scholasticism will not recognize that a specific adversary is being de-
scribed. As a result, reading the Meditations or Discourse on Method today requires
practically no knowledge of the movements they are rejecting. The sections of
these canonical readings from Descartes that acknowledge established traditions
are modularly positioned and easily skimmed over, as in the case of the Meditations’
opening address to the Dean and Doctors of the Faculty of Sacred Theology of Paris,
in which Descartes discusses the tradition of proofs of the existence of God but
leaves it firmly behind before plunging into his rhetorically powerful opening
image of razing cities to the ground to build anew.
While Descartes’ personal rejection of past philosophy was broad-sweeping, tar-
geting Plato and Aristotle as much as the humanists and scholastics, it was supple-
mented by the more focused vitriol of his followers, who attacked earlier Renaissance
thought in particular with far more ferocity than Descartes’ own core texts. And with-
in the English-speaking world, Descartes had another ally in his rival and contempo-
rary Francis Bacon. Bacon’s attacks on what he characterized as the false idols and
vacuous accumulated flotsam of earlier philosophy in his Great Instauration and
Novum organum are far more vicious, vivid, and rhetorically ornamented than Des-
cartes’ version of the same call for a break with the past. At times, Bacon even ap-
propriates and redirects the rhetoric that Petrarch used to praise humanism and
damn scholasticism, as when Bacon reuses the image of the ideal scholar as a hon-
 Discourse on Method, Part I, 43a.

 Discourse on Method, Part II, 46b.

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eybee, gathering broadly from Nature for the good of humanity.⁵⁵ This image is clas-
sical in origin, used by Seneca, Horace, and Lucretius.⁵⁶ While Petrarch’s transforma-
tion of the honeybee image was an act of encapsulation, done with the expectation
that his readers would identify it, for Bacon it is an act of assimilation and willful
ignorance, using the image to attack the value, and deny the influence, of the very
figures from whom he took it.
While Bacon is not read or studied nearly as much today as Descartes is, Bacon’s
claims of an absolute rejection of the past echoed forward through the English tra-
dition and the French Enlightenment. Here too the rhetoric is often explicitly one
of creative destruction, as in this vivid 1832 excerpt from a popularly reprinted letter
from Sir David Brewster to Sir Walter Scott:
Des Cartes did, indeed, at last, overthrow the Aristotelian system, but he substituted in its place
one equally absurd; and it was not till the great Bacon arose, that the mists of ignorance, error,
and prejudice began to be dispelled. He it was who first pointed out the true method of explor-
ing the mysteries of nature, and laid the foundation for a correct and rational system of physical
science. The immortal Newton raised the superstructure – a glorious temple, before which the
Dagon of superstition has fallen prostrate, and is fast crumbling to dust.⁵⁷
This rhetoric remained powerful in the English tradition of teaching philosophy lon-
ger than Bacon himself, and already in 1733 Voltaire said of the Novum organum that
“the best and most remarkable of [Bacon’s] works is the one which is the least read
today,” since it was “the scaffolding by means of which modern scientific thought
has been built, and when that edifice had been raised, at least in part, the scaffold-
ing ceased to be of any use.”⁵⁸ Yet, still of use today – and especially of use to Ba-
con’s rival Descartes – is the lingering power of Bacon’s rhetoric of creative destruc-
tion, which lets students become excited about the seventeenth-century triumph over
earlier errors without feeling any need to study those errors or their authors. The af-
tereffects of Bacon make it easy to teach and study Descartes without teaching Des-
cartes’ predecessors, while Petrarch’s adversarial negation of scholasticism under-
mines the value of scholasticism while making it impossible to approach
humanism without it.
 Novum organum Book 1 Aphorism 95; Petrarch, Familiares XXIII.19 (letter to Boccaccio, 28 October
1365).
 Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium 84; Horace, Odes IV, ii, 27– 32; Lucretius III 11– 12. Lucretius
would have been known to Bacon, but not to Petrarch.
 “Letters on Natural Magic” addressed to Sir Walter Scott by Sir David Brewster, Family Library 32
(1832), reprinted in The Aberdine Magazine 2.24 (Dec. 1832): H4.
 Voltaire, Letters on England, “On Chancellor Bacon,” trans. Leonard Woodcock (New York: Pen-
guin, 1980), 58.

