Between the Middle Ages and the modern period, the fabric of philosophical Latin undergoes a series of crucial transformations induced by historical events as well as intellectual reasons.
To begin with, the translation activity from Greek into Latin carried out by several humanists in Italy and their own reflection on that activity has a profound impact on the practice of philosophical writing, on both the stylistic and the conceptual level.In this context, BRUNI, VALLA, and PICO, to mention only a few, are perfect cases in point.But the debate about the style of philosophical Latin involves quite a number of humanists and schoolmen, continuing long after.By injecting the germs of historicity, cultural relativism, and social constructivism into the body of metaphysical knowledge —a kind of knowledge viewed as stable and self-sufficient —, humanistic reflection helps accelerate the crisis of philosophical Latin in the early modern period.Closely connected to characteristically humanist discontents about the status of scholastic jargon is the renewed eagerness to provide Latin translations from Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew sources.While some of these works were in fact re-translations of previously translated texts, others were original versions of treatises that had never been translated before.The recovery of Platonic and Hermetic sources and Ficino’s influential translations represent some of the most significant instances in this field.One should also add, however, the various editions of Aristotle’s collected works supplied with Averroes's commentaries, which, as was the case with the celebrated editions of the Venetian Giuntine press, come out with new translations and editorial contributions (Schmitt 1984b; Burnett2013).
Among the new translations of Averroes's works, his Destructio destructionum refuting an earlier Destruction of Philosophers by Al-Ghazali) becomes certainly the most significant addition, first commented upon by NIFO in a slightly revised version of the translation by one Calonymos ben Calonymos of Arles, and later published in a new translation by a Neapolitan physician who also called himself Calonymos, entitled Subtilissimus liber Averois qui dicitur Destructio.
Another factor in the transformation of philosophical Latin is the increasingly more frequent appearance of cases of philosophical bilingualism, evident among authors who began to write in both Latin and the vernacular, such as Ficino, Patrizi, Bruno, Bacon, Campanella, Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza.
Such a close proximity of Latin and the vernacular, besides signaling a growing tension between traditional institutional sites of
Latin knowledge such as the university and milieus that were becoming more and more receptive to philosophical discussions in the vernacular (courts in the first place, but also academies, convents, chanceries, and salons), result in particularly creative phenomena of hybridization and cross-pollination between different linguistic currencies.
An important medium that more than any other reflects the early modern evolution of philosophical Latin is the genre of the Latin dictionary of philosophy, which became extremely popular between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, as a by-product of a diffuse interest in lexica, glossaries, and other linguistic tools.
Dictionaries are meant to handle and organize an increasingly unmanageable load of information that pours out throughout Europe, as a result of the combined action of the printing press, geographical discoveries, technological progress, and a singularly vibrant culture of intellectual confrontation and debate.
Among the various attempts to harvest and index philosophi-cal information, the most significant case was Goclenius's Lexicon philosophicum and Lexicon philosophicum Graecum.
But but we should add Micraelius's Lexicon terminorum philosophis usitatorum and Chauvin's Lexicon rationale, sive thesaurus philosophicus.
Bruno compiles his own dictionary of philosophical concepts, Summa terminorum metaphysicorum, probably devised as a teaching tool while he was lecturing in some German universities (Canone 1988; Bruno
1989).
This tradition culminates with Bayles vernacular Dictionnaire historique et cri-tique and had its witty coda with Voltaires Dictionnaire philosophique.
Major linguistic turns periodically affect the course of philosophical inquiries in Europe.
In ancient Greece, the fifth-century sophists are able to question the idea of an original correspondence between reason and reality by emphasizing the inherently conventional and contractual nature of language.
While doing so, they act as powerful catalysts for both Plato's and Aristotle’s responses in the domain of metaphysics.
Likewise, the effort to test the boundaries that separate reality from its linguistic descriptions became a recurrent leitmotif in philosophy, in both the Continental (Heidegger) and the analytical traditions (Wittgenstein).
The Renaissance represents another of these decisive linguistic turns.
The debate concerning the relationship between reason and language takes place on two different levels: one of a technical character (the nature of scholastic Latin), the other of a broader cultural significance (the issue of multilingualism).
With respect to the first level, it should be pointed out that a large part of the philosophical output is written in Latin.
Starting with BOEZIO, a momentous effort in translation and exegesis, marked by a sophisticated level of analytical precision and linguistic creativity, results in a formidable corpus of knowledge.
Its Latin is one of the principal reasons for its long-lasting success (Gregory 2006, 3; Dionisotti 1997).
Precisely because of its aspects of raw artificiality, free from the strictures of idiomatic decorum, Latins turns out to be a most flexible tool for the exercise of thinking, open to all sorts of experiments with respect to both language and logic.
Here I am deliberately using the oxymoronic label "raw artificiality."
