ABSTRACT
The sixteenth century is normally given little attention in historical overviews of philosophy. If it is included at all, it is usually under the headings of Renaissance philosophy or humanist philosophy; it is, in other words, usually portrayed as opposed to medieval scholastic philosophy. In this companion to the sixteenth century, we avoid this and present this century’s philosophy in a more historically correct way. The sixteenth century was neither exclusively humanist nor exclusively scholastic-it was both. It did not constitute a ‘renaissance’ either-it built upon and utilized both the old and the new, both the humanist and the scholastic, to forge a unique synthesis of philosophical concerns, but one that exhibits continuities with what came before as well as with the philosophy that was to come in the seventeenth century. We are here following an emerging trend in recent scholarship, where scholars of ‘Renaissance’ philosophy are increasingly considering how scholasticism positively influenced humanist thought, and scholars of ‘late scholastic’ philosophy are increasingly considering how Renaissance humanism positively influenced the philosophy of the schools. In this volume, we have embraced this emerging trend and set out to reconceptualize and reorganize sixteenth-century philosophy.