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186 Ada Palmer
Section 4: Systems without Authors
For Sir David Brewster in 1832, much as for Voltaire in the 1730s, it was a flaw that
when Descartes “did, indeed, at last, overthrow the Aristotelian system … he substi-
tuted in its place one equally absurd.” Yet Descartes’ system-building is one of the
greatest interests of contemporary philosophers, who have been attracted to his tech-
niques for building chains of reasoning and to the elements of his system that are
still ‘live’ or viable today. Bacon, who laid foundations for the work of others without
erecting an edifice, has been largely eclipsed by the authors who did erect systems:
Netwton, Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza. That Bacon now lags behind, not only Des-
cartes, but his own successors, reflects Pierre Hadot’s argument that many pre-mod-
ern philosophers were stripped from the philosophical canon when the current focus
on philosophers as system-builders, whose achievements are to be sought in their
formal written works, replaced the pre-modern tendency to see philosophy as a
way of life, and thus to seek a philosopher’s achievements in his or her actions, bi-
ography, and more intimate or literary writings, all approaches favored in the pre-
seventeenth-century Renaissance. A milder form of Hadot’s thesis posits that it is
not only system-builders but also the creators of key questions, concepts, methods,
and arguments who draw the interest of the modern discipline of philosophy, think-
ers whose creations – whether Anselm’s ontological proof or Heidegger’s Dasein –
can be removed from context and evaluated, debated, refuted, responded to, and re-
combined in part of the ‘live’ conversation of contemporary philosophy. Bacon’s
shared credit in the systems of his successors, so celebrated in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, is difficult to place in our current taxonomy of philosophy
by author.
But what if systems have no author at all? One factor that makes it particularly
difficult to spot moments when a humanist has appropriated an ancient text or label
to disguise original work is that the humanists themselves were not always conscious
of the fact that they were innovating. This was true especially in the case of syncre-
tists like Marsilio Ficino. Drawing on the models of biblical exegesis and late antique
Neoplatonists like Plotinus, Ficino sought to unpack the hidden meanings in what
were believed to be intentionally obscure and coded ancient philosophical texts.⁵⁹
Based on sources such as Boethius’s allegorical account in the Consolation of Philos-
ophy of how Lady Philosophy, who after dwelling happily with early sages like Plato,
was attacked by later “marauders” (i. e., later stages of ancient thought) who carried
 See the works of Michael J. B. Allen, especially Plato’s Third Eye: Studies in Marsilio Ficino’s Met-
aphysics and Its Sources (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995); The Rebirth of Platonic Theology, ed. James Han-
kins and Fabrizio Meroi (Florence: Olschki, 2013); James Hankins, “Marsilio Ficino and the Religion of
the Philosophers,” Rinascimento n.s. 48 (2008): 101– 21; Christopher Celenza, “Pythagoras in the Ren-
aissance: The Case of Marsilio Ficino,” Renaissance Quarterly 52.3 (1999): 667– 711; and Pico della Mi-
randola: New Essays, ed. M. V. Dougherty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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off scraps of her robe, thinking they possessed the whole of her,⁶⁰ Ficino believed
that the early ancients had possessed an original, nearly perfect (and quasi-Chris-
tian) philosophy. He saw his efforts as an attempt to reconstruct this by using the
light of revelation and other later advances in truth to sort through the philosophical
relics of antiquity and access the original perfect philosophy, which he believed had
been passed down through a genealogy of sages from Moses through Zoroaster,
Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras, and others to Plato and later Plotinus.⁶¹
Ficino’s Platonic Theology aimed to demonstrate the compatibility of Plato and Chris-
tianity, and to heal flaws in contemporary theology using classical wisdom, but in
order to do so, he created a radically original new system integrating, among
other diverse elements, both a Christian afterlife and judgment and a highly modified
form of Platonic or Pythagorean reincarnation. Neither Plato, Plotinus, nor modern-
ity would call Ficino’s work authentic Platonism, yet Ficino sincerely believed he was
reconstructing the ideas of others. Who, then, is the author of Ficino’s system? If a
reader deduces from foreshadowing how an author may have intended an unfinished
book to end, and suggests an ending, the reader feels it is the author’s ending, but
the author did not actually create it. Just so, Marsilio Ficino’s attempts to unmask
Plato’s true meaning are neither wholly Ficino’s nor wholly Plato’s, and impossible
to tie to a modern concept of authorship or authenticity.
This type of blurring of authorial identity is common in Renaissance works, and
perhaps most clearly expressed in the (much denigrated) Renaissance practice of ‘re-
pairing’ classical sculptures by grafting new limbs, heads, and even entire subjects
onto antique torsos. These acts of supplementation create hybrid objects, like Benve-
nuto Cellini’s marble Ganymede, a Roman copy of a Greek original, which probably
began as a Dionysius but had its subject changed to Ganymede by Cellini and Willem
Danielsz van Tetrode. Cellini’s plan for the sculpture added more than a new head
and limbs: it added a very unclassical new idea, reversing the power dynamic of an-
tique Ganymede sculptures by having a powerful Ganymede tease a Zeus who seems
to be overmastered by his appetites, depicting the power of human excellence over
the divine in a way that is easy to tie in to the concept of the dignity of man, which is
often the most celebrated element of humanist thought in modern discussions. Yet
modern studies of Cellini rarely give the Ganymede more than a fleeting mention.
A supplemented sculpture, with two subjects, two creation dates, and at least four
creators – Greek, Roman, Italian, and German – is impossible to place in any chro-
nological, topical, or national treatment and fails to satisfy ideas of authorial integ-
rity and genius.
Such hybrid objects, produced by the supplementation of antiquity, are even
more common in Renaissance thought than in Renaissance art. Ficino’s Platonism,
 Consolatio I.i.
 Ficino’s specific genealogy of sages varied throughout his work, sometimes including Aglaophe-
mus and Philolaus; see James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 1990)
2:643 – 44.

