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 and Munich online at history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about Nicholas of Kusa with Paul Richard Bloom, who is emeritus professor of philosophy at Loyola University, Maryland, but is speaking to me from Germany, we're both in Germany, so hello professor Bloom.

Yeah, and we don't have any time difference so that makes things easy.

Speaking of time, let's talk a little bit about the period in which Nicholas of Kusa lived, he can be seen as a figure who binds together the northern and southern Renaissance because he studied in Italy, he was even in contact with Byzantium, he traveled to Constantinople, but he was German and most of his life was spent in Germany or in German speaking lands.

And you're someone who's worked on Renaissance topics across Europe, so I thought actually before we start talking about Cousinus, maybe I could ask you to say something about the relationship between philosophy in Italy and philosophy in the rest of Europe in let's say the 15th century when Cousinus was alive.

Yeah, that's an interesting approach because indeed when we speak about Renaissance philosophy, we usually think about Italy and then a little bit more Italy and then gradually we might also extend to other parts of Europe.

That has to do not not not too much with reality, but with the Italian approach to their national philosophy in the 19s and 20th century, we just now overcome.

So we should say that at that time in the 15th century, there was philosophy all over Europe, but it was not organized in terms of nations or languages.

We do this or this kind of things, but it was organized by schools and by communities.

As schools, I mean universities, community communities, I mean Florence is religious audience.

Think of Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, born in Italy, worked in Naples, in Rome, and in Cologne and in Paris, and then back to Rome.

So, and that was because he was going from university to university and he wasn't the minute fire.

And similar things happened also in the Germany and in other parts of Europe.

Think of Germany, the Nicholas of Cousin studied in Heidelberg, because that was the university you would go.

And when he came back from Padua, he went to Cologne, because again, that was the university that was the most one of them, best way now in universities of the time.

And so he got his, he met his friends and his colleagues there, not according to being Germans or being Italians, but according to what they have lost.

In France, we had, before Cousinus, we had John Gason, a theologian with a lot of new innovative approaches to religious and theological and philosophical things.

We, for instance, advocated the rebirth of Dionysus, the area for guide, very important influence on humanism and, when some philosophy in terms of negative theology and critique of human understanding.

We had also in France, the Mondes de Gaulle, as it's called by Montenny, the Mondes de Gaulle, a Catalan who worked in tour.

And he was important because he invented basically the concept of natural theology, that is theology done with philosophical means.

And so, and then let's see, yeah, in England, we had Wichlif and the Wichlifites, which is not just a religious movement, but a movement of critique of traditional approaches to scholarship and also to the Bible, which then influenced the chick intellectuals, the most famous, who was burnt at the state, at the Council of Constance,

in 2015. And of course, we had Byzantium, the flourishing culture, the area in Byzantium.

...