Eckhard Kessler, Ludwig Maximilians Universität

Description
In the history of western philosophy the time from the middle of the 14th to the middle of the 17th century, usually called the Renaissance, is a period of transition, emerging from the „dissolution of the Medieval outlook“ and leading to the foundation of early modern thought and science.
Since it has inherited from the Late Middle Ages a couple of most serious and apparently unresolved problems, the Renaissance developes, inspired by the recently rediscovered Antiquity, various attempts towards a new and reliable understanding of men and the world, and though none of these attempts as such seems to have been successful, taken as a whole they pave the way for the exceptionally efficient paradigm of modern thinking.
The lecture course intents to make familiar with the most representative philosophers and philosophical doctrines of the period and to open an understandig for the reasons, why they came into being, for the role, they assumed in their times, and for the impact, they had on the further course of philosophy.
Starting with a sketch of the precarious situation of Late Medieval philosophy, the lecture course shall be divided into three major parts, each dealing with one of the main philosophical currents of the Renaissance and located chronologically according to the time of its appearence and flowering: the first part shall deal with the humanist movement, especially in Italy between 1350 and 1450, the second part with the neoplatonic movement, especially in Florence in the second part of the 15th century, and the third and final part with the Aristotelian movement, which – though it had continued to dominate philosophy teaching in higher education troughout the 15th century, gained its specific Renaissance character only in the 16th century as a reaction to the innovations of Humanism and Neoplatonism.

General literature
Charles B. Schmitt / Quentin Skinner / Eckhard Kessler (edd.): The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1988
Brian P. Copenhaver / Charles B. Schmitt: Renaissance Philosophy (A History of Western Philosophy: 3) Oxford, Oxford UP, 1992
Paul Oskar Kristeller: Renaissance Thought and its Sources, ed. Michael Mooney, New York, Columbia UP, 1979
Paul Oskar Kristeller: Renaissance Thought I: The Classic, Scholastic and Humanist Strains, New York, Harper and Row, 1961
Paul Oskar Kristeller: Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts, New York, Harper and Row, 1965
Eugenio Garin: Italian Humanism. Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, (transl.: Peter Munz) Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1965 (2New York, Harper and Row, 1966)