Lorenzo Casini, Uppsala University

2008-2010

The aim of the project was to examine Renaissance philosophical discussions about human freedom and determinism, paying close attention to features playing a role in the explanation of human action. During the Renaissance, many humanists and scholastic philosophers reacted firmly against fatalistic notions that subjugated human life to the stars, as well as tried to clarify the compatibility between the divine government of the world and human free will. Although these debates have attracted much scholarly attention during the last century, there is not yet a critical philosophical analysis of the conceptions of human action implicit therein.

The aim of the project was to examine these debates focusing on issues related to the conditions for moral responsibility, reasons for action, and the relation between reason and emotions. It aimed also at trying to clarify the background to Renaissance conceptions of free choice, divine providence, fate, contingency and determinism, in order to determine the function of these notions within natural philosophy, as well as their precise role in moral psychology and the explanation of human action. A further aim was to examine the alleged divorce between moral and religious goals on the one side, and scientific, secular ones on the other, in order to bring into clearer view developments more often associated with early modern philosophy.

Most important results and publications

The Renaissance is most often considered an age during which human nature came to be perceived as having no restrictions. The most famous expression of this tribute to the capacities of the human being is Pico della Mirandola's "Oratio de hominis dignitate". One of the results of the project is the ascertainment from the material that has been examined that this view, which can also be found in authors such as Bartolomeo Fazio, Giannozzo Manetti, and Marsilio Ficino, was not as dominating within Renaissance thought as the received view seems to suggest. The examined debates were on the contrary characterized by a certain degree of pessimism with regard to the question of the compatibility of human freedom with divine providence or astrological determinism. A prominent view was that man is a being whose self-determination is very limited. This ascertainment has meant a significant change in relation to the original plan of the project.

A further result concerns an important shift of focus in the discussions concerning human freedom which went from the medieval debates on the human capacity to freely choose between alternatives to a debate concerning the scope of this freedom. Renaissance authors overtook from medieval philosophy the explanatory models of moral psychology regarding the capacity to make free choices (liberum arbitrium), but brought the discussion to mainly bear upon the metaphysical question of the scope of this freedom. Several results of the project deal with this shift of focus that came to expression in many different ways.

The article "A Renaissance Aristotelian on the Limits of Human Freedom: Simone Porzio's 'An homo bonus vel malus volens fiat'" discusses the Aristotelian Porzio's examination of the question of whether our ethical dispositions are up to us or determined by external factors. Porzio's analysis offers a peculiar solution of this problem, and his exposition of Aristotelian ethics is interwoven with religious themes with strong connections to catholic heterodox views. Porzio's strategy is to show within the framework of Aristotelian philosophy that the human being has enough freedom in order to choose between good and evil, but that in the exercise of this freedom is restrained by many different conditions and is therefore in need of divine grace. To exaggerate or frustrate human freedom would make divine grace either superfluous or ineffective.

The article "Freedom and necessity in Lorenzo Valla's 'De libero arbitrio'" deals with the humanist Valla's discussion of the problem about the compatibility between divine providence and human free will. Valla's text is characterized by the desire to replace the rational theology of the scholastics with a humanist theology based on rhetorical principles, and can be described as an attempt to come to terms with the way in which medieval theology analysed the human capacity to freely choose between different alternatives. In the article, Valla's point of view is analysed in light of views within modern compatibilism, such as A. J. Ayer's view that it is not causality that freedom is to be contrasted with, but constraint. The conclusion is that Valla's views on human action fulfil all the conditions that Ayer makes for an action to be called free.

The project has partly been carried on in co-operation with the research program "Understanding Agency". Parts of the work have been presented at seminars and international conferences in Münich, Gothenburg and Uppsala.

New and unanswered questions

The most interesting work that has been examined within the project is undoubtedly Pietro Pomponazzi's estensive treatise "Libri quinque de fato, de libero arbitrio et de praedestinatione". It is a very complex work about which several interpretative problems have arised within contemporary scholarship. The first part of the treatise consists in a philosophical investigation of the compatibility of the divine government of the world and human freedom. The second part is a theological attempt to reconcile human freedom with divine providence. This dual character has generated within modern scholarship a number of different interpretations concerning the relation of the two parts of the treatise. On this point the project has not generated any conclusive results. An unpublished maniscript is at hand, but several details still remain to be examined.

The two publications mentioned above, together with the work on Pomponazzi's text, also represents a contribution to one of the project's further aims, i.e., to examine the alleged divorce between moral and religious goals, on the one side, and scientific and secular ones, on the other.

One question that has arised as a direct result from this part of the project and that would be worthwhile investigating is whether the developments sketched above anticipated or influenced those theorists of the early modern period that abandoned theories of human action based on practical reason and adopted instead motivation-based accounts. An investigation of Renaissance theoretical accounts of animal action, a task which was outside the scope of the present project, could eventually also contribute to shed some light on such a research project.