Lüh Ghe Lühnt Köh Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at

King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Old News. Introduction to the Italian Renaissance.

If you want to be reborn, the first thing you need to do is die in the first place.

In Latin, Christendom, ancient civilization and culture met their doom around the time the

Western Roman Empire itself passed away at the end of the 5th century AD. This ushered in the so-called

dark ages, initiating a period we still call the Middle Ages,

middle because the medievals had the misfortune to live between the time of the Romans and the time of the Renaissance.

We usually picture it as a sudden falling away from a high

plateau of culture, followed by a trough of about 1,000 years, with a sudden ascent to

previous heights in the 15th and 16th centuries. Ancient culture was

reborn and modernity and the Enlightenment were right around the corner. It's this way of

thinking that leads people to skip over almost half the history of philosophy in their reading and teaching,

vaulting from antiquity straight to the 17th century with perhaps a brief stop at someone like Aquinas in the middle. You've heard me complain about this often enough, about how much gets missed when people ignore medieval philosophy in the Islamic world, Latin Christendom and Byzantium. What I haven't yet pointed out is that this dismissive attitude

towards the Middle Ages itself has a history. It was born at the same time that ancient culture

was supposedly being reborn in the Renaissance. Ancient literature, including philosophy, was rediscovered and re-evaluated. It was out with the crabbed overly technical and reliably barbarous Latin of the schoolmen in with the elegant Latin of Cicero.

Unreadable translations of Aristotle were old news and the very latest thing was something even older

as Greek texts were studied in the original. But was

this really new? There had already been a major recovery of Greek thought during the late

12th and 13th centuries thanks to scholars who got access to the manuscripts of Constantinople.

Way back in the first half of the 12th century, James of Venice traveled there and translated Aristotle into Latin. His example was followed in the 13th century by men like Robert Grositest, who produced a Latin version of Aristotle's ethics and William of Murabeka who strove to produce a complete Latin Aristotle.

In a parallel development, Arabic philosophical works were rendered into Latin too, providing

...