TIL 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 dot net.

Today's episode will be an interview about Renaissance humanism with Jill Kray who is

America's professor of the history of Renaissance philosophy at the Warburg Institute

in London.

Hi Jill.

Hi, Peter. Thanks for coming back on the podcast. Hi, Joe. Hi, Peter.

Thanks for coming back on the podcast.

Good to be back.

We're going to be talking about humanism, which is a term that actually wasn't used in the Renaissance,

even though they did use similar phrases like

Studia humanitatus and so I wanted to ask you what have modern scholars meant

by the word humanism and are there any caveats we should be aware of I mean dangerous

pitfalls in applying this word to the Renaissance?

Thanks. Well it is true that it that it's a modern coinage.

It first appears with the meaning of study of classical antiquity in the early 19th century in Germany,

and then it quite rapidly spreads to

England and other places. Matthew Arnold refers to knowledge of Greek and Roman

Antiquity as humanism.

And there was a very important book by Georg Voix that came out

in the mid-19th century called the revival of classical antiquity

or the first century of humanism, it but that really made that a kind of the formal

term that everybody used.

...