Latin is largely an artificial creation produced in the great translation laboratories of medieval Europe (Sicily) and remains characterized by a distinctive quality of unpolished immediacy that suits very well the task of thinking, and thinking outside the historical box.
Due to particular circumstances, this encounter of Latin and philosophy is quite a unique episode in the history of Western culture, more so than in the fields of law and medicine, where the question of the relationship between verbal and nonverbal knowledge never manages to rise to the status of foundational issue, as happens in metaphysics.
A number of philosophical innovators charge Latin with being a parasitical construction in relation to the free exercise of thought.
In fact, that kind of Latin has long been an uncanny symbiosis of mind and word.
As far as the second level is concerned —that is to say, the emergence of national vernaculars as legitimate media for literary pursuits of all kinds and orders—a generalized state of multilingualism creates the ideal conditions for the rise of original considerations on the nature of language.
The humanist revolt against the use of Latin is fueled by discussions about the nature of translation.
In De interpretatione recta, designed as a manifesto stating the requisites for a good translation, Bruni prefers to dwell on the technical aspects of the question rather than explore the speculative implications underlying the activity of thinking.
Criticizing the medieval translator of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, whom we know to be Grosseteste, Bruni points out the "(imperitia litterarum) of the latter-that is, both the naiveté with which he had undertaken a task well beyond his capabilities, and his obvious lack of literary taste, which had prevented him from reproducing the original flair of Aristotle'stext (Bruni 1996, 152 and 160).
In Bruni's opinion, the "efficacy" and "rationale" (vis and ratio) of a good translation lie in transferring the written form of a particular language into the form of another language.
In order to do so, a translator needs to have a vast and confident knowledge of both languages, acquired through long and careful readings of different kinds of writing (multiplex et varia ac accurata lectio omnis generis scriptorum;
Bruni 1996, 158).
Being a transfer of forms more than an exercise in thinking, translation was first and foremost a reenactment of the original experience of literary enchantment and largely an aesthetic experience.
This also applied to the field of philosophy, for, Bruni pointed out, Plato's and Aristotle's essays were "replete with (exornationes) and venustates)" (Bruni 1996, 160 and 176).
The best translator was therefore that artisan of the written word who was capable of transforming himself entirely-with both his mind and will-into the author he was translating (sese in primum scribendi auctorem tota mente et animo et voluntate convertet).
Bruni argued that if a translator is not capable of recovering the spirit of the original, he cannot aspire to preserve its meaning (sensus).
The skill lies in keeping the stylistic template of the original (figura primae orationis) and the verbal coloring (verborum colores). The model is therefore painting, not philosophy.
More specifically, with respect to philosophical translation, the translator is supposed to combine knowledge of reality (doctrina rerum) with style (scribendi ornatus), for the ultimate aim behind all his efforts is to recover the life of the author's thoughts, their vividness (splendor sententiarum) and the naturally harmonic flow of the original (tota ad numerum facta oratio; Bruni 1996, 158 and 166).
A militant anti-philosophical attitude lingers in Valla's Dialecticae disputationes composed in three different redactions, in 1439, 1448, and
1452).
As in Bruni's De interpretatione recta, Vallas arguments were grammatical and aesthetic rather than philosophical (Valla 2012, 1:54-56; Dionisotti 1997).
In focusing on the aspects of aesthetic and grammatical awkwardness among scholastic philosophers, Lorenzo Valla was close to Bruni's position.
Like Bruni, he dismissed the scholastic tendency to reify adjectives and pronouns (sometimes even adverbs) into philosophical objects as an illegitimate and pointless practice, for they were abusing, as it were, the natural-grammatically correct-process of deriving abstract nouns from adjectives, such as sanitas ("health") from sanus ("healthy").
Contrary to the logic of historical lan-guages, philosophers made instead quiditas ("whatness") out of quid ("what"), perseitas ("per se-ness") out of per se and haecceitas ("thisness") out of haecce ("this"), and this was all the more irritating because creations of this kind could not even be found in Aristotle's own works (haec ab Aristotele non traduntur)
. Most of all, Valla condemned the artificial decision of giving a name to the very essence of being, entitas (literally
"being-ness," later entering standard English usage as "entity"), out of ens, which was a fictional present participle of the verb esse ("to be"), never used by Latin writers.
Pico tackled the question of Latinate forms of philosophical expression by appealing to the ancient trope of contrasting nature with convention.
In Pico's opinion, the effort to understand reality was always more pressing than finding the correct linguistic expression. Reworking in an original way the classical argument used to defend the power of language over freedom of thinking, he assigned a priority to philosophyover Latinity based on both nature and conventions. Addressing the Venetian scholar Barbaro (1454-1493; Garin 1952, 804-23), he claimed that he was even ready to embrace the argument based on convention, which had always been the traditional prerogative of rhetoricians and sophists.
