Age of Adventure: The Renaissance Philosophers [The Mentor Philosophers Series]

Giorgio de Santillana provides a rich introduction to selections of Renaissance writings. Da Vinci, Thomas More, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Erasmus, Copernicus, Montaigne, Kepler, Galileo, Giordano Bruno. As Santillana understands it the Renassiance has its beginning in Italy in the early fifteenth century and extends for approximately one - hundred and fifty years. It is for him the Age of Adventure, the Age in which Mankind uses its imagination in new ways, to search the unknown. The Medieval world of carefully defined and 'utterly separate absolute entities' is shattered asunder by new adventures in thought. Copernicus shakes us from the certainty that we terrestials are at the center of the universe, Columbus breaks out of the Old World and finds a New, the Reformation comes throughout Europe, and the printing press opens up new worlds of knowledge to masses of mankind. Santillana makes it clear that the Renaissance is more than a Restoration it is a bursting of bounds, a hunger for discovery, innovation and exploration. The result of this is not a new clarity in human self- perception but rather a 'grand confusion' A heroic age which according to Santillana will also give birth to 'physical science, critical skepticism, and historicism. This is an outstanding anthology which features some of History's greatest inventors and creators Mankind.