Towards a New Logic. A methodological consid-
eration regarding the historiographic approach to a
phenomenon like Italian humanism of the Renaissance
(or any other historical phenomenon) might perhaps
be appropriate here. Some historians emphasize with
good reasons the continuity of humanism with the
Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages; others with
equally good reasons insist on the discontinuity be-
tween the two phenomena, hence on the originality
of humanism itself. The contrast between the two
schools derives principally from the ambiguousness of
the concept of “continuity.” If by continuity is meant
the existence of discoverable relations between the
recurrent these of humanism and those of Christian
medieval philosophy, it is undeniable. But relations are
not only of similarity and identity. They can be of a
different nature.
They can be the result of a greater or lesser impor-
tance attributed to certain conceptions; and of the use
which is made of them and of the polemical ends to
which they are subordinated. The revival of Platonism,
for example, is not the simple repetition of medieval
Platonism; it takes issue with the Aristotelian concep-
tion of the world and tends to disseminate another
conception in which the position of man and his ca-
pacity for planning have a determining part. The har-
mony, in which the humanists believed, between faith
and reason, between the teachings of Christianity and
the results of philosophic research, is another trait
which binds them to the medieval world; but this
harmony served Saint Thomas, for instance, to subor-
dinate reason to faith while it served the humanists
to give reason a new dimension of freedom. The sub-
stantial identity which Pico maintained existed be-
tween different faiths and different philosophies would
have been a heresy in the medieval world; but this
was the interpretation which he gave to the principle
of harmony between reason and faith that had been
predominant in that world.
When one opposes to Renaissance humanism—as,
for instance, Haydn does in the book already
mentioned—a “counter-Renaissance,” in which, in the
polemic against the humanists' enthronement of the
intellect and reason as normative principles in every
sector of life, an almost exclusive value is attributed
to faith, to natural instinct, to “the facts,” to what is
empirically real; and when Machiavelli, Montaigne,
Luther (and in general the whole Protestant Reforma-
tion) are designated as representatives of this counter-
Renaissance, one forgets the manifold relations which
bind these figures and movements to Renaissance
humanism. Machiavelli shared substantially with the
humanists their interest in the world of humanity and
the principle of the “return to origins.” Montaigne like
the humanists turned back to classical wisdom and
obtained from it (and especially from Stoicism and
Skepticism) data for interpreting the human condition.
And the entire Protestant Reformation (the real pre-
cursor of which was the humanist Erasmus) was an
attempt to bring Christianity back to its sources, i.e.,
to reattach it directly to the Bible, setting aside the
ecclesiastical tradition which had constituted the base
of medieval religion. The reevaluation of social life,
of work, of human activity as the only “divine service”
by which the Christian bore witness to his inner faith,
is another humanistic aspect of the work of Luther.
On the other hand, the criticism of the intellect and
of reason which is common to the cohorts of the so-
called Counter-Renaissance is in reality the critique of
the intellect and of reason in the Aristotelian sense of
those terms, that is, of the intellect as the faculty
of apprehending first principles as self-evident, and of
reason as the faculty of deducing or drawing necessary
conclusions by means of the syllogism from those prin-
ciples. But the critique of those faculties thus under-
stood was initiated actually by the humanists. In the
Dialecticae disputationes of Lorenzo Valla, which is
a fundamental text in this respect, logic is conceived
as an art which does not have absolute principles at
its disposal and does not guarantee the truth of its
demonstrations. It is merely an organon, i.e., an instru-
ment to give order and coherence to human language,
to the discourse which men commonly use in their
affairs. Aristotle, according to Valla, had been wrong
in his failure to concern himself with these affairs, and
thus his logic is useless for the purpose of disciplining
communication among men, communication which
deals with objectives such as the administration of
provinces, the leading of armies, the discussion of law-
suits, the practice of medicine, legislation, the writing
of history, or the composition of poems. Superior to
Aristotle have been those who, like Hippocrates and
Euclid, restricted themselves to a single science but
at least elucidated the indubitable principles of that
science. As for the syllogism, Lorenzo Valla compared
it to the art of making bread: the three parts that
compose it, the major premiss (propositio), and the
minor premiss (assumptio) are the water and the flour
from which the baker makes the dough, the conclusion
(conclusio), which is good if its components are good.
Valla's controversy led to this new approach toward
logic, which a century later was to be developed in
the work of Peter Ramus; to the contrast between the
logic of invention, which aimed at disciplining human
discourse and which was directed towards the dis-
covery of new truths, and syllogistic logic, which was
capable only of giving order to truths already known.
It is certainly to the criticism of Lorenzo Valla (or
of his many followers) that Galileo refers when in the
First Day (Prima Giornata) of the Two Main Systems
... (Due massimi sistemi..., 1632) he asserted that
if logic is the instrument with which one philosophizes,
one learns to play the instrument from him who knows
how to play it and not from the instrument maker.
And so demonstration is learned by reading books full
of demonstrations, which are those of mathematicians
and not of logicians.
In conclusion, if Italian Renaissance humanism was
not an explosion of absolute novelty in the history of
ideas (and perhaps no movement in this history is an
explosion of this kind), neither was it merely the con-
tinuation of the ideas that dominated the medieval
world. It was, in the first place, an attempt to regain
possession of the authentic legacy of the classical world
and hence of the techniques suitable to discovering this
legacy. In the second place, it was an effort to rescue
human knowledge from the authority which still
oppressed it and to vindicate its freedom. In the third
place, it was the first attempt to construct a body of
knowledge which met the demands of man's daily life,
private and public, and therefore could serve as an
effective instrument for his plans in the future.
From the distance of centuries, we can recognize
that the attempt made by the humanists to break with
their recent past, and to open to man the possibility
of a different kind of life, was not in vain. This attempt
has not always been maintained along the lines which
they indicated, and even when it has, there have been
deviations and stagnations; but when all is said and
done it is still the direction followed by human knowl-
edge today.
