User:Natalkasmily/comparison paper

Each era of intellectual and cultural development is remarkable and noteworthy. Renaissance is the time when the original works of Greek and Roman thought became popular. This era started sometime at the end of the thirteenth century and spread its wings to the beginning of the seventeen century. During this time such philosophical thoughts as Neoplatonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism began to flourish again and spread doubt in the Aristotelian philosophy.

The Renaissance Movement began in Italy, which was called the Italian Renaissance, with its major centers in Florence, Siena, Venice, and Milan. Despite foreign invasions in Italy in the middle of the sixteenth century, Renaissance Movement continued to spread into the rest of Europe. This Movement was called Northern Renaissance, because it spread north of Italy. Italian Renaissance had different level of impact on Polish Renaissance, German Renaissance, Spanish Renaissance, in Croatia, the Lower Countries, France, Portugal, England, and Scotland. The Renaissance in Poland, Spain, Germany, Croatia and the Lower Countries occurred between fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Polish Renaissance is considered to be the Golden Age for Polish culture. Many Italian artists and educators moved to Krakow during this time introducing the “values of the dignity of man and power of his reason.” German Renaissance was a result of German artists visiting Italy; their experience influenced German scientists to turn their attention from religious matters to “world around them.”

The Renaissance Movement in France, Portugal, England, and Scotland lasted longer – until early seventeenth century. One French historian described Renaissance as the “rebirth” of Europe. The main developments during French Renaissance were the development and new artistic ideas in the field of art and science, popularity of humanism, also development of etiquette and discourse. Portuguese Renaissance was mostly isolated from the influence of other countries during this time. Portugal was exploring new horizons by introducing to Europe trade with India, the Orient, the Americas, and Africa, which made the nation supreme in technology, arts and culture over the rest of Europe. English Renaissance differed from Italian by the forms of arts that were dominant during that time: English movement focused more on music and literature, while in Italy visual arts were more significant. Scottish Renaissance was following the same routine of development of arts and science during this time, but the most crucial became changes in politics and education. As an inseparable part of the Renaissance, Humanistic Movement was born in response to the medieval education. It produced cultural and educational reform which goal was to educate both men and women to become involved members of society and to encourage others to live a virtuous and prudent life. Humanists achieved their goals through the studies of humanities, which are grammar, history, moral philosophy, rhetoric and poetry. Another movement that developed during Renaissance was the Protestant Reformation. This movement is considered to be one of the most distinguishing points between Renaissance religion and Medieval.

''In this essay I would like to compare lives, thoughts, and approaches of the three prominent representatives of that time: Niccolo Machiavelli, Nicholas of Cusa, and Marcilio Ficino.

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Lives.

Niccolò Machiavelli was born in Florence as the third child and first son of a lawyer Bernardo di Niccolò Machiavelli. The Machiavelli family is believed to come from the old marquesses of Tuscany and to produced thirteen Florentine Gonfalonieres of Justice, one of the offices of a group of nine citizens selected by drawing lots every two months and who formed the government. However, he was never a full citizen of Florence, due to the nature of Florentine citizenship at that time, even under the republican regime. His education was in accordance with the humanist ideals of the Renaissance with the focus on Latin, grammar, rhetoric and the classics. It is believed that during his youth years he lived in a city with continuous political instability and tumults: notable events include the Pazzi conspiracy and its aftermath, the end of Medici rule, and the reign of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola. In 1494, Florence restored the republic. Shortly after the execution of Girolamo Savonarola, Machiavelli was appointed to an office of the second chancery- a medieval writing office which put Machiavelli in charge of the production of official Florentine government documents. Not long after that, he was also made the secretary of the Dieci di Libertà e Pace. In the first decade of the sixteenth century he carried out several diplomatic missions: most notably to the Papacy in Rome, in the Italian states. From 1502 to 1503 he became a witness to the brutal reality of the state-building methods of Cesare Borgia and his father, Pope Alexander VI, who were then engaged in the process of trying to bring a large part of central Italy under their possession. The pretext of defending Church interests was used as a partial justification by the Borgias.

Nicholas Kryffs or Krebs, also referred to as Nicolaus Cusanus and Nicholas of Kues, was born in Kues, about 30 km from Trier, to a wealthy shipper on the river Moselle, Johan Krebs (or Cryfts). Nicholas was one of his parents' four children. He left his home and was sent to Deventer, in the Netherlands, by Count Theodoric von Manderscheid. In Deventer, his early education took place at the Brothers of the Common Life. It is safe to assume that the Brothers of the Common Life, a Roman Catholic religious community founded by Gerard Groote in the 14th century, would have strongly influenced the young Nicholas with their mixture of mysticism and reason. The first certain information about Nicholas's education is in 1416 when he matriculated at the University of Heidelberg. In Heidelberg Nicholas studied liberal arts, particularly philosophy, for a year before going to the University of Padua in 1417. At Padua he studied canon law under Giuliano Cesarini, who was only three years older than Nicholas. At Padua he became friends with fellow student Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, who was studying mathematics and medicine.