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188 Ada Palmer
Figure 1: Benvenuto Cellini and Willem Danielsz van Tetrode, “Ganymede” (Florence, 1540s), Marble,
106 cm, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.

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Figure 2: Benvenuto Cellini and Willem Danielsz van Tetrode, “Ganymede,” detail (Florence, 1540s),
Marble, 106 cm, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.
Pico’s synthesis of all religions, Petrarch’s initial attempts to cobble together a moral
system from Cicero, Seneca, and what rough translations of Platonic dialogues he
had, even Lorenzo Valla’s inverted Epicureanism – which did, after all, reflect on
what Valla knew of Epicurus – all of these are simultaneously ancient and Renais-
sance, derivative and original. Commentaries and exegeses have no single author,

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190 Ada Palmer
and even original treatises like Ficino’s Platonic Theology cannot be said to contain
ideas with a single creator. Viewed this way, the majority of the most powerful fruits
of Renaissance philosophy have no author, no date of origin, nor even any clear
name, since they so often appropriate and revaluate classical labels. These philo-
sophical achievements cannot fit into any modern taxonomy by author, geography,
or even time. The hybrid authorship caused by supplementation was less of a difficul-
ty in the Renaissance, when authors – scholastic and humanist – displayed their
skill, not in originality, but in how brilliantly they transformed earlier authorities,
and proved their membership in a philosophical sect, not by following its written
precepts to the letter, but by living the life and honoring the virtues that the sect pre-
scribes.
Section 5: Authenticity and Partisanship
A final, related barrier that style places between us and Renaissance thought is one
of how we perceive philosophical authenticity. Even if we judge Renaissance philos-
ophers by their lives, and open space for text artifacts of complex authorship, hu-
manists still often come across – to modern eyes at least – as hypocrites or failures
in their attempts to lead philosophical lives, because their activities and works were
so entangled in short-term political ends. The earmarks of partisanship, whether sup-
porting a city, a region, a faction, or a particular patron, are extremely visible in al-
most all humanist writings, while the earlier and later authors most studied today
tend toward a rhetoric that makes them feel neutral. For example, no one today
would deny that Plato’s political thought reflects both his experiences of life in a
Greek city-state and his anger over the death of Socrates. But the Republic presents
Plato’s political ideas abstracted from their context, so they feel neutral in isolation,
even if we see their political context by reading between the lines. In contrast, it is
impossible to ignore the political when Paolo Giovio, in his dialogue on the virtues
and virtuous people of his age, De viris et feminis aetate nostra florentibus, suddenly
breaks off after a string of one-paragraph portraits of famous women to crown the
text with fifteen pages praising Vittoria Colonna, the patroness then paying his
bills, who receives an entire paragraph for each of her sublime body parts and char-
acter traits.⁶² Similarly, Plato’s abstract philosopher-king feels like a legitimate phil-
osophical concept, despite its political roots, but when Johann Reuchlin takes on the
same topic – the flourishing of a state under a philosophically inclined ruler – in the
 De viris et feminis aetate nostra florentibus (Notable Men and Women of Our Time), trans. Kenneth
Gouwens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 502– 34. Paolo Giovio crowns his discus-
sion of Vittoria Colonna by suggesting that her virtues make it more appropriate to judge her by the
standards of men than women, touching on much the same question of whether the quality of the
soul transcends the differences between the sexes which Plato embarks on in Republic V 554b,
but, directed toward the author’s patroness, it cannot seem like anything but sycophancy.

