Humanism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Renaissance humanism (often designated simply as humanism) was a European intellectual movement beginning in Florence in the last decades of the 14th century. Initially a humanist was simply a student or teacher of Latin and Latin literature. By the mid-fifteenth century humanism described a curriculum - the studia humanitatis - comprised of grammar, rhetoric, moral philosophy, poetry and history as studied via classical authors. It was only later in the twentieth-century that humanism was interpreted as a new philosophical outlook which encompassed human dignity and potential and the place of mankind in nature, since these were the kinds of themes on which humanists practised their skills. The over-riding goal of humanists, who may be said to have valued the witnesses of reason and the evidence of the senses in reaching the truth over the Christian values of humility, introspection, and passivity, or "meekness" that had dominated European thought in the previous centuries, was to become eloquent in rhetoric. Beauty, a popular topic, was held to represent a deep inner virtue and value, and an essential element in the path towards God. The humanist movement developed from the rediscovery by European scholars of many Latin and Greek texts.
The humanists were in opposition to the philosophers of the day, the "schoolmen", or scholastics, of the Italian universities and later Oxford and Paris, whose methodology was derived from Thomas Aquinas, which revived a classical debate which referred back to Plato and the Platonic dialogues.
