Materialism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

The word ‘materialism’ did not enter European languages until the seventeenth century. With a few exceptions, it was used to mock explanations of nature that dispensed with God, the soul and any purpose in nature. The thirteen chapters, written by leading specialists in the field, shed new light on how medieval and Renaissance thinkers assigned matter an explanatory role in physics, medicine, cosmology and the philosophy of mind. Each case-study endeavours not to impose modern and contemporary categories on these theories, in order to highlight the distinctive characteristics of this period. The book covers three distinct periods: the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Aristotle’s polemic against the Presocratics set the terms of the debate; the fourteenth century, when materialism was transformed into a philosophical hypothesis in its own right rather than an error of the Ancients; and, finally, the Renaissance, when the rediscovery of Lucretius and medieval Aristotelianism informed the positions of Niccolò Machiavelli and Giordano Bruno. A final chapter re-examines the whole in the light of the major histories of materialism and demonstrates that this period long regarded as a gap provided a significant proportion of the conceptual tools employed by modern thinkers. This book is aimed primarily at anyone interested in the history of philosophy, at specialists in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and at those working on materialism, atomism or physicalism.

Aurélien Robert is a senior research fellow at the CNRS and director of the SPHERE research laboratory. He regularly teaches at the University of Paris Cité and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is the author of numerous books, including Epicure aux enfers: Hérésie, athéisme, hédonisme (Paris, 2021) and Le monde mathématique. Marco Trevisano et la philosophie dans la Venise du Trecento (Paris, 2023).