Humanism

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592) is one of those rare thinkers whose influence is measured not by the construction of a philosophical system but by the invention of a form. By creating the essay — a word he coined himself, from the French essai, meaning attempt or trial — he inaugurated a way of thinking that refuses any claim to final truth and makes the thinking subject both the object and the instrument of inquiry. His Essais, published between 1580 and 1595, remain among the most widely read texts in Western literature, and their philosophical significance has only grown with time. ...

Erasmus of Rotterdam Born in Rotterdam around 1466, Erasmus (Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam) was the greatest humanist of the Northern Renaissance — the “Prince of the Humanists.” An Augustinian canon and priest, he devoted himself to letters and traveled across Europe, forming a friendship with Thomas More in England. An incomparable scholar of Greek and Latin, he made cultivated language an instrument of reform and of irony. He died in Basel in 1536, having refused both the dogmatism of the old Church and the Protestant rupture. ...

Ludwig Feuerbach German philosopher; dissident disciple of Hegel. His materialist and anthropological critique of religion was the fundamental link between Hegelian idealism and Marx’s historical materialism. He inverted Hegel by dissolving theology into anthropology: the real subject of philosophy is not the Spirit, but sensible man. Feuerbach first studied theology before turning to philosophy and attending Hegel’s lectures in Berlin. He gradually broke with his master: his academic career was blocked by heterodox writings on immortality, and he ended up living apart from the universities, writing from private life. It was in this context that he published his most famous work, devoted to the essence of Christianity, which had an immediate impact on a whole generation of young German intellectuals and made him the central figure of what came to be called Left Hegelianism. The starting point of his thought is a methodical operation he himself describes as an inversion: where idealist speculation makes thought, the Spirit, or God the subject and concrete man the mere predicate, Feuerbach proposes to reverse the roles and recognise in sensible, corporeal, finite man the true subject of which those concepts are projected predicates. ...

Marsilio Ficino Italian philosopher and Catholic priest. Leader of the Platonic Academy of Florence under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici. He translated the entire works of Plato into Latin for the first time, as well as the Corpus Hermeticum and Plotinus. Born in Figline Valdarno, Tuscany, in 1433, Ficino came of age in an environment shaped by the extraordinary cultural patronage of the Medici family. When Cosimo de’ Medici decided to establish a Platonic Academy modeled on antiquity, he entrusted its direction to Ficino and charged him with the monumental task of rendering Plato’s dialogues into Latin — a corpus virtually inaccessible to the medieval West — alongside the Neoplatonic writings of Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus, and the recently rediscovered Corpus Hermeticum. This translation project, carried out between the 1460s and the 1490s, was decisive in reintroducing Platonic philosophy into European intellectual debate after centuries of Aristotelian dominance. ...

Michel de Montaigne Born in 1533 at his family’s château in the Périgord, Michel de Montaigne received a refined humanist education — raised to speak Latin as his first language. He served as a magistrate in the Parlement of Bordeaux, where he formed a profound friendship with Étienne de La Boétie, whose death would mark him forever. Around 1571 he withdrew to the tower of his château, surrounded by books, and there, amid the bloody Wars of Religion, he began to write a work of an entirely new genre: the Essays. He is one of the fathers of modern thought and the inventor of the essay as a literary and philosophical form. ...

Nicholas of Cusa German cardinal; transitional figure between Scholasticism and the Renaissance. Used mathematics as a philosophical analogy (not as a method in the technical sense) to express the relationship between divine infinity and human finitude. Born in Kues (present-day Bernkastel-Kues, Germany) in 1401, Nicholas studied at the school of the Brethren of the Common Life in Deventer and earned a degree in canon law at Padua, where he came into contact with Italian humanism. He was made cardinal in 1448 and bishop of Brixen (Bressanone), playing an active role in the conciliarist controversies that shook the Church in the fifteenth century — first as an advocate of conciliar supremacy over the papacy, a position he later revised in favor of papal primacy. His ecclesiastical and intellectual trajectory reflects the spirit of the age: a mode of thought suspended between medieval tradition and the new horizons opened by the rediscovery of Platonic and Neoplatonic texts. ...

Pico della Mirandola Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Italian prodigy philosopher; knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. Proposed to hold a debate in Rome with 900 theses from all philosophical traditions — Pope Innocent VIII condemned some of them. Died at age 31. Trained at the Platonic Academy of Florence in close dialogue with Marsilio Ficino and within the circle of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Pico represented the apex of Renaissance humanism. In 1486, he composed the 900 Conclusions — theses drawn from sources as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes, Jewish Kabbalah, and the Corpus Hermeticum — with the ambition of demonstrating that philosophical and religious truth was one, accessible through multiple paths. The project was cut short when a papal commission condemned thirteen of the theses as heretical; Pico fled to France and only returned to Italy under the protection of Lorenzo de’ Medici. ...

Thomas More English humanist, jurist, and statesman. Lord Chancellor of Henry VIII; refused to recognize the king as supreme head of the Church and was beheaded. Canonized by the Catholic Church (1935). Author of the concept of utopia. Thomas More was born in London in 1478, the son of a successful lawyer, and received a rigorous classical education — he studied at Oxford and at the Inns of Court, becoming one of the most respected jurists in Tudor England. His friendship with Erasmus, forged in the early sixteenth century, shaped his intellectual orientation: Christian humanism, which held that society could be reformed through moral renewal and the recovery of good letters, without breaking from the Catholic tradition. Against this backdrop, Utopia (1516) is not merely a literary fantasy but a work of rigorous political philosophy that fuses the Platonic dialogue with Lucianic satire to diagnose the ills of contemporary Europe — land enclosure, noble corruption, dynastic warfare, and the brutality of capital punishment for petty crimes. ...