ABSTRACT
While classical Greek philosophy had concentrated on the eudaimonist promise of cultivating happiness of the soul, and medieval philosophy on guiding the soul to the eternal happiness of heaven, Renaissance philosophy added to these the more worldly goal of ending the war, factionalism and instability that ravaged Europe, and especially Italy, in the twelfth through sixteenth centuries, by recreating the sciences, society and moral education which had achieved the Pax Romana. Two hundred and six years of pan-European peace was a golden dream to a vulnerable city like Florence, which might endure six bloody regime changes in as many decades. This classical revival, which we now call humanism, with its expectation that philosophy would have an immediate and practical public effect, found some precedent in the political applications of Roman Stoicism, but was far more ambitious in its hopes for broad social transformation, and would not be surpassed in its focus on the practical applications of philosophy until Francis Bacon and, eventually, the Enlightenment.