If the foundations of any language were deemed to be conventional, Pico went on, then every linguistic community on earth was entitled to have its own laws (normae dicendi) and to philosophize in accordance with those laws.
Indeed, it was precisely the thesis of the conventional, historical, and social origins of language, so often championed by the humanists, which, in Pico's opinion, made their charges of barbarism leveled at scholastic Latin irrelevant.
However, he believed that anxieties about linguistic barbarism were even more out of place if the discussion pertained to the natural origin of meanings and words.
If terminological correctness (rectitudo nominum) depended on nature, Pico went on, why should one turn to the rhetoricians to know more about the nature of this rectitudo, and not to the philosophers, "who alone have examined and clarified the nature of all things?"
Formulated with a precise anti-rhetorical aim in mind, the tone of Picos question was clearly rhetorical, for we know where Pico's allegiances lay (namely, for the philosophers and against the rheto-ricians): "that which the ears reject as being too harsh, reason accepts as more in tune with reality (utpote rebus cognatiora)" (Garin 1952, 818-20). He was convinced that, by revealing the unsettling domain of things that could not be verbally articulated, the limits of language exposed reality in its more perplexing aspects.
The need for philosophers to stretch the boundaries of the common use of words came, therefore, directly from a perceived rift between what could and what could not be said. "Why did the philosophers need to introduce innovations into the language and not to speak in Latin," Pico asked,
"if they were born among Latins?"
This time, the question was not rhetorical, and indeed was the most crucial question of all; for Pico, like Plato, was convinced that, ontologically speaking, there was an original surplus of meaning that no historic language could ever encompass (Garin 1952, 820), and even a language as nuanced as Latin was not equal to putting into words the full range of human ideas and experience.
Not only was reality ontologically richer than any description language could provide; it also evolved faster than historic languages.
At a time when an overflow of new information demanded new words and new linguistic solutions, philosophers-whether metaphysicians, logicians, or natural and moral thinkers-did not have time to check their Latin grammars and repertoires of verbal elegantiae.
In his Dialogo delle lingue Speroni (1500-1588), one of the most illustrious members of the Paduan Academia degli Infiammati, represented the contrast of convention (arbitrio) and nature (natura) by imagining a duel between the philologist Giano Lascaris (1445-1534) and the philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525).
In this case, a curious reversal of roles occurred between nature and convention: Lascaris, who in the dialogue defended the need to be proficient in Greek and Latin in order to be able to practice philosophy, appealed to nature as a norm that could not be changed by social and cultural interventions;
Pomponazzi, by contrast, resumed the well-rehearsed humanist argument about the conventional origin of languages in order to vindicate the right for every nation to philosophize in the vernacular (Speroni 1740, 193).
Stimulated by the broad linguistic turn that took place during the Renaissance and by individual contributions of humanist scholars (Schmitt 1984), a good number of phi-losophers, including the most stylistically and linguistically alert, reached the conclusion that thinking required a deeper investment than simply relying on grammatical and rhetorical proficiency.
The reason was that reality itself was "barbaric," alien, richer, and evolving more quickly than words. Thinking was also a more integral and wholesome experience than the one provided by correct descriptions of things, both grammatically and stylistically. Any verbal account of reality was inherently partial and effete compared to the freedom and poignancy of inner meditation. As Pico had pointed out to Barbaro, philosophers had always been in search of a language that could be close to reality as a whole, including the reality of the soul. In this sense, reasons of intellectual honesty made inward experience more valuable than linguistic proficiency:
“Those who create a disagreement between the heart and the tongue are mistaken. However, aren't those who are all tongue (toti sunt lingua), precisely because they have no heart (excordes), simply dead dictionaries, as Cato says?" (Garin 1952, 820; Kraye 2007).
Starting with Dante's Convivio in Italy, French translations of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics in the fourteenth century, and a teeming output of mystical treatises in German (Meister Eckhart, active between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, being the most representative case), the use of the vernacular as a philosophical language was prompted by rhetorical, political, and religious motives, such as the need to extend the range of one author's readership, the will to reach social classes not directly involved in courtly or intellectual life, the urge to give immediate expression to lofty theological speculations, and a dearth of administrative and diplomatic personnel trained in the art of argumentation.
And yet, in all these cases, there was still a link that connected the vernacular to the template of scholastic Latin.
Even the rising of a philosophical discourse in German with strong mystical overtones emerged out of scholastic Latin (De Libera 1995).
When Segni (1505-1558), to give another example, translated and commented the Nicomachean Ethics into Tuscan (Segni 1550), the technical language remained highly Latinate and scholastic in origin.