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beginning of his De arte Cabalistica, he does so in a direct address to a patron, Pope

Leo X, and in language that showers such hyperbolic praise on the Medici pope and
his late father Lorenzo il Magnifico that it comes across as toadying and obsequious,
making it feel philosophically compromised in a way that Plato does not:
Philosophy in Italy was once upon a time handed down to men of great intellect and renown by
Pythagoras…. But over the years it had been done to death by the Sophists’ wholesale vandal-
ism, and lay long buried in obscurity’s dark night, when, by God’s grace, that sun that shone on
every field of liberal study, your father Lorenzo de’ Medici, son of the great Cosimo, rose up as
the chief citizen of Florence. We knew that his natural ability for affairs of state, his knowledge
of such matters, and his wise handling of war and domestic policy, were such that no man in
politics was more worthy of praise than he. But it must be said that when, in addition to
this, his scholarly activities are taken into account, his birth seems heaven-sent…. Zealously
he brought to his country learned men from every land, men familiar with the ancient authors,
whose fluency equaled their scholarship…. Nothing flourished as did Florence then: all those
dead arts were there reborn; no aspect of language or literature was left untouched…. Fruit
born of the Laurentian laurel is most precious, not just for his people, but for the whole
world. Holy Father … [n]o treasure could be richer than your reign, of which no tongue can
speak; from it flow riches as water from the Pactolian depths, and the charm and graces of
belles-lettres, all that is good in man. Your father sowed the seeds of ancient philosophy in
his children. With his son they will grow to reach the rooftops …⁶³
As this passage shows, the directly political aims of humanist virtue politics, ex-
plored in James Hankins’ chapter in this volume, mean that humanist writings
tend to be packed with direct references to patrons, titles, feuds, battles, towns,
and dynasties. Improving the world by influencing powerful families was one of
the central goals of the humanist project, but, for anyone not expert in the period,
the constant references make these works off-putting in much the same way that hu-
manist encapsulated classicism does. This baggage of petty politics is tolerated in
Machiavelli, where we perceive it as the object of his study, but in some sense indi-
vidual elite families and patrons were the objects of all humanist philosophy, in that
their aims to be heard by and influence these political actors were both sincere and
central to the project as a whole. In the seventeenth century, patronage was still the
main source of income for philosophers, but the concise and courteous dedications
that precede the Novum organum or Leviathan rarely recur in the body of the text. No
one could claim that Francis Bacon, or indeed Peter Abelard, was not involved in pol-
itics, but patronage does not leave its mark on every chapter, as is so often the case in
humanist works.
 De arte Cabalistica, trans. Martin and Sarah Goodman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1983), 36 – 39.

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192 Ada Palmer
Conclusion: Humanism’s Many Masks

A crisis comes in Lorenzo Valla’s Epicurean masquerade when, toward the end of
Book 1 of De voluptate, the Vegio interlocutor is pushed on the question of Provi-
dence. Even in 1430, before Diogenes Laertius and Lucretius had circulated beyond
Florence, Epicurus’s denial of Providence was infamous,⁶⁴ so for Valla’s ‘Epicurean’
to attack it threatens the illusion that this is truly a debate between ancient sects at
all. Valla’s justification – in Vegio’s voice – demonstrates a distinctly un-modern at-
titude toward the status of philosophy that touches on the heart of why humanist
style conflicts with its philosophical content so much more than the style of other
periods:
It is nonetheless proper to derive support for one’s argument from whatever source one desires,
as did your Seneca, a very keen supporter of this Stoic sect, who drew so many ideas from Epi-
curus himself that it sometimes seems that Seneca was an Epicurean or that Epicurus was a
Stoic. This procedure should be allowed to me the more freely because I have been initiated,
not into the rites of philosophy, but into the more significant and lofty ones of oratory and po-
etry. Truly, Philosophy is like a soldier or lower officer at the orders of Oratory, his commander
and (as a great writer of tragedies calls her) his queen.⁶⁵ Cicero allowed himself to speak freely in
philosophy without being tied to any sect; and this he certainly did with distinction. Neverthe-
less, I would prefer that he had claimed to deal with those arguments not as a philosopher but
as an orator, and that he had exercised the same license – or rather, freedom – in firmly recov-
ering from the philosophers all the oratorical trappings that he found among them (since every-
thing that philosophy claims for itself is actually ours) and I would wish him to have raised
against those sneak thieves of philosophers the sword he had received from Eloquence,
queen of all, and to punish them as criminals. Truly how much more clearly, solemnly and mag-
nificently the same subjects are dealt with by the orators than by the obscure, squalid, and ane-
mic philosophers!⁶⁶
Here Valla’s deliberately provocative Vegio character draws a very specific and unex-
pected line between what he calls philosophy and oratory. Combining the spirit of
Petrarch’s invectives against the emotionless, dry, and difficult scholastics with Boe-
thius’s image of philosophical marauders who clutch stolen scraps of truth, Vegio’s
philosophia encompasses scholasticism, sophism, faction-ridden Hellenistic squab-
bles, and all the dogmatic facets of the intellectual world, more invested in defend-
ing entrenched positions than in pursuing truth. Queen over such minor applications
of the intellect is oratio, encompassing the syncretism and intellectual supplementa-
 In addition to discussions in Seneca and in Cicero’s dialogues, especially Academica, De fato, De

