HoP 355 - Town and Gown - Italian Universities

History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps

Peter Adamson

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Society & Culture:philosophy

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2020

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The blurry line dividing humanism and scholastic university culture in the Italian Renaissance.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast.
0:17.0	Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the
0:23.4	philosophy department at King Scholars London and the LMU in Munich online at history of
0:28.1	philosophy dot net today's episode town Town and Gown, Italian universities.
0:36.4	You're probably aware that there are university league tables which students can use to compare
0:41.4	the places they might go to study.
0:43.0	Believe it or not, there are also league tables for philosophy,
0:46.8	which list philosophy departments, or at least the ones in the English speaking world,
0:50.8	for overall quality and within a given discipline.
0:54.0	The departments take this very seriously, looking to hire famous names that will bump them up the league table.
1:00.0	It's comparable to the way people talk about summer transfers in soccer or other sports.
1:05.9	Just as that new striker may help Arsenal compete for the title again, that new metaphysician
1:10.5	will help Harvard gain ground on Princeton.
1:13.1	If you find it vaguely unseemly for philosophers to be competing in this fashion,
1:18.7	a sign of modern-day corruption in what should be a disinterested inquiry into truth, then you're at least half wrong.
1:25.2	It may be unseemly, but there's nothing modern about it.
1:28.4	Though they didn't literally have league tables, as far as I know, the scholars at universities in the Italian Renaissance would find the rivalry and competition of today's academia entirely familiar.
1:40.0	A good example would be the contest over the services of Pietro Pompeii, a leading Aristotelian scholar around the turn of the 16th century.
1:48.0	He mostly taught at Padua, with brief stints at Ferrara, but was then enticed to join the University of Bologna in 1511 or 1512.
1:57.0	Bologna worked hard to keep him, pulling political strings in Florence to stop them from bringing bringing Pompe-Anasi to Tuscany.
2:05.1	He also enjoyed a generous salary, and he was not the only one.
2:09.0	The best and the brightest were paid well at the leading Italian universities.
	...

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