Continuity and Change

The separation and distinction from the preceding age, which the philosophers of humanism and of the Renaissance underlined with force—as their program of rebirth demanded—characterized the Middle Ages as an era dark and deprived of philosophy after which a new and luminous period of rejuvenation was beginning, based on a new vision of man and being developed outside Scholasticism. This stress placed on separation, rather than being a real and proper chronological or cultural break between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, was one of the central themes in the historiographic tradition of studies on the Renaissance begun in the 19th c., whose most well-known exponent was Jakob Burkhardt. In the Italian culture of the 20th c., this position has been resumed, updated, and explained by Eugenio Garin. The resumption of the study of medieval philosophy under the aegis of neo-Thomism did not eliminate this bias, but rather increased its ideological importance with respect to contemporary philosophic alternatives. If in fact the ‘Catholic philosophy’ was medieval, then it was inevitably that from the lay point of view the elements of novelty and separation of Renaissance writers would be valorized. Already the study of Ernest Renan on Averroes and Averroism viewed the developments of the Renaissance as the true flourishing of this trend of philosophy. The discovery of ‘rebirths’ in the Middle Ages by scholars such as Charles Homer Haskins, Étienne Gilson, and Marie-Dominique Chenu does not modify the scheme of discontinuity, although it does give a more articulate and complex idea of the Middle Ages, while on the other hand, the idea of Gilson that medieval philosophy is ‘Christian philosophy’ impedes a schematic periodization. Already at the end of the 19th c., however, a specific aspect of late-medieval thought, the philosophy of nature, had grabbed the attention of the epistemologist Pierre Duhem, who, while studying the roots of modern science, had located in the changes of late-medieval Aristotelianism the ‘precursors’ to research that, evolving in the discussions on method in the school of Padova, would eventually see its full expression in Galileo. In this way, Duhem promoted the idea of continuity between medieval and modern science, and on this basis is grounded an important line of research which is followed in the first half of the 20th c. by Annelise Maier and Alistair Crombie. The idea of continuity in the field of science underlies the idea of rational progression, even if sometimes it is slowed down by unfavorable circumstances. The continuism of Duhem has been notably refined and developed also in light of research on medieval logic in the last decades by scholars primarily from the United States (Joseph Murdoch, David Lindberg, and Edith D. Sylla), thereby gaining for medieval natural philosophy a stabile place in the history of science.