1. Humanism –the new worldview orientation of the

Renaissance.

2. The revival of Platonic tradition. Nicolas of Cusa.

3. Natural philosophy and new science.

4. Social theories of the Renaissance.

The growth of industry, commerce, navigation, and the military arts, the development of material production, conditioned the progress in the technical sciences, in natural science, mathematics, and mechanics. All this required the freeing of reason from scholasticism and a transition from purely logical problems to natural-scientific cognition of the world and man. This tendency was manifested in the views of the major thinkers of the Renaissance permeated with the idea of humanism.

The demolition of the medieval worldview was assisted too by the Reformation, which undermined the traditional authority of the Church, and ultimately drove authority back to individual interpretation and inner experience.

   The fruitful rise of science in the West has been partly ascribed to the notion of God: because God is rational it is easy to think that the patterns underlying the functioning of the material world are rational. There may be something in this, especially with the revival of the mathematization of science, so that rationally describable processes could be looked on as mathematically describable. On the other hand, the large and admittedly fairly comfortable strait-jacket in which thought was held so long as Western Europe was dominated by a single and relatively unified Church was not perhaps so conducive to new critical thinking, such as was demanded by the growth of science. At any rate, with the Renaissance came new freedoms of thought. And this was due to a kind of inner dialectics in Western civilization.

For the great revival of excitement about Hellenism and in general Classical civilization - the new humanism - was not placed against a background of prior ignorance about the ancient world. In its own way Classical values had been quite well served by Arab and Latin translators, commentators and philosophers. But the scale of the new concern with the Classics was great. It was as though pagan civilization had hit back from its grave, and in a new key. Classical philosophy had already made one synthesis with Christianity, and the result had been Neoplatonist and in due course Aristotelian forms of theism. But now another wave rolled into the West, inspiring the arts as well as philosophy. The old contradictions in Western civilization gained a new life. It was the very contradictoriness and relative anarchy of the new culture emerging from the fourteenth century onwards that help to account for its being a matrix of science. In turn the new science could not fail to stimulate philosophy and the construction of new worldviews. How could the Copernican revolution not leave thinkers feeling disoriented? How could Galileo’s telescope not leave the whole of Aristotelian physics in ruins? How could new paintings in perspective not begin to affect the whole of optics, and how could this not fail to throw a different light upon the whole .process of seeing?

Education also had its role to play. The collection of texts proceeded apace during the Renaissance. The emergence of the printing press began to bring their price down, and to favor the swifter circulation of ideas. The examples of Cicero and Seneca could stimulate the ideal of the urbane and cultivated gentleman. Education was privatized and became an aristocratic pursuit, thus drifting away from the clerics who had previously been the prime educated class.

Nor should we forget that the Renaissance period was also the beginning of that huge expansion of Europe into Asia and the New World. This was anthropologically suggestive, and the existence of diverse other cultures was gradually to make its impact upon Europe. But it also brought a period of new wealth, which was to help to transform European economics, and supply a new class, the bourgeoisie, more vigorous in developing education and ideas.

The influence of mystical and esoteric ideas upon the formation of the Renaissance may also be mentioned. The revived Platonism brought with it new interest in Neo-Platonism. Moreover, the rediscovery of the old Hermetic stimulated new forms of esotericism which came to be combined with a refreshed Kabbalah.

Anylizing the philosophy of the Renaissance we can see a number of philosophies which were born in Europe in the 15th-18th centuries. They all had antischolastic, antichurch character and they glorified man, they beleived into his physical and spiritual potential. These philosophies were optimistic and full of life.