finibus, De natura deorum, and Tusculanae disputationes, Epicurean doctrine was known through
early Christian apologists, notably Lactantius, Divinae institutiones III.17; see G. D. Hadzits, Lucretius
and His Influence (London: Longman, 1935), 216 – 27.
 Euripides, Hecuba 816, another signature humanist encapsulation of antiquity; cf. Valla, On Pleas-
ure, 327 n. 31.
 Valla, On Pleasure, 75 – 77.

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tions characteristic of humanism, but also important are Cicero’s dialogues, which
integrate and test the propositions of all available sects in the spirit of exploration
and even philosophical skepticism. Oratory and eloquence are the signature domain
of the humanists, and here Valla appropriates into that domain the open-minded and
dynamic parts of philosophy, which humanists believed were not being practiced in
university-dominated scholastic debates between Thomists and Scotists – as faction-
al and irresolvable as those between Stoics and Epicureans. Humanist style – packed
with rhetorical ornament, classicizing language, and encapsulated classical referen-
ces – was not only a declaration of membership in a community, but a declaration of
the type of intellectual inquiry a work will undertake: an inclusive, speculative proj-
ect in the style of Cicero and Petrarch, and one with both earthly and spiritual goals
instead of purely spiritual. Valla’s expression of this attitude through Vegio is unusu-
ally strong; a more modest expression of this association of the long-neglected, true
practice of philosophy with what seem like purely literary humanist practices ap-
pears in Raffaello Maffei Volaterrano’s encyclopedic Commentarium urbanorum,
when he finishes discussing all ancient “philosophers and theologians” and begins
his subsequent catalogue of recent figures who have followed in their tradition with
those who work on “Grammar, Poetry and Rhetoric, along with Mathematics and the
study of philosophy,” naming Dante and Petrarch as the first true practitioners of
philosophy since antiquity.⁶⁷
Humanism and its associated arts – grammar, rhetoric, oratory – were the signa-
tures of a new philosophical method, seeking to distinguish itself from an en-
trenched philosophical mainstream, just like the ‘new philosophy’ of the seventeenth
century or the philosophes of the Enlightenment. When humanists undertook original
intellectual projects that we would classify as philosophy today, their efforts to define
themselves in contrast with scholasticism involved a strategy of veiling their philo-
sophical content. But today, when we run across figures celebrated as a ‘philoso-
pher-poet’ or ‘philosopher and Platonist’ or who eschew the title of ‘philosopher’ al-
together, and when we read treatises that veil their original content under revaluated
or inverted ancient labels, or deny the originality of their works of multi-authored
philosophical supplementations, it is easy to be deflected by the form and fail to
see the innovative content. This barrier is worsened by the modern tendency to asso-
ciate rhetoric and ornamented language with hypocrisy – an association that ampli-
 “Theologorum, philosophorumque turba, cum ipsis ordinibus repetita: nunc recentiores qui
nomen aliquod adsecuti sunt: primum in artibus quas Graeci κυκλικὰ id est circulares vocant: vide-
licet Grammatica, Poetica, Rhetorica, cum Mathematicarum & philosophiae studiis. Qui nec admo-
dum pauci, nec omnino despiciendi sunt. Nam ex illo quo literae tot barbarorum procellis ab Italia
migraverunt, nulla gens prior quam Florentina hunc Ausoniae honorem restituit: si a Claudiano
poeta initium faciamus, post quem rem literariam rursus ob philosophorum Theologorumque nostro-
rum negligentiam qui haec minime curaverunt, interpolaram, Dantes primum, pauloque post Pet-
rarcha in lucem revocaverunt. Ab his igitur decet exordiri” (Commentarium urbanorum (Basel: Hier-
onymus Froben and Nikolaus Episcopius, 1559), 577).

