Richard Hooker is often thought of as a scholastic, because of his obvious appreciation for Thomism, Aristotelianism, and late medieval philosophy, and his very orderly and precise argumentation; and scholasticism, of course, as we all know, is antithetical to humanism. Right? Well, no, not really—more recently, scholars have recognized that scholasticism and humanism were not necessarily at all mutually exclusive, and William Bouwsma has described Hooker as every bit as much a humanist as he was a scholastic. These intriguing passages from Susan Schreiner’s book Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era, describing the distinctives of 15th-century humanism, lend considerable weight to Bouwsma’s argument, and suggest much more fruitful work to be done on this connection:
“Like Valla, he [Agricola] was interested in argumentation that persuaded and influenced the hearer, thereby commanding assent. In his challenge to Aristotelian logic, he emphasized the case for “likelihood” or “probability” over certainty. According to Agricola, dialectic was concerned with speaking convincingly (probabiliter), in a way suitable for creating belief in the given situation or context. Thus both Valla and Agricola challenged the supremacy of the syllogistic form of reasoning and its sole claim to validity and certitude. Both men were interested in forms of reasoning or argumentation that convinced or persuaded rather than proved.. . .More so than the Nominalists, the humanists explored the implications of living and belonging to history. They focused on the study and writing of history and the assumptions of living within history. They began to recognize the historicity of truth. In particular, they understood the ramifications of human knowledge as appropriate to the ever-changing historical realm: “The historical aspects of the realization of the mind are never eternally valid, never absolutely “true,” because they always emerge within limited situations bound in space and time; i.e. they are probable and seem to be true [verisimile], probably only within the confines of “here” and “now,” in which the needs and problems that confront human beings are met.”In this worldview, the objects of contemplation were not eternal and unchangeable first principles. Rather, the object of thought was the changing, contextual, and societal world. Throwing human concerns into the realm of the historical had important consequences for the issue of certainty. Downgrading the claim of certitude based on rational syllogistic demonstration and the elevation of the mind through abstraction, humanists developed a significant consciousness of what it meant to live within the partial and incomplete realm of history. Ethical, political, and historical issues became the primary subjects of debate and discussion. . . .By the late Renaissance, the growth of historical knowledge sometimes functioned to accentuate the sense of perspectivism, and “custom” came to be recognized as a dominant force. The study of philology and law also exerted enormous impact on the development of a historicist and relativist consciousness.”
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