Renaissance linguistic philosophical schools

Philosophy

Abstract

Renaissance linguistic philosophy’s status has been inclined to review recently. Previously this philosophy was considered as pre-scientific knowledge. Nowadays it might be supposed that Renaissance linguistic philosophy is the basis of a number of modern concepts. The purpose of this article is categorizing of Renaissance linguistic philosophical schools and discovering their specific features. The subjects of inquiry are Coluccio Salutati, Lorenzo Valla, Pietro Bembo and Baldassare Castiglione’s views. The original sources, as well as the modern Russian and foreign research’s findings are the base of inquiry. The methods of the dialectical analysis and the comparative one are used in this article. Two directions were discovered in Renaissance linguistic philosophy. The author named them the political one and the cultural one. The representatives of the political direction are Coluccio Salutati and Lorenzo Valla, the followers of the cultural direction are Pietro Bembo and Baldassare Castiglione. The purpose of political one is disclosure of the truth hiding from the mass by the clergy. Its followers applied the method of textual criticism. The cultural direction revealed an interaction between linguistic evolutionary processes and development of civilizations. Its representatives postulated the correlation between the stages of language formation and historical periods. These ideas have been developed until now. In author’s opinion, the main difference between the political direction and the cultural one is the role — active or passive — of language with respect to thinking. In the first case, the language is a tool of influence in the second case, it affects the human thinking directly. Scientific novelty lies in the classification of Italian linguistic philosophical ideas, which hasn’t been used before. This classification sets the lines of detailed investigation for each idea.