TIL Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're

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 Scholars Linton and the LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy. Net. Today's episode, literary criticism, Lorenzo Vala.

As I've observed before, medieval scholastic philosophy and today's analytic philosophy have much in common.

The proliferation of distinctions, the delight in logic and linguistic analysis, the technical

vocabulary that shuts out the uninitiated, And something else, namely the criticisms these features tend to provoke.

Already in the 13th and 14th century, you can find sentiments that are routinely echoed by contemporary observers frustrated by the professional analytic philosophy scene.

All this logic chopping and distinction-mongering is mere obfuscation.

Philosophers should keep it simple and speak in a way that everyone can understand.

Now I'm no fan of needless technicality, but I tend to think that these critics are impatient with scholastic and analytic philosophy because they are indeed impatient.

Any philosophical problem worth thinking about will lead you into complex and difficult territory once you do start to think about it.

Fans of the simple answers often just haven't reflected hard enough about what these answers

might imply and what might be said in favor of rival answers.

We need to decide whether this applies to the Italian humanists.

When they denounced the methods used by the medieval schoolmen and by the scholastic still active in their own day?

Was that a well-informed and philosophically serious rejection?

Or were they the renaissance equivalent of people who haven't studied philosophy going on

social media to complain that professional philosophy is a waste of time.

To answer this question, we can do no better than to turn to the works of Lorenzo Vala.

In addition to being one of the most prolific and brilliant of the Italian humanists,

he was also especially vocal in his disparagement of scholasticism and Aristotelian philosophy more generally.

Above all, he had the intellectual integrity and it must be said, boundless self-confidence necessary

to fight the schoolmen on their own ground, clashing with them on topics like dialectic, the soul, and the metaphysics of free will, alongside

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