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1. Renaissance philosophy

2. RENAISSANCE
 Renaissance - a cultural “rebirth” of extraordinary
creativity in Europe.
 XIV – XVII centuries.
 Renewed interest in the whole of Greek and Latin
Classical culture - it was a movement that viewed
humans, not God, at its center.
 The victory of rational, scientific discovery over
Christian dogma.

3. RENAISSANCE
 Anthropocentrism. Man is perfect in spirit and in body.
 Materialism. Matter is the fundamental substance in
nature.
 Empiricism. Practice as a criteria of the truth.
 Rationalism. The criteria of the truth is not sensory but
intellectual and deductive.
 Individualism. The human individual is of primary
importance.

4. NIKOLAUS VON KUES
God is what comes before everything, even before the
possibility of something existing.
“Whatever-I-know is not God and
whatever-I-conceive is not like God”.
Truth is given together with its opposite - a lie.
Consequently, even the deepest of human knowledge is
not infallible.
«The more he knows that he is unknowing…the more
learned he will be»

5. NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI
 “The end justifies the means”.
 “The Prince” - Machiavelli sets out his
argument that the goals of a ruler
justify the means used to obtain
them.
 Realism - ruler cannot be bound by
morality, but must do what it takes
to secure his own glory and the
success of the state over which he rules.
 Man is a child of nature. He is selfish by nature. Driving force of
human activity is human interest.
 “The world has become more like that of Machiavelli”. ?

7. MARTIN LUTHER
 Justification – God's act of declaring a sinner
righteous – by faith alone through God's grace.
 “Faith alone makes someone just and fulfills the
law”. Faith is a gift from God.
 Catechisms – origins of religion in form of “question-
answer”.

8. JOHN CALVIN
 Protestant ethics – capitalism.
 “Many are called, but few are chosen” - "nobody
knows whom God has chosen” - so there is a hope
in the soul of every person that he is chosen by God.

9. MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
 The intellectual and moral dangers of living among
others, and the value of solitude.
 “We should shake off the desire for glory in the eyes of
other people—that we should not always think of other
people’s approval and admiration as being valuable”.
 “Caring too much about the opinion of those around us
will corrupt us, either because we end up imitating those
who are evil, or become so consumed by hatred for them
that we lose our reason”.

10. • Tranquillity depends upon detachment from the opinion of
others.
• If we seek fame—which is glory in the eyes of others—we must
seek their good opinion.
• If we seek fame we cannot reach detachment.
• Fame and tranquillity can never be bedfellows.

11. From geocentrism to heliocentrism
 Nicholas Copernicus - not the Earth but the Sun is
the center of the universe.
 Giordano Bruno - the Sun is just the center of our
world, while every star in the universe is the sun with
its own planets, and they also might have life.

12. FRANCIS BACON
 British empiricism - all knowledge
must come ultimately from sensory
experience.
 Psychological barriers to pursuing
scientific knowledge:
1) Idols of Tribe;
2) Idols of the Cave;
3) Idols of the Marketplace;
4) Idols of the Theater.

13. • Scientific knowledge builds upon itself.
• It advances steadily and cumulatively, discovering new laws
and making new inventions possible.
• It enables people to do things that otherwise could not be done.
• Knowledge is power.