Renaissance

From Geography

Latest revision as of 13:50, 25 October 2012

A wide ranging shift in intellectual, artistic and practical achievements that swept away the dust of Medieval times and heralded the dawn of more modern ones. A transformation that affected the very way in which human beings conceived of themselves and of their role within the cosmic order, and an alteration that gave humanity a much more important place in this cosmic order than had been the case in Medieval times.

A new idea emerged during the Renaissance: humans are indispensable and determinative in life. The Medieval concept of 'everything happens with a reason, God decides' became unthinkable. (In Medieval times men and women held an important but decidedly inferior position in the great chain of being and in which their prime duty was to transcend the mortal world and their mortal bodies.) But the Renaissance people found themselves responsible for human action and thinking. The Renaissance created a new image of man as the central miracle of creation. The perfect measure of God and God's creation.

The Renaissance effectively 'invented' the human subject as something indispensable to human thought and action: as something active in history, in the sense of 'making things happen' and as something capable of attaining a knowledge of both its external world and its internal world.

The fact that such a big shift could evolve, shows that people are oracular and that the origin of 'humanism' is uncertain.

Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller sees Protagoras as the founding father of so called 'humanism', but the more common idea is that humanism emerged during the Renaissance. Renaissance humanism is one of the areas within humansim, where through 'rational thinking' humans got a bigger role in the universe.

The Enlightenment (as a result of rational thinking) caused differences in science. Science became the preeminently 'human' tool for knowing the world, and that in so doing the capacity of the human mind to acquire knowledge about existence became a central problem for philosophical reflection. So, there was no clearcut difference between 'arts' and 'sciences'.

In the Renaissance humanistic approach of the world, David ley and Marwyn Samuels came up with a slightly other form of humanism: scientific humanism.

References

• Cloke, P., Philo, Chr. & Sadler, D. (eds) (1991) Approaching Human Geography: An Introduction To Contemporary Theoretical Debates. Chapman, London. Chapter 3: Peopling human geography and the development of humanistic approaches.

• Renaissance humanism

Contributors

• Page edited by --JikkeVanTHof 15:57, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

• Page enhanced by Iris van der Wal - 15:44, October 21st 2012