Continuity Thesis - Franklin and Pasnau

Franklin and Pasnau

More recently the Australian mathematician and historian of science James Franklin has argued that the idea of a European Renaissance is a myth. He characterizes the myth as the view that around the 15th century:

• There was a sudden dawning of a new outlook on the world after a thousand years of darkness
• Ancient learning was rediscovered
• New ideas about intellectual inquiry and freedom replaced reliance on authority
• Scientific investigation replaced the sterile disputes of the schools.

He claims that the Renaissance was in fact a period when thought declined significantly, bringing to an end a period of advance in the late Middle Ages, and that the twelfth century was the "real, true, and unqualified renaissance". For example, the rediscovery of ancient knowledge, which the later Italian humanists claimed for themselves, was actually accomplished in the 12th century.

Franklin cites many examples of scientific advances in the medieval period that predate or anticipate later 'discoveries'. For example, the first advances in geometrical optics and mechanics were in the 12th century. The first steps in understanding motion, and continuous variation in general, occurred in the 14th centuries with the work of the scientists of the Merton School, at Oxford in the 1330s and 1340s. (Franklin notes that there is no phrase in ancient Greek or Latin equivalent to "kilometres per hour"). Nicole Oresme, who wrote on theology and money, devoted much of his effort to science and mathematics and invented graphs, was the first to perform calculations involving probability, and the first to compare the workings of the universe to a clock. (See also Grant 1974, Hannam 2009.) Franklin emphasises how much of later thought, not only in science, was built on a foundation of revived scholasticism, not Renaissance humanism.

But little of importance occurs in any other branches of science in the two centuries between Oresme and Copernicus. Like other historians of this period, Franklin attributes the decline to the plague of 1348-1350, (the black death), which killed a third of the people in Europe. Huizinga's examination of this period suggests a tendency towards elaborate theory of signs, which Franklin compares with the degeneracy of modern Marxism. He cites the late Renaissance naturalist Aldrovandi, who considered his account of the snake incomplete until he had treated it in its anatomical, heraldic, allegorical, medicinal, anecdotal, historical and mythical aspects. He marks the 15th century as coinciding with the decline of literature. Chaucer died in 1400; the next writers that are widely read are Erasmus, More, Rabelais and Machiavelli, just after 1500. "It is hard to think of any writer in English between Chaucer and Spenser who is now read even by the most enthusiastic students. The gap is almost two hundred years." He points to the development of astrology and alchemy in the heyday of the Renaissance.

Franklin concedes that in painting the Renaissance really did excel, but unfortunately the artistic skill of the Renaissance concealed its incompetence in anything else. He cites Da Vinci, who was supposed to be good at everything, but who on examination, "had nothing of importance to say on most subjects". (A standard history of mathematics, according to Franklin, (E. T. Bell's The Development of Mathematics, 1940), says that " published jottings on mathematics are trivial, even puerile, and show no mathematical talent whatever.") The invention of printing he compares to television, which produced "a flood of drivel catering to the lowest common denominator of the paying public, plus a quantity of propaganda paid for by the sponsors".

The philosopher and historian Robert Pasnau makes a similar, but more extreme claim that "modernity came in the late twelfth century, with Averroes' magisterial revival of Aristotle and its almost immediate embrace by the Latin West."

Pasnau argues (p. 4) that in some branches of 17th century philosophy, the insights of the scholastic era fall into neglect and disrepute. He disputes the modernist view of medieval thought as subservient to the views of Aristotle. By contrast "scholastic philosophers agree among themselves no more than does any group of philosophers from any historical period." Furthermore, the almost unknown period between 1400 and 1600 was not barren, but gave rise to vast quantities of material, much of which still survives. This complicates any generalizations about the supposedly novel developments in the seventeenth-century. He claims that the concerns of scholasticism are largely continuous with the central themes of the modern era, that early modern philosophy, though different in tone and style, is a natural progression out of later medieval debates, and that a grasp of the scholastic background is essential to an understanding of the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, and others.