Renaissance philosophy: anthropocentrism, humanism, development of human individuality. Anthropocentrism and humanism in the philosophy of revival

Basic concepts of Renaissance philosophy (God, Nature, Man)

· Anthropocentrism: the attention of philosophers is directed mainly to man, while Neoplatonic constructs are cultivated in a new way.

· Humanism, recognition of Man as a person, his rights to creativity, freedom and happiness. It was meant that this could be achieved primarily through the revival of the interest in the humanities, characteristic of antiquity, and not in knowledge of nature.

· Postulation of the creative essence of man: he does not imitate anyone, neither God nor nature, he is active in himself, he creates, mostly hand-made, handicraft.

· Personal-material understanding of the world: everything that exists is understood in projection onto a person with maximum interest in the physical principle.

· The idea of dominance of the aesthetic understanding of reality over moral and scientific ideas.

· Antischolasticism: the desire to debunk imaginary authorities and the dogmas they propagate. From this point of view, the Reformation, the movement in favor of religious reforms, whose heroes were J. Hus, M. Luther, T. Munzer, J. Calvin, was especially important.

· A geometric-structural understanding of the world, supplemented by the dialectics of transition characteristic of the infinitely small and the infinitely large and their relationship with each other.

· Pantheism. Identification of God and Nature.

The philosophy of the Renaissance is a set of philosophical trends that arose and developed in Europe in the 14th - 17th centuries. , which were united by an anti-church and anti-scholastic orientation, a focus on man, faith in his great physical and spiritual potential, life-affirming and optimistic character.

The prerequisites for the emergence of philosophy and culture of the Renaissance were:

1. improvement of tools and production relations;

2. crisis of feudalism;

3. development of crafts and trade;

4. strengthening of cities, turning them into trade, craft, military, cultural and political centers, independent of feudal lords and the Church;

5. strengthening, centralization of European states, strengthening of secular power;

6. emergence of the first parliaments;

7. lag behind life, crisis of the Church and scholastic (church) philosophy;

8. increasing the level of education in Europe as a whole;

9. great geographical discoveries (Columba, Vasco da Gama, Magellan);

10. scientific and technical discoveries (invention of gunpowder, firearms, machine tools, blast furnaces, microscope, telescope, printing, discoveries in the field of medicine and astronomy, other scientific and technical achievements).

The main directions of Renaissance philosophy were:

1. humanistic (XIV - XV centuries, representatives: Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Lorenzo Valli, etc.) - put the person in the center of attention, glorified his dignity, greatness and power, ironized the dogmas of the Church;

2. Neoplatonic (mid-15th - 16th centuries), whose representatives - Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, Paracelsus and others - developed the teachings of Plato, tried to understand nature, the Cosmos and man from the point of view of idealism;

3. natural philosophy (XVI - early XVII centuries), to which Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei and others belonged, who tried to debunk a number of provisions of the Church’s teaching about God, the Universe, the Cosmos and the foundations of the universe, relying on astronomical and scientific discoveries;

4. Reformation (XVI - XVII centuries), whose representatives - Martin Luther, Thomas Montzer, John Calvin, John Usenliffe, Erasmus of Rotterdam and others - sought to radically revise church ideology and the relationship between believers and the Church;

5. political (XV - XV] centuries, Nicolo Machiavelli) - studied the problems of government, the behavior of rulers;

6. utopian-socialist (XV - XVII centuries, representatives - Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, etc.) - sought ideal-fantastic forms of building a society and state, based on the absence of private property and universal equalization, total regulation by state power.

The characteristic features of Renaissance philosophy include:

1) anthropocentrism and humanism - the predominance of interest in man, belief in his limitless capabilities and dignity;

2) opposition to the Church and church ideology (that is, the denial not of religion itself, of God, but of an organization that has made itself a mediator between God and believers, as well as a frozen dogmatic philosophy serving the interests of the Church - scholasticism);

3) moving the main interest from the form of the idea to its content;

4) a fundamentally new, scientific-materialistic understanding of the surrounding world (spherical, not flat, Earth, rotation of the Earth around the Sun, and not vice versa, infinity of the Universe, new anatomical knowledge, etc.);

5) great interest in social problems, society and the state;

6) the triumph of individualism;

7) widespread dissemination of the idea of social equality

Humanism as a philosophical trend became widespread in Europe in the 14th - mid-15th centuries. Its center was Italy.

