Abstract

This book is a treasure house of Italian philosophy. Narrating and explaining the history of Italian philosophers from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the author identifies the specificity, peculiarity, originality, and novelty of Italian philosophical thought in the men and women of the Renaissance. The vast intellectual output of the Renaissance can be traced back to a single philosophical stream beginning in Florence and fed by numerous converging human factors. This work offers historians and philosophers a vast survey and penetrating analysis of an intellectual tradition which has heretofore remained virtually unknown to the Anglophonic world of scholarship.“Italy’s greatest historian of Renaissance culture, and at the same time its foremost living philosopher…” Charles Boer in American Philosophical Society Proceedings Vol. 151, 1 “… Garin reinvented Humanism.”Armando Torno in Corriere Della Sera, 30 December 2004“With his studies on the Renaissance, against the too many immanentist and antireligious oversimplifications that considered the Age of the Renaissance as a pure and simple reversed manifestation of the medieval religiosity, Garin saw and taught the continuity between the origin of the Modern Age, and of Science itself, and the inheritance of the late Middle Ages.”Gianna Vattimo in La Stampa, 30 December 2004 “In opposition to Paul Oskar Kristeller, Garin did not see in Humanism a mere literary and philological event, but a movement endowed with a true and peculiar philosophy, different from the one based on summulae and logic of the Schools, and characterized instead by its new interest in the historical. Moral, and scientific disciplines.”Il Tempo, 30 December 2004