ABSTRACT
Two movements exerted a profound influence on the philosophy of the Italian Renaissance: scholasticism and humanism, both of which began to take root in northern Italy around 1300. Differing from one another in terms of methods and aims as greatly as the scientific-and humanities-based cultures of our own times, scholasticism and humanism each fostered a distinctive approach to philosophy. The centres of scholasticism were the universities, where philosophy teaching was based on the Aristotelian corpus, in particular the works of logic and natural philosophy. Since Platonism was part of their educational background, they were more capable of dealing with the entire range of Plato's philosophy, speculative doctrines as well as practical ethics and politics. Although Ficino used such Neoplatonic insights to give Renaissance Platonism greater depth and coherence, he never lost sight of the primary motivation which had led his contemporaries to admire this philosophy: its compatibility with Christianity.
