ABSTRACT
It is not easy to pin down what the philosophical impact of the discoveries was in the sixteenth century, because what the learned men of the period understood as philosophy could be much broader than more recent academic usages would lead us to assume. Philosophy, in effect, embraced any branch of learning. Interestingly, this very definition was offered by the geographer Strabo (c.63 BC-c.25 CE), who was influenced by Stoicism: Only a philo - sopher-that is, a man curious about everything-could be a geographer, an idea that was not lost on his humanist readers. Geography (or, more broadly, cosmography) and history (whether natural or moral history) were therefore both imbued with philosophical ideas, which, in turn, could not be dissociated from religious concerns. More generally, it was difficult to separate ‘science,’ which encompassed any theoretically informed body of learning, whether on natural or moral topics, from philosophical ideas. Finally, the humanists were often responsible for a revival of ancient philosophical traditions by finding, editing, and commenting on Greek and Latin texts, creating a deep bond between classical philology and philosophy. In this context, the discovery of new lands and peoples had a diffuse and pervasive philosophical impact in a number of genres and disciplines that ranged from cosmography and the philosophy of science to moral and political thought. Although this diffuse impact also touched the scholasticism taught at the universities, notably (as we shall see) in Spain, it was most apparent in the contribution of humanistic culture to a broad moral and scientific learning that became the concern of many lay people. Hence, although it is hard to single out a sixteenth-century philosophical discussion of the geographical discoveries in abstract terms, detailed analysis displays a deep interaction between philosophical concerns and new empirical evidence about newly discovered lands and peoples, in a variety of historical and scientific genres.
