This book is a treasure house of Italian philosophy. Narrating and explaining the history of Italian philosophers from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the author identifies the specificity, peculiarity, originality, and novelty of Italian philosophical thought in the men and women of the Renaissance. The vast intellectual output of the Renaissance can be traced back to a single philosophical stream beginning in Florence and fed by numerous converging human factors. This work offers historians and philosophers a vast survey and penetrating analysis of an intellectual tradition which has heretofore remained virtually unknown to the Anglophonic world of scholarship.

Medieval discussions of mental representation were constrained in essential ways by Thomas Aquinas' doctrine of intelligible species. Aquinas' view of a formal mediation of sensible reality in intellectual knowledge was not universally accepted. In particular, after his death, a long series of controversies developed about the necessity of intelligible species. (These were analyzed in the first volume of this study.) The first part of this book deals with Renaissance controversies, discussing Peripatetics, Neoplatonics, and a group of relatively independent authors. In the second part, developments of late Scholasticism, and the elimination of the intelligible species in modern non-Aristotelian philosophy are scrutinized. Particular attention is paid to the possible roots of the seventeenth-century theories of ideas in traditional philosophy.

The main purpose of this book is to offer a comprehensive historical analysis of the discussions on a crucial problem for the early modern theory of knowledge: the formal mediation of sensible reality in intellectual knowledge.

This 1988 Companion offers an account of philosophical thought from the middle of the fourteenth century to the emergence of modern philosophy.