Renaissance And Early Modern

Philosophers of the Renaissance revival of Platonism and the early modern turn toward rationalist and empiricist metaphysics, from the Byzantine scholars whose teaching and translation work carried Greek philosophical learning into Renaissance Italy and the Florentine Platonists who revived and systematized it there, through philosophers of nature, infinity and a plural cosmos whose views cost some of them dearly, to the great seventeenth century rationalist system-builders and the early Enlightenment materialists and idealists who challenged or extended their metaphysics. Spans roughly the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries, and specifically includes the Byzantine-born scholars whose own historical significance rests on transmitting classical learning into the Italian Renaissance rather than on their prior work inside the Byzantine Empire itself.