Humanism and Knowledge in Renaissance

A philosophy of the human being and his behavior as a social being, a cerebration of the continuity and a witty argumentation of this cerebration - this is what we see in humanism. Humanism defines the fundamental forms of the most diverse manifestation of the humankind. Out of all the epochs that strove for mankinds evolution as an individual, the only one that was able to sustain the explosion of the humanism was the Renaissance; this word alone defining the age of light in human history and everything that came along with this rise of consciousness. The meaning of the word renaissance is rebirth, and has been borrowed from Latin and adapted to French: renaissance [ns s , Italian: rinascimento, and English: renaissance, with a specific pronunciation, of course: UK /rnesns/, US /rns ns. The specific type of humanistic thinking has its beginning point in Italy with Francesco Petraca, Giovanni Boccaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, followed by France with Franois Rabelais, Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay and Michel de Montaigne, England through William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe , Sir Thomas More, Francis Bacon; Germany: Jan van Eyck , Hieronymus Bosch and the composers Johannes Ockeghem and Netherlands: Erasmus from Rotterdam, dubbed the prince of humanists. The science and art rebirth movement emboundes all the great thinkers of the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries within an intellectual community concerned by high ideals, such as the manifestation and the versatile development of the human being through its liberation from any constrains. Many of these ideals find their origin in the antiquity humanism in the works and philosophy of the Ancient Greeks such as Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, Pythagoras and Romans, particularly Cicero, when good was identified with truth and beauty, displaying the trust in mans ability of improving oneself. This ascending was lost as the mankind stepped in the darkness, barbarism and superstition disseminated by the church in the Medieval Period. As many thought and still think, humanism was not an anti-Christian movement. Not pushing aside the idea of God as a creator or a God-ordered universe, they wish to make use of reason to understand the place of man in the world, the simple idea of faith not being enough anymore. This aspect of the Renaissance was, still, only the starting point known as the anthropocentrism, the men being in the center of all the preoccupations. After that existed an atheistic Renaissance that considered the man a walking God, afterwards an optimistic

Renaissance with some slightly nave cast, and finally a mature renaissance which remarks itself in the rediscovery of the Latin critical spirit through the chant: to judge, but not to negate. On a larger scale, humanists were directing their efforts into two specific points: education and politic. To support their ideas and the implication that most of them had about growing at an individual level by releasing the constant reference to a higher authority figure when the concern of how and what one should think, believe in, and know about the world that surrounds him and the time that was before him. This concerns the education of the commoner and was handled, according to their jobs, by scholastics, the church and the rulers of the countries. Looked from this point of view, the political stage crystallizes itself within a new form that encompasses all of the debates of the humanism in renaissance, but in another acceptance, easily described by the line: Progress for the sake of progress is not, in fact, progress.. Resting this thought aside for a future reference, I want to continue with some more theoretical points. Having this sense of direction in mind, humanists were concerned on getting out to light old writings and concepts regarding vast areas of learning and, most important, for those belonging to the patristic, but also to the pagan authors. This study took them one step forward and made them understand how writings from two or more different periods of time differ one from another. So, they observed that the style in which Latin was being used in a writing depended on the changes that were applied by time on the authors understanding of the terms and Latins semantic. The procedure known as stylistic text analysis, nowadays philology, has not been used to its full potential and lost the opportunity to shade light on all the manuscripts to which authority figure used to refer in attesting its leading powers writes in the eyes of the folks. Their need to unite the human believes was hailed by the Neo-Platonism and the hermeticism coming from Greece under the colors of the Greek and Roman Churches in the words of Plato, Aristotle and some Christian Gospels. This opened their eyes upon the powerful connections between history, science, philosophy and human beings that can and must be made as a new step in the evolution of mankind and embedded a much deeper study of everything they found themselves surrounded by. Having this in their hands, the Guttenberg revolution is about to begin in the middle of th the 15 century. In good faith, the humanist publish every piece of information, making it available to the public. They also take care of new translations from Greek that homogenizes the ground for a wider spread of the clerics. From this point on religion became a reference for the humanism in Germany, and only scarcely, in Italy and France, they approached scholarship and philology views, having a peculiar cure note avoiding issues that might abrupt the despotic ruler or any belief whatsoever. In England, everything happened in a much more crawling way. The humanistic literature made its way to the surface after a full development of the language in the beginning of the 16th century in the form of poetry, theater, and later on prose. The starting point humanism as a movement in England was placed at Oxford,