Abstract

The period 'from Petrarch to Descartes' is the locus of a non-Anglophone canon for the history of philosophy. Petrarch's invective On his Own Ignorance spared 'scholastics' while assailing 'Aristotelians' and never mentioning the 'humanists' who now star in textbook accounts of the renaissance. Erasmus updated the name-calling in his Antibarbarians, where he promoted the classics and attacked theologians for bad dogma - but not philosophers for bad arguments. Theology was also his target in the Praise of Folly, which Christianized Plato's pagan program of meditation - a regimen that practiced death by isolating the soul from the body. Ignatius and the early Jesuits made meditation methodical and taught it in their schools and colleges - eventually hundreds of them - like La Flèche, where Descartes spent most of his boyhood.