Abstract

Since the late 1960s there has been a significant and fast‐expanding interest in medieval philosophy, and though once largely confined to questions of logic and general ontology, the range of this interest has now extended to cover most aspects of normative enquiry such as ethics, politics and aesthetics (seeHaldane, 1991, 1992). The philosophy of the Renaissance is far less widely studied, though in recent times there have been signs of a developing interest and no doubt in the coming years there will be an expansion and intensification of this. One may doubt, however, whether the renaissance is as likely as the medieval period to catch and hold the interests of philosophers, as distinct from cultural historians, for while the renaissance produced striking innovations in the style of speculative writing and saw the emergence of secular humanism it had relatively little to add to the philosophical systems developed in the middle ages. These systems were themselves related to earlier ways of thinking, in particular to those of Plato and Aristotle, but the medievals added much to what antiquity had produced. Here I shall mention authors of the early middle ages through whose work the ideas of antiquity were communicated to later periods, and writers of the early modern period who paved the way for Descartes; but I will focus upon the major figures of the high middle ages.