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Muratori, Cecilia. Renaissance Vegetarianism: The Philosophical Afterlives of Porphyry’s On Abstinence. Cambridge: Legenda 2020, xiv + 276 pp.

Muratori, Cecilia. Renaissance Vegetarianism: The Philosophical Afterlives of Porphyry’s On... We commonly think of the European Renaissance as a time of recovery for classical texts. But it was also a time of exalting some classical texts over others. The proto-typical humanist Lorenzo Valla was defined no less by his critique of Aristotle than by his embrace of the rhetoric of Quintilian. While that critique can look like blinkered carping, as when he dismisses Aristotle’s use of variables to render perspicuous the logical form of arguments, Valla does make genuinely interesting philosophical points. In his Dialectical Disputations, he argues that Aristotle was wrong to ascribe soul to plants.See L. Nauta, “Lorenzo Valla’s Critique of Aristotelian Psychology,” Vivarium 41 (2003), 120–43, and for his discussion B.P. Copenhaver and L. Nauta (ed. and trans.), Lorenzo Valla: Dialectical Disputations, 2 vols (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), § 1.9. Plants just grow, like hair, which is not the same as being animated. But if Aristotle rated plants too highly, then in Valla’s view he rated animals too low. We should credit them with relatively advanced psychological powers, including will and even reason. Reprising a sort of example considered by the Stoics (Chrysippus’ famous “dialectical dog”), Valla argued that a horse might use a process of reasoning to http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie de Gruyter

Muratori, Cecilia. Renaissance Vegetarianism: The Philosophical Afterlives of Porphyry’s On Abstinence. Cambridge: Legenda 2020, xiv + 276 pp.

Adamson, Peter
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie , Volume 105 (1): 3 – Mar 31, 2023
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de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
0003-9101
eISSN
1613-0650
DOI
10.1515/agph-2023-0003
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Abstract

We commonly think of the European Renaissance as a time of recovery for classical texts. But it was also a time of exalting some classical texts over others. The proto-typical humanist Lorenzo Valla was defined no less by his critique of Aristotle than by his embrace of the rhetoric of Quintilian. While that critique can look like blinkered carping, as when he dismisses Aristotle’s use of variables to render perspicuous the logical form of arguments, Valla does make genuinely interesting philosophical points. In his Dialectical Disputations, he argues that Aristotle was wrong to ascribe soul to plants.See L. Nauta, “Lorenzo Valla’s Critique of Aristotelian Psychology,” Vivarium 41 (2003), 120–43, and for his discussion B.P. Copenhaver and L. Nauta (ed. and trans.), Lorenzo Valla: Dialectical Disputations, 2 vols (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), § 1.9. Plants just grow, like hair, which is not the same as being animated. But if Aristotle rated plants too highly, then in Valla’s view he rated animals too low. We should credit them with relatively advanced psychological powers, including will and even reason. Reprising a sort of example considered by the Stoics (Chrysippus’ famous “dialectical dog”), Valla argued that a horse might use a process of reasoning to

Journal

Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie – de Gruyter

Published: Mar 31, 2023

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