The main features of humanism included:

· anti-church and anti-scholastic orientation;

· the desire to reduce the omnipotence of God and prove the intrinsic worth of man;

· anthropocentrism - special attention to man, glorification of his strength, greatness, capabilities;

· life-affirming character and optimism.

In its genre, humanistic philosophy merged with literature and was presented allegorically and in artistic form. The most famous humanist philosophers were also writers. These primarily included Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, and Lorenzo Balla.

a. glorifies Christianity, but at the same time, between the lines, he ridicules the contradictions and inexplicable truths (dogmas) of Christian teaching;

b. praises a person;

c. moves away from the interpretation of man solely as a divine creature;

d. recognizes in man the presence of both divine and natural principles, which are in harmony with each other;

e. believes in the happy future of man, his initially good nature.

Petrarch introduces ideas alien to scholasticism into literature, philosophy, and culture:

a. human life is given once and is unique;

A person should live not for God, but for himself;

c. the human personality must be free - both physically and spiritually;

d. a person has freedom of choice and the right to express himself in accordance with this;

e. a person can achieve happiness, relying only on himself and his own strength, he has sufficient potential for this;

f. the afterlife most likely does not exist and immortality can only be achieved in the memory of people;

g. a person should not sacrifice himself to God, but should enjoy life and love;

h. the external appearance and inner world of a person are beautiful.

b. criticized scholasticism for artificiality, artificiality and untruth;

c. placed man at the center of the universe;

d. believed in human capabilities and his mind;

e. rejected asceticism and self-denial;

f. called for active action, struggle, courage in changing the world;

g. was a supporter of equality between men and women;

h. He considered pleasure to be the highest good, which he understood as the satisfaction of a person’s material and moral needs.

Anthropocentrism in the Renaissance

During the Renaissance, the value of the individual person increased as never before. Neither in antiquity nor in the Middle Ages was there such a burning interest in the human being in all the diversity of its manifestations. The originality and uniqueness of each individual is placed above all else in this era. Refined artistic taste is able to recognize and emphasize this uniqueness everywhere; originality and difference from others becomes the most important sign of a great personality.

Therefore, one can often come across the statement that it was during the Renaissance that the concept of personality as such was first formed. And in fact, if we identify the concept of personality with the concept of individuality, then such a statement will be completely legitimate. However, in reality the concept of personality and individuality should be distinguished. Individuality is an aesthetic category, while personality is a moral and ethical category. If we consider a person from the point of view of how and in what way he differs from all people, then we look at him as if from the outside, with the eye of an artist; In this case, we apply only one criterion to a person’s actions - the criterion of originality. As for personality, the main thing in it is different: the ability to distinguish between good and evil and act in accordance with such a distinction. Along with this, the second most important definition of personality appears - the ability to bear responsibility for one’s actions. And the enrichment of individuality does not always coincide with the development and deepening of personality: the aesthetic and moral and ethical aspects of development can significantly diverge from each other. Thus, the rich development of individuality in the 14th-16th centuries was often accompanied by extremes of individualism; the intrinsic value of individuality means the absolutization of the aesthetic approach to man.

During the Late Renaissance (XVI - XVII centuries) natural philosophical ideas became widespread in Europe (especially Italy).

Representatives of natural philosophy:

a. substantiated a materialistic view of the world;

b. sought to separate philosophy from theology;

c. formed a scientific worldview, free from theology;

d. put forward a new picture of the world (in which God, Nature and Cosmos are united, and the Earth is not the center of the Universe);

e. believed that the world is knowable primarily thanks to sensory knowledge and reason (and not Divine revelation).

The most prominent representatives of natural philosophy of the Renaissance were Andreas Vesalius, Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei.

Andreas Vesalius (1514 - 1564) revolutionized philosophy and medicine.

Vesalius materialistically explained the origin of the world, at the center of which he placed man.

Vesalius refuted the views that had dominated medicine for more than a thousand years since the time of Galen (130 - 200), an ancient Roman physician who described the physiology and structure of man, based on animal studies. On the contrary, Vesalius based his conclusions on numerous anatomical experiments and published the book On the Structure of the Human Body, famous for his time, where he described in detail human anatomy, which was much more consistent with reality than the anatomy described by Galen.

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 - 1543), relying on astronomical research, put forward a fundamentally different picture of existence:

a. The Earth is not the center of the Universe (geocentrism was rejected);

b. The Sun is the center in relation to the Earth (geocentrism was replaced by heliocentrism), the Earth rotates around the Sun;

c. all cosmic bodies move along their own trajectory;

d. space is infinite;

e. the processes occurring in space are explainable from the point of view of nature and are devoid of “sacred” meaning.

