How Did Aristotle Contribute To The Rise Of Humanism

Before the year of 1543, the work of antiquity philosophers, especially the virtuous Aristotle, was the foundation of scientific discovery. The groundwork for the rise of Humanism began with Petrarch’s obsession with the works of Cicero. Petrarch’s intellectual addiction with the works of Cicero and his establishment of Humanism, allowed European thinkers and philosophers to access the ancient database of antiquity intellectuals. One intellectual’s work, in particular, rapidly spread throughout Europe, Aristotle’s work reshaped the celestial science of Medieval and Early Renaissance Europe into a terrestrial science. The Church accepted Aristotle’s work as fact, and because of the Church’s acceptance Aristotle’s writings, everyday Europeans also thought of it as fact.

The nominalists’ challenge of previously accepted Aristotelian views opened the door of investigation of the natural world. Two hundred year later in 1543, Nicholas Copernicus published and honored the pope with his On the Revolutions of Heavenly Bodies. The Revolutions began the Scientific Revolution by disproving the Ptolemaic system and introducing the heliocentric system. The Scientific Revolution hosted numerous historic thinkers, from Tycho Brahe to Robert Hooke, whose discoveries forever influenced the world, but none was as impactful as the Italian Galileo Galilei and the English Francis Bacon. Galilei’s and Bacon’s combined scientific discoveries and advancements were more impactful politically, technologically, and intellectually than any other scientist’s