Bruno, to mention someone who was as linguistically creative in the vernacular as he loathed both scholastic obscurity and grammatical pedantry, fully recognized the speculative value of the scholastic tradition. Averroes, he famously retorted, knew his Aristotle better than any of his Greek readers (Bruno 1958, 306).
The relationship between Latin and the vernaculars in the domain of philosophical writing became increasingly more sophisticated during the early modern period.
The practice of translating from Latin into the vernacular and the complementary trend to turn vernacular texts into Latin responded to different but parallel communicative strat-egies. While the move from Latin into the vernacular was largely aimed at expandingthe social spectrum of the philosophical audience, the tendency to transpose vernacular texts into Latin made the most recent and innovative results in the field accessible to an international readership. To these general lines of exchange one should add individual cases of self-translation, in which authors, depending on their specific needs and rhetorical preferences, could switch from one medium to another and experiment with different linguistic resources.
To mention a few examples of self-translation, Ficino turned his Latin De amore and De Christiana religione into Tuscan; Campanella translated his Città del sole (City of the Sun, 1602), II senso delle cose (The Sense of Things, 1604), and Ateismo trionfato (Atheism Conquered,
1606-1607) into Latin; while Hobbes provided a Latin version of the Leviathan (1651), with significant changes and additions to the English original (N. Malcolm in Hobbes 2012, 1:146-95).
Translations into vernacular and Latin as well as self-translations were all ways of testing (and sometimes breaking) the limits of linguistic rectitudo and of demonstrating that the boundaries of reason in different contexts (between different languages, nations, and classes) were in fact porous.
Leibniz advocated the need to start (Germanice philosophari) and rejected a distorted use of Latin as a way of narrowing the social compass of philosophy by excluding laymen (plebs) and women (feminae) from its exercise (Leibniz 1875-1890, 4:144).
It should also be noted that often the use of the vernacular ensured greater freedom of expression and a certain level of stylistic playfulness, which in particular situations could turn out to be refreshing and inspiring (Dionisotti (1960] 2004 13-14). Significantly, by the time Montaigne had written his Essais, "a type of philosophy had been created which was both colloquial and militant" (Zambelli [1994] 2012, 382).
Within the general debate about the philosophical potential of Latin in its relationship to both contemporary vernaculars and ancient languages (first and foremost Greek, but also Hebrew and Arabic), some technical points betrayed specific assumptions of a more theoretical order.
A writer like Bruni, who believed that all languages could be translated into each other without losing any of the original meaning and style, was not interested in defending the special status of any particular historical language as better suited to the exercise of philosophical inquiry.
His position differed from the one championed by such philhellenes as those depicted by Speroni in his dialogue (Giano Lascaris and Lazzaro Buonamici), who had no qualms about advocating the philosophical primacy of Greek, claiming that it had been no accident that philosophy had originally been written in Greek and that Greek should continue to be the model (philhellenism by the way, is a recurrent vogue in the history of Western philosophy, from Nicholas of Cusa to Heidegger).
By contrast, even an admirer of the expressive potential of Latin and a firm believer in the superiority of both history and poetry over philosophy like Valla remained convinced that a number of philosophical concepts that had been originally elaborated in Greek could not find adequate expression in Latin and should not be translated at all costs: multa belle dicuntur Graece quae non belle dicuntur Latine ("many things can be said beautifully in Greek, but not in Latin"; Valla 2012, 1:6).
Finally, a philosopher trained in the subtleties of scholasticism like Pomponazzi considered the question about what language was most suitable for writing philosophy as irrelevantand looked at philosophical discussions about the greater or smaller veridical import of historical languages as, ultimately, a waste of time (Paccagnella 2010).
In addition, the thesis that one was allowed to philosophize in one of the available idioms represented a further argument against the dogmatic belief that there could only be one true description of the world. Speroni's recommendations "to philosophize in the vernacular (filoso-far volgarmente), without knowing Greek and Latin" (Speroni 1740, 193) were a sign that the time had finally come when people could write about philosophy in Italian, Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and German.
The philosophical potential of the vernaculars, being a question that was closely intertwined with issues of readership and communication, also bore on the problem of distinguishing between what was safe and not safe to say. Resuming a characteristically Platonic posture, Giovanni Pico did not miss the opportunity to describe the relationship between language and philosophy in terms of esoteric and exoteric communica-tion. Philosophers, he argued in De ente et uno (On Being and the One, 1491), should
"think as the few and speak as the many" (sentire quidem ut pauci, loqui autem ut plures), for people speak to be understood (loquimur ut intelligamur; Pico 1942, 1:396).
This was another situation that required philosophers to strike the right balance between intellectual novelty and linguistic tradition. Since language represented the vehicle of conventional wisdom, thinkers were supposed to accept the rules of the linguistic game (with its attached social conventions) while skillfully circumventing the traps of linguistic pressure.