Giordano Bruno (1548 - 1600) developed and deepened the philosophical ideas of Copernicus:

a. The Sun is the center only in relation to the Earth, but not the center of the Universe;

b. The universe has no center and is infinite;

c. The universe consists of galaxies (clusters of stars);

d. stars - celestial bodies similar to the Sun and having their own planetary systems;

e. the number of worlds in the Universe is infinite;

f. all celestial bodies - planets, stars, as well as everything that is on them, have the property of movement;

g. There is no God separate from the Universe; the Universe and God are one whole.

Giordano Bruno's ideas were not accepted by the Catholic Church, and he was burned at the stake in 1600.

Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) confirmed in practice the correctness of the ideas of Nicolaus Copernicus and Giordano Bruno:

a. invented the telescope;

b. used a telescope to explore celestial bodies;

c. proved that celestial bodies move not only along a trajectory, but also simultaneously around their axis;

d. discovered spots on the Sun and a varied landscape (mountains and deserts - “seas”) on the Moon;

e. discovered satellites around other planets;

f. studied the dynamics of falling bodies;

g. proved the plurality of worlds in the Universe.

Galileo put forward a method of scientific research, which consisted of:

a. observation;

b. putting forward a hypothesis;

c. calculations of the implementation of the hypothesis in practice;

d. experimental (experimental) testing in practice of the put forward hypothesis.

Philosophy cheat sheet: answers to exam papers Zhavoronkova Alexandra Sergeevna

16. ANTHROPOCENTRISM AND HUMANISM OF THE RENAISSANCE

Since the 15th century A transitional era in the history of Western Europe begins - the Renaissance, which created its own brilliant culture. The most important condition for the flourishing of culture during the Renaissance was the destruction of the dictatorship of the church.

Anthropocentrism- the doctrine according to which man is the center of the Universe and the goal of all events occurring in the world.

Humanism - a type of anthropocentrism, a view that recognizes the value of man as an individual, his right to freedom and happiness.

Secular interests, a full-blooded earthly life of a person were opposed to feudal asceticism:

- Petrarch, who collected ancient manuscripts, calls to “heal the bloody wounds” of his native Italy, trampled under the boots of foreign soldiers and torn by the enmity of feudal tyrants;

- Boccaccio in his “Decameron” he ridicules the depraved clergy, the parasitic nobility and glorifies the inquisitive mind, the desire for pleasure and the seething energy of the townspeople;

- Erasmus of Rotterdam in the satire “In Praise of Stupidity” and Rabelais in the novel "Gargantua and Pantagruel" they express humanism and the unacceptability of the old medieval ideology.

The following also had a huge influence on the development of humanist ideas: Leonardo da Vinci(his works of painting, sculpture and architecture, works on mathematics, biology, geology, anatomy are dedicated to man and his greatness); Michelangelo Buonarroti(in his painting “The Lamentation of Christ”, in the painting of the vault of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, in the statue “David” the physical and spiritual beauty of man, his limitless creative possibilities are affirmed).

The philosophy of the Renaissance is filled with recognition of the value of man as an individual, his right to free development and manifestation of his abilities.

Stages of development humanism:

Secular freethinking, which opposes medieval scholasticism and the spiritual dominance of the church;

Value-moral emphasis of philosophy and literature.

A new culture and philosophy appeared in Italy, then covering a number of European countries: France, Germany, etc.

The main features of Renaissance philosophy:

Denial of “book wisdom” and scholastic word debates based on the study of nature itself;

Use of materialistic works of ancient philosophers (Democritus, Epicurus);

Close connection with natural science;

Study of the problem of man, the transformation of philosophy into anthropocentric in its orientation.

Niccolo Machiavelli(1469–1527) - one of the first social philosophers of the Renaissance to reject the theocratic concept of the state.

He substantiated the need for a secular state, proving that the motivation for people's activities is selfishness and material interest. The evil of human nature, the desire to get rich by any means, reveal the need to curb human instincts with the help of a special force - the state.

The necessary order in society is created legal worldview people who cannot be educated by the church, but only by the state, this is the main idea of Niccolo Machiavelli.

Questions that Machiavelli considers:

- “Which is better: to inspire love or fear?”

- “How should sovereigns keep their word?”

- “How to avoid hatred and contempt?”

- “What should a sovereign do to be revered?”

- “How to avoid flatterers?” and etc.

From the book Reader on Philosophy author Radugin A. A.

