The collections of essays published by Margaret Meserve and Anthony Ossa-Richardson in honor of Jill Kraye, professor emerita of the Warburg Institute, is an important and timely contribution to the ongoing debate on Renaissance humanism and philosophy. The volume is divided in two parts, “Humanism and Its Reception” and “Renaissance Philosophy and Its Antecedents.” Humanist and Renaissance scholarship has resisted the idea that humanism had a philosophical character, following an interpretation dating back to Hegel, who in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy wrote that it was only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that genuine philosophy seeking to grasp the truth reappeared. Suffice here to mention works like The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, by Ernst Cassirer, or Studies in Renaissance Thought, by Paul Oskar Kristeller, that notwithstanding their appreciation of the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions, tended to deny that humanism has a truly philosophical character. The work of Jill Kraye, on the other hand, has promoted the idea that the history of philosophy is in itself a humanistic discipline. As Anthony Grafton writes in the introduction to the volume, she has not only traced Aristotelian and Platonic as well as Stoic traditions in the Renaissance, but has also “insisted that philosophy was pursued in many ways and in many genres—in literature for example, as well as in treatises and commentaries” (3).

There is still some resistance to accepting Jill Kraye's illuminating and forward-looking position, as testified by Brian Copenhaver's polemical essay against the concept of humanist philosophy, “Against ‘Humanism’: Pico's Job Description,” included in this volume. He underlines that “Pico's standing as philosopher is shaky” and that his Oration does not have “any bearing on modern theory of dignity, whose roots are in Kant's moral philosophy” (233–34). After an excursus on the notion of humanism from Heidegger to Sartre, and from Gentile to Garin, Copenhaver concludes that “any humanism—as philosophical matter—is problematic.” In any case, he believes that humanism is a problem of modern philosophy and that the use of the term humanism is also not appropriate in reference to Pico because the humanism of the Renaissance was in reality a classicism.

David A. Lines's essay “Defining Philosophy in Fifteenth-Century Humanism: Four Case Studies” takes a different direction, revamping Jill Kraye's lucid approach to the problem of humanism and philosophy. He studies the way in which fifteenth-century humanists such as Donato Acciaiuoli, Pico della Mirandola, Ermolao Barbaro, Angelo Poliziano, Filippo Beroaldo and Sr., and Antonio Codro Urceo actually defined philosophy. Lines emphasizes the connection of Renaissance thinkers with Greek philosophy (Platonic, Aristotelian, and Pythagorean); at the same time, he illustrates the influence of the moral philosophy of Seneca and Cicero on Poliziano and Filippo Beroaldo. He holds that the interest in philosophy for these thinkers is as eclectic as their sources: it was not exclusively moral or practical, and included also natural philosophy, logic, and metaphysics. Lines concludes that beyond its eclecticism the texts he examined in his essay “suggest that philosophy in the fifteenth century was commonly viewed as a speculative exercise” (296).

I would like to briefly mention at least two other essays of the twenty included in the volume. James Hankins, in his essay “The Unpolitical Petrarch: Justifying the Life of Literary Retirement,” argues that in De Vita Solitaria emerge “Petrarch's deepest convictions regarding the autonomy of the individual in the face of what present themselves as social and political obligations” (9). Hankins considers this attitude toward the self and its obligations as belonging to the modern world more than to the ancient. Germana Ernst, in her contribution “Life in Prison: Cardano, Tasso and Campanella,” studies the importance that the experience of prison had on the philosophers Cardano and Campanella and on the poet Tasso. She argues that for each of them detention was a painful and dramatic experience, one that deeply affected their life and led them to reflect upon its meaning.

To conclude, this is a very rich volume of contributions whose center is represented by a thorough reconsideration of the question of humanism in relation to philosophy.