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194 Ada Palmer
fies the feeling of insincerity introduced by the humanists’ constant references to pa-
trons – whereas the humanists in fact employed elaborated and ornamented rhetoric
as proofs of sincerity, associating oratory and beauty with truth and virtue,⁶⁸ and
naked argumentation with the stagnant scholastic adversaries whom the humanists
labored to negate. Humanist stylistic choices intended to advertise openness and dy-
namism read to later audiences as the earmarks of inauthenticity and stagnation, es-
pecially with the advent of the powerful rhetoric of Descartes and Bacon. In contrast,
seventeenth-century strategies of assimilating earlier material instead of encapsulat-
ing it intact, making only vague references to rivals in a rhetoric of creative destruc-
tion instead of keeping their foes alive through active negation, and the comparative
paucity of references to everyday politics, make seventeenth-century sources easier
to detach from their historical context.
Is Francis Bacon a ‘philosopher and statesman’ or ‘statesman and philosopher’?
During his years in office, Bacon’s fame as one of the highest officers in England
vastly outstripped his intellectual reputation, which overtook it only gradually, so
that even in his 1733 Letters on England, Voltaire still used the title “Chancellor”
Bacon to remind his readers that the great man had been great in office as well as
intellect. Just so, Renaissance philosophers usually won their initial fame under
other titles than ‘philosopher,’ since their efforts to distinguish humanism from ear-
lier movements, and to exert political as well as intellectual influence, made them
intentionally position themselves in a complex relationship to the label ‘philoso-
phus.’ The same process of historical digestion that came to categorize Bacon defin-
itively with philosophers faced a much more complex challenge when categorizing
Renaissance polymaths. Was Coluccio Salutati a statesman or philosopher? Valla a
rhetorician or philosopher? Leto a philologist or philosopher? Leon Battista Alberti
an architect or philosopher? Ficino a translator or philosopher? Poliziano a poet or
philosopher? Pietro Bembo a literary theorist or philosopher? Few figures – Pico,
Pomponazzi, Machiavelli – have come to be known as philosophers first and fore-
most. Yet, this is no surprise. The farther we move from an author’s life, the more
we come to depend on the author’s own words, or the words of peers, as a window
on the now-lost mind that crafted them. Humanist writings have a thousand artful
ways of telling us that only classicism and rhetoric are to be found here, not innova-
tion. It is not intuitive to imagine that a work might wrap itself in deception, pack
denials of its originality into every page, express itself as a pastiche of out-of-context
fragments and distorted old ideas, twist and obscure even its own authorship, and
yet, cocooned within that dark and twisted mass of words, hide true philosophy.
 On humanist claims for the association between truth and persuasiveness, see Victoria Kahn,
Rhetoric, Prudence and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985),
29 – 35.

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The Effects of Authorial Strategies For Transforming Antiquity On The Place of The Renaissance in The Current Philosophical Canon

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Ada Palmer¹

The Effects of Authorial Strategies for

Introduction: How Humanists Hide Their Philosophy

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Periphrasis: A Glance at Today’s Philosophical

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Diagram 1: Syllabus Pie Chart.

Diagram 2: Book Publication Pie Chart.

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Diagram 3: Vertically-oriented Bar Chart.

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A more detailed breakdown of reading and scholarship by century treated expos-

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were major subjects of philosophy books published in 2014, sixty-eight, or only 32 %,

Diagram 4: Scatterplot of Teaching.

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Diagram 5: Scatterplot of Publications.

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Diagram 6: Research vs. Presence in Classes Double Bar Graph.

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Section 1: Innovation Masked

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 Valla, On Pleasure, 62– 63.

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Section 2: Strategies of Integration

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Section 3: Strategies of Rejection

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 Petrarch, De ignorantia 22.

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So vague is Descartes’ sketch of what he is opposing that it can almost be called a

 Discourse on Method, Part I, 43a.

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Section 4: Systems without Authors

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Section 5: Authenticity and Partisanship

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beginning of his De arte Cabalistica, he does so in a direct address to a patron, Pope

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Conclusion: Humanism’s Many Masks

 In addition to discussions in Seneca and in Cicero’s dialogues, especially Academica, De fato, De

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