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Chapter III Philosophy of the Renaissance

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5. Characteristics of Renaissance philosophy Social, historical and scientific prerequisites for its formation Anthropocentrism and humanism in Renaissance philosophy The Renaissance replaced the Middle Ages and lasted from the mid-15th century to the beginning of the 16th century. The philosophy of this

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51. Anthropocentrism of the Renaissance During the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance period emerged (approximately XIV-XVI centuries). During the Renaissance, the central position of God formally remains in force, but the real object of philosophical interest becomes

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Chapter 3 PHILOSOPHY OF THE RENAISSANCE The Renaissance is marked by the development of industry, trade, navigation, military affairs, that is, the development of material production, and consequently, the development of technology, natural science, mechanics, and mathematics. This required

Anthropocentrism- the doctrine according to which man is the center of the Universe and the goal of all events occurring in the world.

Humanism - a type of anthropocentrism, a view that recognizes the value of man as an individual, his right to freedom and happiness.

Secular interests, a full-blooded earthly life of a person were opposed to feudal asceticism:

- Petrarch, who collected ancient manuscripts, calls to “heal the bloody wounds” of his native Italy, trampled under the boots of foreign soldiers and torn by the enmity of feudal tyrants;

- Boccaccio in his “Decameron” he ridicules the depraved clergy, the parasitic nobility and glorifies the inquisitive mind, the desire for pleasure and the seething energy of the townspeople;

The philosophy of the Renaissance is filled with recognition of the value of man as an individual, his right to free development and manifestation of his abilities.

Stages of development humanism:

Secular freethinking, which opposes medieval scholasticism and the spiritual dominance of the church;

Value-moral emphasis of philosophy and literature.

A new culture and philosophy appeared in Italy, then covering a number of European countries: France, Germany, etc.

The main features of Renaissance philosophy:

Denial of “book wisdom” and scholastic word debates based on the study of nature itself;

Use of materialistic works of ancient philosophers (Democritus, Epicurus);

Close connection with natural science;

Study of the problem of man, the transformation of philosophy into anthropocentric in its orientation.

Niccolo Machiavelli(1469–1527) - one of the first social philosophers of the Renaissance to reject the theocratic concept of the state.

The necessary order in society is created legal worldview people who cannot be educated by the church, but only by the state, this is the main idea of Niccolo Machiavelli.

Questions that Machiavelli considers:

- “Which is better: to inspire love or fear?”

- “How should sovereigns keep their word?”

- “How to avoid hatred and contempt?”

- “What should a sovereign do to be revered?”

- “How to avoid flatterers?” and etc.

17. SPECIFICITY OF RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY: NEOPLATONISM, NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, THEOSOPHY, PANTHEISM

Renaissance- the era of the revival of classical antiquity, the emergence of a new sensation, a sense of life, considered as akin to the vital feeling of Antiquity and as the opposite of the medieval attitude to life with its renunciation from a world that seemed sinful.

The Renaissance in Europe spans the period from the 14th to the 16th centuries.

Neoplatonism- one of the forms of Greek philosophy, which arose as a result of mixing the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, Stoic, Pythagorean, etc. with Eastern and Christian mysticism and religion.

Basic ideas of Neoplatonism:

Mystical-intuitive knowledge of the highest;

The existence of a number of stages in the transition from the highest to matter;

Liberation of a materially burdened person for pure spirituality through ecstasy or asceticism.

The Renaissance uses Neoplatonism to develop philosophical thought. From ancient Neoplatonism he adopted aesthetic attention to everything corporeal, natural, admiration for the human body especially. The understanding of man as a spiritual person was inherited from medieval Neoplatonism.

Natural philosophy is a set of philosophical attempts to interpret and explain nature.

Goals of natural philosophy:

Generalization and unification of general knowledge about nature;

Clarification of basic natural science concepts;

Knowledge of connections and patterns of natural phenomena.

The natural philosophy of the Renaissance was pantheistic in nature, that is, without directly denying the existence of God, it identified him with nature.

The natural philosophical views of Renaissance philosophers are combined with elements of spontaneous dialectics, which largely comes from ancient sources. Noting the constant variability of all things and phenomena, they argued that over the course of many centuries the surface of the Earth changes, seas turn into continents, and continents into seas. Man, in their opinion, is a part of nature, and his boundless love for the knowledge of the infinite, the power of his mind elevates him above the world.

Theosophy - wisdom from God. Theosophy is the name given to the highest knowledge about God and the divine, which is achieved by direct contemplation and experience, thanks to which the mystery of divine creation becomes accessible.