Between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the European Latin lexicon became enriched by new terms as a result of successive waves of Latin translations from Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew, from Boethius in the sixth century to Christian Wolff's Latinization of Leibniz's metaphysics in the eighteenth century. It would go well beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a complete record of even the most significant changes that affected the Latin philosophical vocabulary during the same period.
Here I will confine myself to some representative specimens.
It should be noted, first of all, that some Latin keywords more than others marked the evolution of the early modern philosophical lexicon, such as res ("thing"), subiectum ("subject"), obiectum ("object"), conceptus ("concept"), intentio ("intention"), and inten-tionalitas ("intentionality"). Transliterations and calques from other languages, such as the Greek entelechia ("actualization") or the Arabic colchodea (the intellect as "giver of forms"), had already enjoyed a remarkable fate in scholastic Latin and continued to be the subject of heated debate among philosophers and humanists. Angelo Poliziano
(1454-1494) devoted one of his essays in Miscellaneorum centuria prima (First Hundred Miscellanea, 1489) to clarify the many philological and philosophical issues involved in the discussion about the difference between entelechia (activity as fulfillment of apotentiality) and endelechia (activity as perpetual movement; Poliziano 1553, 1:224-28).
If it is true that not as many transliterations from the Arabic became part of the technical lexicon of philosophical Latin as for mathematics, astrology, and alchemy (Burnett 2010, 41-42 and 44), the impact of the translations from Arabic during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance resulted in significant additions to the specific vocabulary of the internal senses ([virtus) aestimativa, i.e., animal instinct, and cogitativa, i.e., human rea-son, for instance). Some illustrious Greek transliterations also enjoyed a new life in the early modern period.
This is the case, for example, of energeia ("energy") and energeticus ("energetic", which, especially during the seventeenth century, began to be used with increasing frequency to denote the life and energy of matter and material beings. The English medical writer Francis Glisson is probably the most interesting case, with his De natura substantiae energetica (The Active Nature of Substance, 1672), a foundational work for modern physiology. New words were created by philosophers who felt the need to hone their expressive tools and expand the range of the available vocabulary. As an example, one may think of Campanellas primalitas (the primal attributes of being), essentiatio (the process of self-definition within being), specificatio (the process through which being divides itself into kinds), corporatio (the formation of bodies from the most abstract categories of being), and toticipatio (participation in the primal attributes of being; Giglioni 2006-2010).
In a discipline like philosophy, where words (verba) find themselves in a relationship of uneasiness with things (res) from the very beginning, it is precisely the use of barbarisms-in the technical sense of linguistic expressions contravening standards of good use and purity-that often facilitated the task of finding words for particularly vexing notions. Leonardo Bruni had recommended that translators avoid neologisms and new ways of expressing old things (et verborum et orationis novitas). Above all, a translator was supposed to shun nonsensical and outlandish terms (inepta et barbara).
From a philosophical point of view, Bruni's strongest contribution was his idea that any language could be turned into any other, and that therefore Latin, too, had all the resources to say everything that had already been said in Greek (nihil Graece dictum est quod Latine dici non possit; Bruni 1996, 190). While concerned with the use of barbarisms in philosophy, others like the German metaphysician Goclenius (Rudolph Gockel, 1547-1628) displayed a more tolerant attitude. For instance, he described the use of the verb vigorari ("gain strength") in Zabarella's commentary on Aristotle's De anima (published posthumously in 1605) as a form of barbarism, which was nevertheless necessary to explain the heightened condition undergone by the intellect when
"invigorated" by the power of a forceful intelligible (i.e., object of understanding; vehe-mens ac excellens intelligibile; Goclenius 1613, 329).
It is significant to note that by 1613, Goclenius, a scholastic philosopher by training and profession, had allowed certain latitude in the use of philosophical barbarisms. Among the "barbarians" Duns Scotus
(1265-1308) had probably been one of the most creative, and Goclenius carefully surveyed his influence over the early modern lexicon of philosophical Latin.
He noted that even Scaliger's most refined Latin (lautissima lingua) entertained a conceptual closeness with Scotist ideas (Goclenius 1613, 19). Goclenius was so concernedwith the influence that Latin barbarisms had exercised on the philosophical tradition that he added to his Greek dictionary of 1615 an appendix to the earlier Latin dictionary, entirely devoted to a meticulous analysis of all sorts of inappropriate ways of expressing philosophical notions in Latin, a Sylloge vocum et phrasium quarumdam obsoletarum, minus usu receptarum, nuper natarum, ineptarum, lutulentarum, subrusticarum, barmi-barbararum, soloecismorum et hyposoloikön (Collection of Some Words and Phrases That Are Obsolete, Less Ordinary, Recently Born, Improper, Impure, Uncouth, Including Barbarisms, Solecisms and Slight Solecisms; Goclenius 1615, 282).
