Rhetoric and scholasticism in fifteenth-century Italy

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The present research project purported to look into aspects of the opposition in fifteenth-century Italy between humanism and rhetoric on the one hand and scholasticism and dialectic on the other, for which the head investigator studied the relevant literature housed in the British Library and the Warburg Institute. The objects of research fall into three main groups : 1.Leonardo Bruni's ‘De interpretatione recta' written in relation to his own Latin version of "Ethica Nicomachea". In this treatise on translation, Bruni extolled the humanist method that tried to capture the ‘sententia' (meaning) as against the medieval translation that respected the ‘verbum' (word). The investigator also studied other scholars and translators such as Alfonso de Cartagena, Georgius Trapezuntius, Joachim Perion. 2. The controversy on philosophy and rhetoric between Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Ermolao Barbaro. Pico maintained that scholastic philosophy possessed unique values not fully appreciated by the estheticism of humanist rhetoric, whereas Barbaro objected that rhetoric was superior to philosophy and promoted a humanist Aristotelianism based on the Greek original. 3. Angelo Poliziano's "Lamia", a ‘praelectio' (opening lecture) at the Studio Fiorentino. The oration, which Poliziano delivered before embarking on his course of Aristotle's works on logic, defended the explication of philosophical texts by philologists and humanists. Common to the three objects of research above were the humanists' opposition to scholasticism and dialectic, which still retained influential positions in fifteenth-century Italy, and the rise of a new humanist Aristotelianism that derived from the original Greek text.