An ardent supporter of theosophy during the Renaissance was Nikolai Kuzansky. He, like other thinkers, believed that knowledge was given to man by God. If we consider that knowledge is from God, and God is unknowable, then God is the limit of knowledge. God is the limit beyond which there is no knowledge, but there is faith, there is awareness of God. God is truth, and truth is not cognized, but realized by man.

Pantheism - a teaching that deifies the Universe and nature.

Pantheism exists in four forms: 1) theomonistic pantheism gives existence only to God, while depriving the world of independent existence;

2) physiomonistic pantheism asserts that there is only the world, nature, which supporters of this direction call God, thereby depriving God of independent existence;

3) mystical pantheism;

4) immanent-transcendent pantheism, according to which God is realized in things. Proponents of pantheism in the Renaissance exalted the individual through God.

The main features of Renaissance philosophy are anthropocentrism and humanism. Since the 15th century The Renaissance begins, a transitional period in the history of Western Europe, which created its own brilliant culture. In the field of economics, feudal relations are disintegrating and the rudiments of capitalist production are developing; The richest city-republics in Italy are developing. Major discoveries follow one after another: the first printed books; firearms; Columbus discovers America; Vasco da Gama, having circumnavigated Africa, found a sea route to India; Magellan, with his trip around the world, proves the sphericity of the Earth; geography and cartography emerge as scientific disciplines; symbolic notation is introduced in mathematics; scientific anatomy and the basics of physiology appear; “iatrochemistry” arises, or medicinal chemistry, striving for knowledge of chemical phenomena in the human body and for the study of drugs; Astronomy is achieving great success.

But most importantly, the dictatorship of the church was broken. This was precisely the most important condition for the flourishing of culture during the Renaissance.

Secular interests, the full-blooded earthly life of a person were opposed to feudal asceticism, the “otherworldly” ghostly world. Petrarch, who tirelessly collected ancient manuscripts, calls for “healing the bloody wounds” of his native Italy, trampled under the boots of foreign soldiers and torn by the enmity of feudal tyrants. Boccaccio in his “Decameron” ridicules the depraved clergy and the parasitizing nobility, glorifying the inquisitive mind, the desire for pleasure and the seething energy of the townspeople. The satire “In Praise of Folly” by Erasmus of Rotterdam, the novel “Gargantua and Pantagruel” by Rabelais, the witty, full of mockery and ridicule “Letters of Dark People” by Ulrich von Hutten express humanism and the unacceptability of the old medieval ideology.

The remarkable Italian painters, sculptors and architects Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti had a huge influence on the development of the ideas of humanism. Leonardo da Vinci dedicates his creations - works of painting, sculpture and architecture, works on mathematics, biology, geology, anatomy to man and his greatness. As the author of The Last Supper, La Gioconda and a number of other world-famous masterpieces, he had a powerful influence on the humanistic principles of Renaissance aesthetics.

The entire culture of the Renaissance, its philosophy, is filled with recognition of the value of man as an individual, his right to free development and manifestation of his abilities. A new criterion for assessing social relations is being approved - human. At the first stage, Renaissance humanism acted as secular free-thinking, opposed to medieval scholasticism and the spiritual domination of the church.

A new culture and philosophy appeared in Italy. Subsequently, the Renaissance also spread to a number of European countries: France, Germany, etc. It was the role that ancient culture played in the formation of the culture of a new era that determined the name of this era itself, as the Renaissance, or Renaissance.

What are the main features of Renaissance philosophy? Firstly, this is the denial of “book wisdom” and scholastic word debates based on the study of nature itself, secondly, the use, first of all, of the materialistic works of ancient philosophers - Democritus, Epicurus; thirdly, close connection with natural science; fourthly, the study of the human problem. Transformation of philosophy into anthropocentric in its orientation. Researchers distinguish two periods in the development of Renaissance philosophy: 1. Restoration and adaptation of ancient philosophy to the requirements of modern times - the 15th century. 2. The emergence of its own unique philosophy, the main trend of which was natural philosophy - XVI century.

The philosophical views of the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) are noteworthy. He created an ethical doctrine, one of the sources of which was the ethics of Epicurus. The basis of all Lorenzo Valla's thoughts on ethical topics is the idea of the desire of all living things for self-preservation and the elimination of suffering. Life is the highest value. and therefore the entire process of life should be a desire for pleasure and good, as a feeling of joy.