With respect to specific technical terms in philosophy, res can be considered one of the most important words in the lexicon of early modern philosophy. In his Lexicon philosophicum, Goclenius defined res as anything that can be conceived by our mind (quodlibet conceptibile) without involving a contradiction (non includens contradic-tionem), in the domain of both imagination (ens rationis) and reality (ens reale). He explained that in philosophy the word res could be taken in a "very general" sense (com-munissime), in a "general" one (communiter), and in the strictest one (strictissime seu appropriate). Combining Aristotle with Quintilian, and perhaps aware of Vallas sophisticated treatment of the matter in his Dialecticae disputationes, Goclenius identified res in the strictest sense with "substance" (substantia; Goclenius 1613, 983-84). Here it is crucial to point out that, while Goclenius reconfirmed the primacy of substance as the ontological marker of reality (and in this sense, res were substantiae), Valla had followed the opposite route and had brought substantia back to res, understood, in line with the rhetorical tradition, as that which can be said of a particular reality.
By thus resolving
"substance" into "thing," Valla, like other humanists at the time, had in fact deflated the ontological content of res by transforming it into any subject that could be conceptual-ized through words.
Among the most illustrious Latin words that entered a phase of remarkable decline during the early modern period, actualitas can be taken as a vivid example of a term with a glorious past in the sphere of philosophical learning, which, beginning in the fifteenth century, found itself heading towards extinction. Between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, any professional philosopher trained in one of the many European universities would have called reality actualitas. As recorded by Goclenius in his diction-ary, actualitas prima, the "first reality," was seen as the principal ontological requirement behind the existence of anything. In the twentieth century, the alleged process of reifi-cation (actualitas) through which the notion of being as activity (energeia in Aristotle) mutated into that of being as static presence (be that presence subiectum or res) was interpreted as the dominant event in the history of metaphysics. In an attempt to come to terms with the powerful consequences of René Descartes's philosophy and the way he polarized reality between the extremes of the "thinking thing" (res cogitans) and the"extended thing" (res extensa), the French neo-Thomist Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) dissected with painstaking precision the many layers accrued over the centuries by the principal categories of Western Latin ontology (esse, ens, entitas, and essentia), making a powerful case for the vitality and creativity of scholastic philosophy well into the seventeenth century. After all, Descartes's great accomplishment, in Gilson's opinion, lay in the way in which the French philosopher had taken advantage-both speculatively and linguistically - of scholastic lore, still fertile and productive at the time (Gilson 1912;
Gilson 1952). The evolution of scholastic Latin in philosophy was also a source of speculative inspiration for Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who secured his philosophical credentials by detecting in the process through which energeia became Latinized into actualitas the symptom of a lingering metaphysical malaise; that is, the gradual obfuscation of the true meaning of being (Seinsvergessenheit, the "oblivion of being").
Here it may be useful to point out that behind Heidegger's effort to reawaken our awareness of the energeia of being, there was no humanistic intent (as he clearly intimated in his Brief über den Humanismus, published in 1946). Indeed, the opposite was true for him. The legacy of scholastic philosophical Latin (and significantly Heidegger's first foray into the domains of philosophy had been a dissertation in 1916 on Duns Scotus's ontology) was clear and strong in his mind. Or perhaps, we might say that a peculiarly humanist urge underlay Heidegger's warnings about the "presentification" of being (Gegenwärtigung), in the sense that, like Lascaris and Buonamici, he thought that Greek was more suitable to metaphysical inquiries than Latin, for the ominous Seinsvergessenheit had already happened in the philosophical Greek of the pre-Socratics and therefore the truth had begun to hide itself (Verborgenheit) quite early on. In the specific domain of thinking, Greek was inherently philosophical and Latin was not, for Latin had helped disseminate the Gegenwärtigung of being. It was precisely by referring to Heidegger that in the 1990s Alain de Libera asked the crucial question: was Latin in fact a language suitable for philosophy? His answer to this question was unambiguously positive. He characterized the "multilingual translatio ["transfer"] of philosophy" (in particular its Latin transfer) during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as a "linguistic event" that affected the development of modern thinking in a significant way (De Libera 1997, 8 and 21).
De Libera draws our attention to a moment in history "when Latin stops being a language of philosophy to become the language of philosophical taxonomy (not to say, taxidermy); in other words, a moment in which Latin moves from the status of a language that is philosophically alive to that of a language that is philosophically dead" (De Libera 1997, 1). That was not the case during the Middle Ages and the early modern period, which in fact were key periods in the transfer of learning prompted by translations (translatio studiorum), when Latin played a fundamental role in the "philosophi-cal acculturation of Europe" (De Libera 1997, 3). And yet, from its very beginnings in Greece, Western philosophy has always had an extremely uncomfortable relationship with language. The act of thinking cannot help stumbling over words, especially written words. According to de Libera, the most fascinating aspect of scholastic Latin in the Middle Ages was the far-reaching linguistic experiment—an extremely successfulone, it must be said-through which, in the translation and exegetical laboratories of European studia and universities, masters of arts and theologians forged a language suitable for philosophy, a privileged medium that allowed a trans-national, trans-linguistic, and trans-cultural discussion and transmission of ideas. So it happens that precisely the artificiality condemned by the humanists can today be seen as the major innovation and resource introduced by the philosophical Latin of the schools, for that raw and unreal Latin expanded the scope of the thinking exercise. In a way, Petrarch and Bruni failed to understand precisely this point.