Marsilio Ficino was born on 19 October, 1433, in Figline Valdarno, not far from Florence. His mother was Alexandra (the daughter of a Florentine citizen) and his father - Dietifeci Ficino, a physician. There is not much information on his early life and education, however, it is safe to say that he studied Scholastic philosophy and medicine at the University of Florence, and that he was exposed to the burgeoning educational movement of Italian Humanism. Two educators, Comando Comandi and Luca di San Gimignano, taught Ficino “grammatica,” which is basic Latinate education. He clearly received an excellent but traditional education, focused on questions drawn from the realm of scholastic theology. The outlines of Ficino's early career begin to appear a bit more clearly in the 1450s when he supposedly studied Greek and other matters with Francesco da Castiglione, Antonio degli Agli, Lorenzo Pisano, and Niccolò Tignosi. Ficino’s earliest philosophical writings are largely Scholastic in their consideration of metaphysical, logical, and natural philosophical questions. In particular, Thomas Aquinas had a strong influence on significant aspects of his early thought, and this influence is thought to have persisted in his later philosophical writings.

Thought.

Machiavelli believed that the ethical outlooks of both Cicero and Christianity were rigid and unrealistic, and actually cause more harm than they prevent especially in politics. According to Machiavelli a ruler must be flexible about the means he employs if he wants to be effective, just as the virtue of a general on the battlefield is a matter of how well he adapts to ever-changing circumstances. A ruler “cannot conform to all those rules that men who are thought good are expected to respect, for he is often obliged, in order to hold on to power, to break his word, to be uncharitable, inhumane, and irreligious. So he must be mentally prepared to act as circumstances and changes in fortune require. As I have said, he should do what is right if he can; but he must be prepared to do what is wrong if necessary” (“Prince” by Machiavelli). Machiavelli does not simply argue that political expediency requires that ethics be set aside. Rather than being amoral or immoral, as commonly assumed, Machiavelli was an ethical consequentialist, who thought that the end justifies the means. He argued that, in the normally brutal world of real politics, rulers are often forced to choose between two evils, rather than between two goods or between a good and an evil. This is the classic dilemma of political ethics that is often referred to as ‘the problem of dirty hands’, in which politicians are often confronted with situations in which all of the options available to them are morally repugnant. In such tragic circumstances, choosing the lesser evil over the greater evil, however cruel and repugnant in itself, is the ethically right thing to do.

Nicholas is best known for his philosophy, encapsulated in two famous phrases: The “coincidence of opposites,” which means that the many entities and the diversity of the finite world coincide with the oneness of the infinite realm of God; and “of learned ignorance,” which means that the key to experiencing mystic unity with God through intellectual intuition is an awareness that a complete conceptual understanding of God is impossible and can only be acquired in a limited fashion. His thought contains strong elements of mysticism and Platonism within the framework of Christian faith. Following Plato, he has a synthetic philosophy that comprehends and integrates opposing streams of thought. Also, Nicholas never attempts to present a consistent and self-contained system of thought. Instead, he remains open to unlimited elaborations of his seminal ideas of learned ignorance and the coincidence of opposites. Learned ignorance itself is a coincidence of opposites, for it teaches that the more we know our ignorance, the more we attain to true knowledge.

Approach

Machiavelli was in a sense trapped between innovation and tradition, between via antiqua and via moderna, in a way that generated internal conceptual tensions within his thought as a whole and even within individual texts. This historical ambiguity permits scholars to make equally convincing cases for contradictory claims about his fundamental stance without appearing to commit egregious violence to his doctrines. Salient features of the distinctively Machiavellian approach to politics should be credited to an incongruity between historical circumstance and intellectual possibility. What makes Machiavelli a troubling yet stimulating thinker is that, in his attempt to draw different conclusions from the commonplace expectations of his audience, he still incorporated important features of precisely the conventions he was challenging. In spite of his repeated assertion of his own originality, his careful attention to preexisting traditions meant that he was never fully able to escape his intellectual confines.

Nicholas read widely in various languages and was influenced by Plato and Neoplatonic thinkers such as Plotinus and Proclus. Nicholas also drew inspiration from Dionysius and Meister Eckhart. From Anselm he took the notion of God as ultimate Maximum. From Ramon Lull he took the idea that the infinite is the joining of beginning, middle, and end. The fundamental insight that inspires Nicholas’s thought, however, comes not from his wide learning, but from a mystical illumination in 1437 during a journey home from Constantinople. This gift from God, as he describes the vision, provided him with the key that allowed him to talk about the ineffable, and provided a way of viewing opposites as coincident from the point of view of infinity. According to Nicholas, this logic of infinitude unites opposites, transcends comparison, overcomes limits of discursive reasoning, and goes beyond both positive and negative theology. The profound mystical insight at the heart of Cusa’s logic of infinitude is clearly expressed in the following passage:

In God we must not conceive of distinction and indistinction, for example, as two contradictories, but we must conceive of them as antecedently existing in their own most simple beginning, where distinction is not other than indistinction.

Ficino played a major role in the rediscovery of classical learning in the Renaissance by translating a large number of other ancient texts into Latin including the works of Synesius, Psellus, Iamblichus' On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Porphyry and Theon of Smyrna. A guiding principle that runs through Ficino's career: “philosophy” and the “history of philosophy” are closely tied. Another way to put this is that for Ficino, imitative exegesis represented a way to philosophize. Ficino regarded himself as a Platonist, but this did not mean that he was interested in finding Plato's intentions in a historicist manner. Instead, he saw himself as one member of a venerable sequence of interpreters who added to a store of wisdom that God allowed progressively to unfold. Each of these “prisci theologi,” or “ancient theologians,” had his part to play in discovering, documenting, and elaborating the truth contained in the writings of Plato and other ancient sages, a truth to which these sages may not have been fully privy, acting as they were as vessels of divine truth.

--Natalkasmily (talk) 15:47, 3 July 2014 (UTC)Nataliya Smith