Valla refuses to consider man in the spirit of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, according to which man was considered to participate in God through the dual character of the soul as unreasonable and rational, mortal and immortal. Valla believes that the soul is something unified, although he singles out its functions such as memory, reason, and will. All the faculties of the soul are recognized in the senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. Valla is a sensualist: he considers sensations the only source of knowledge of the world and moral activity.

Sensations are of fundamental importance in his ethical teaching. He tries to comprehend such feelings as gratitude, affection for a person, pleasure, anger, greed, fear, vindictiveness, cruelty, etc. Pleasure is defined by Valla as “a good that is strived for everywhere and which consists in the pleasure of soul and body,” and It is pleasure that is declared to be the “highest good.”

Lorenzo Valla emphasizes the difference between how he understands the highest good and what Augustine understands by the highest good. For Augustine, the highest good is bliss associated with the knowledge of the highest absolute truths and God himself. For Valla, the highest good is any pleasure received by a person in his life, if it is his life goal. In Valla’s works we come across such concepts as “personal benefit”, “personal interest”. It is on them that relationships between people in society are built.

He contrasts ascetic virtues with secular virtues: virtue is not only in enduring poverty, but also in using wealth wisely; not only in abstinence, but also in marriage; not only in obedience, but also in ruling wisely. The attempt to derive morality from human nature was very important for the ideology of humanism. Researchers believe that in the development of ethical problems Lorenzo Valla occupies a place between Epicurus and Gassendi.

M. Montaigne is called “the last humanist.” If we list the titles of the chapters of his book “Experiments”, we will understand that Montaigne writes something like a “textbook of life”: “The hour of negotiations is a dangerous hour.” “On the punishment for cowardice”, “The benefit of one is the detriment of another”, “On moderation”, “On the laws against luxury”, *On the frugality of the ancients”, “On age”, “The same thing can be achieved by different means”, “ On parental love”, “On glory”, “On cruelty”, “On conceit”, “On three types of communication”, etc. Initially, “Experiences” were conceived as a presentation of instructive things he extracted from the moral and philosophical works of antiquity (Plutarch, Seneca). examples, anecdotes, aphorisms. However, he soon felt that they needed comments, and rather thorough ones, based on personal experience.

Throughout his life, Montaigne corrected and supplemented the Essays, so they contain different points of view of the author, a certain inconsistency that Montaigne sought to eliminate. He was looking for the truth.

He opposed the theocentric concept, which comes from Thomas Aquinas: God is an absolute being, and man, as his creation, is an exceptional being, who is given, using the means of reason, to endlessly approach this being, to penetrate into the “first cause,” into the very essence of things ... Montaigne does not agree with such anthropocentrism; his anthropocentrism is different: he proposes to consider a person “taken by himself, without any other help, armed only with his human means and deprived of divine grace and knowledge, which in fact constitute all his glory, his strength, the basis of his being...”.

One of the first social philosophers of the Renaissance to reject the theocratic concept of the state, according to which the state depends on the church as the supposedly supreme power on Earth, was Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527). He is responsible for the rationale for the need for a secular state: he argued that the motivation for people’s activities is selfishness and material interest. People, Machiavelli declared, would rather forget the death of a father than the deprivation of property. It is precisely because of the original evil of human nature, the desire to get rich by any means, that there is a need to curb these human instincts with the help of a special force, which is the state. In his works “Discourses on the first decade of Titus Livy”, “The Prince”, the Florentine philosopher comes to the conviction that it is the law, the legal worldview of people, which can only be educated by the state, and not the church, that will create the necessary order in society.

Machiavelli states that the church shook the foundations of state power, trying to unite spiritual and secular power in its hands, and weakened the desire in people to serve the state.

Machiavelli comes to the conclusion that all means are permitted to achieve political goals, and although the sovereign must be guided by generally accepted norms of morality in behavior, he may not take them into account in politics if this will help strengthen state power. A prince who has embarked on the path of creating a strong state must be guided by the “carrot and stick” policy, combining the qualities of a lion and a fox. Bribery, murder, poisoning, treachery - all this is permitted in a policy aimed at strengthening state power.

The social and philosophical thought of the Renaissance was also associated with the names of Thomas Munzer (1490-1525) - a German revolutionary, leader of the peasant masses in the Reformation and the Peasant War of 1524-1526. in Germany; English humanist Thomas More (1478-1535) - author of the book “Utopia”, which made him the first representative of utopian socialism; Italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639), who wrote the famous essay “The City of the Sun”.