Addressing Grosseteste, Bruni proudly declared himself to be part of a community of Latin writers and asserted his inability to make sense of Grosseteste's operation: ego Latinus istam barbariem tuam non intelligo ("as a Latin speaker I do not understand your barbarism"; Bruni 1996, 180). However, from a genuinely philosophical point of view, what Bruni did not understand was that the "barbarism" of not mastering a foreign language, with all its idioms and elegancies (which, in the final analysis, we should admit is a rather harmless form of barbarism) betrayed the scholastic philosopher's effort to come to terms with a much deeper kind of "barbarism"; that is, the remorselessly foreign and alienating experience of thinking of the other qua other. Giordano Bruno opposed the pseudo-philosophical obsession with linguistic decorum (an obsession that was for him the defining feature of "grammarians" and "pedants") to the genuinely philosophical sense of disorientation that derives from delving into the depths of the thinking process (profondano ne' sentimenti, Bruno 1955, 90; Bruno 1958, 1:258; Ciliberto 1979, xviii).
Perhaps, the most significant point we can make out of this whole discussion is that, more than in any other discipline, novitas ("novelty, the perplexing nature of what is unfamiliar) represents the very hallmark of philosophy. Reality is inherently "barbaric" because it is every time foreign and new to the human mind, and it challenges the mind's attempts to represent it. This sense of ontological "novelty" was clear to Giovanni Pico, who as a philosopher was equally open to reasons of linguistic perspicuity and philosophical inquiry. His was a subtle mediation between language (tradition) and thought (novelty). In De ente et uno, he praised Poliziano, "vindicator of a more elegant lan-guage," for allowing the use of "a few terms that were not entirely Latin, but necessary in any case because of the very newness of things (ipsa rerum novitas]" (Pico [1942] 2004, 1:389). The fact is that reality is for the most part brutally opaque, while language is often employed to confirm and reassert its opacity (through the use of rhetorical and literary devices, for instance), more than to shed light on it. The exercise of thinking, as an attempt to dissolve this resistance to interpretation, finds itself uneasily squeezed between a reality that is perceived as already given and the expressive resources made available by individual linguistic communities. The Latin of scholastic philosophy, precisely because of its artificiality and ugliness, was well equipped to cope with bouts of ugly reality, and it continued to do so well after the thirteenth century. To de Libera we should therefore add here Charles B. Schmitt: scholastic Latin was in good health during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, not just during the Middle Ages (Schmitt 1983, 64-88). Indeed, the taxonomical and taxidermic use of Latin, so much feared by de Libera, perhaps did not take place even in the eighteenth century, if we bear in mind thatthe imposing system of Leibnizian scholasticism Latinized by Wolff became the breeding ground for Immanuel Kant's so-called pre-critical production.
SUGGESTED READING
On the development of philosophical ideas in Latinate contexts from the later Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, see the section "Latin and philosophy" in ENLW
1:587-663 (essays by Garrod, Rees, Kraye, De Bom, and van Bunge). The close link between philology and philosophy in the Renaissance is examined by Kraye (1996).
Finally, the Italian research institute Lessico Intellettuale Europe has been publishing regular contributions to the study of philosophical Latin keywords in their developments from antiquity to the eighteenth century. Eleven volumes have been published so far (Florence: Olschki): Ordo (1979), Res (1982), Spiritus (1984), Phantasia/Imaginatio
(1988), Idea (1990), Ratio (1994) Sensus/Sensatio (1996), Signum (1998), Experientia
(2001), Machina (2005), and Materia (2011).
REFERENCES
Bruni, Leonardo. 1996. Opere letterarie e politiche. Edited by Paolo Viti. Turin: Utet.
Bruno, Giordano. 1955. La cena de le ceneri. Edited by Giovanni Aquilecchia. Turin: Einaudi.
- 1958. "De la causa principio e uno." In Dialoghi Italiani, edited by Giovanni Gentile and Giovanni Aquilecchia, vol. 1, 173-342. Florence: Sansoni.
- 1989. Summa terminorum metaphysicorum. Edited by Tullio Gregory and Eugenio Canone. Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo.
Burnett, Charles. 2010. "The Enrichment of Latin Philosophical Vocabulary through Translations from Arabic: The Problem of Transliterations." In Les innovations du vocabu-laire latin à la fin du moyen âge: Autour du Glossaire du Latin philosophique, edited by Olga Weijers, lacopo Costa, and Adriano Oliva, 37-44. Turnhout: Brepols.
-. 2013. "Revisiting the 1552-1550 and 1562 Aristotle-Averroes Edition." In Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, edited by Anna Akasoy and Guido Giglioni, 55-64. Dordrecht: Springer.
Canone, Eugenio. 1988. "Phantasia/Imaginatio come problema terminologico nella lessico-grafia filosofica tra Sei-Settecento." In Phantasia-Imaginatio, edited by Marta Fattori and Massimo Bianchi, 221-57. Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo.
Ciliberto, Michele. 1979. Lessico di Giordano Bruno. 2 vols. Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo & Bizzarri.
De Libera, Alain. 1995. "Sermo mysticus: La transposition du vocabulaire scolastique dans la mystique allemande du XIV° siècle." Rue Descartes 14:41-73.
-. 1997. "Le latin, véritable langue de la philosophie." In Hamesse 1997, 1-22.
Dionisotti, Anna C. 1997. "Philosophie grecque et tradition latine." In Hamesse 1997, 41-57.
Dionisotti, Carlo. (1960) 2004. Introduction to Prose e rime, by Pietro Bembo, 7-54. Turn: Utet.
Garin, Eugenio. 1952. Prosatori latini del Quattrocento. Milan: Ricciardi.
Giglioni, Guido. 2006-2010. "Primalità (primalitas)." In Enciclopedia bruniana et campanel-liana, edited by Eugenio Canone and Germana Ernst, vol. 1, 332-49. Pisa: Serra.Gilson, Étienne. 1912. Index scolastico-cartésien. Paris: Alcan.
- 1952. Being and Some Philosophers. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
Goclenius, Rudolf. 1613. Lexicon philosophicum quo tanquam clave philosophiae fores aperiun-tur. Frankfurt: Becker.
-. 1615. Lexicon philosophicum Graecum ... accessit adiicienda Latino lexico sylloge vocum et phrasium. Marburg: Hutwelcker.
Gregory, Tullio. 2006. Origini della terminologia filosofica moderna: Linee di ricerca.
Florence: Olschki.
Hamesse, Jacqueline, ed. 1997. Aux origines du lexique philosophique européen: L'influence de la
Latinitas. Louvain-La-Neuve: Collège Cardinal Mercier.
Hobbes, Thomas. 2012. Leviathan, edited by Noel Malcolm, 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kraye, Till. 1996. "Philologists and Philosophers." In The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, edited by Jill Kraye, 142-60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-. 2007. "Pico on the Relationship of Rhetoric and Philosophy." In Pico della
Mirandola: New Essays, edited by Michael V. Dougherty, 13-36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leibniz, Gottfried W. 1875-1890. Die philosophischen Schriften, 7 vols., edited by Carl I.
Gerhardt. Berlin: Weidmann.
Paccagnella, Ivano. 2010. "La lingua del Peretto" In Pietro Pomponazzi: Tradizione e dissenso, edited by Marco Sgarbi. 285-314. Florence: Olschki.
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. 1942. "De ente et uno." In De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno, e scritti vari, edited by Eugenio Garin, 101-65. 2 vols. Florence: Vallecchi.
Poliziano, Angelo. 1553. "Miscellaneorum centuria prima." In Opera omnia, 213-311.
Basel: Nicholas Episcopius.
Schmitt, Charles B. 1983. Aristotle and the Renaissance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- (1984a). The Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance Universities. London: Variorum.
- . (1979) 1984b. "Renaissance Averroism Studied through the Venetian Editions of
- Aristotle-Averroes (with Particular Reference to the Giunta Edition of 1550-2)." In Schmitt
1984a, chapter VIII [original pagination 121-42].
-. (1983) 1984c. "Aristotelian Textual Studies at Padua: The Case of Francesco Cavalli. In Schmitt 1984a, chapter XIII [original pagination 287-314).
Segni, Bernardo. 1550. L'Ethica tradotta in lingua volgare fiorentina et comentata.
Florence: Torrentino.
Speroni, Sperone. 1740. "Dialogo delle lingue." In Opere, vol. 1, 166-201. Venice: Occhi.
Valla, Lorenzo. 2012. Dialectical Disputations. Edited by Brian P. Copenhaver and Lodi Nauta. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Zambelli, Paola. (1994) 2012. "From the Questiones to the Essais: On the Autonomy and
Methods of the History of Philosophy." In Astrology and Magic from the Medieval Latin and Islamic World to Renaissance Europe: Theories and Approches, 373-90. Farnham:
No comments:
Post a Comment