Paul Oskar Kristeller

Paul Oskar Kristeller (b. 1905–d. 1999) was a German-Jewish historian of philosophy and one of the most influential Renaissance scholars of the 20th century. Together with a short list of colleagues, Kristeller redefined Renaissance studies after the Second World War, at a time when the so-called problem of the Renaissance and its viability as historiographical category and autonomy as historical period, was acutely felt within what was then a much narrower field of specialists. He is best known for his attempts to dignify and distinguish historical “humanism.” He formally accepted the critiques of the medievalists who denied an enlightened break in the 15th and 16th centuries, and he proceeded to formulate and publish in 1946 a theory that was controversial at the time: that “humanism” was not the dawn of the new philosophy of man but a mostly academic and scholarly movement formally tied to the medieval traditions of ars dictandi and ars arengandi. Taken together, the studia humanitatis (whose focus was on grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and, to an extent, moral philosophy) amounted to an educational reform and, thus, to a reorientation of the medieval subdivision of the liberal arts into the Trivium and Quadrivium. Kristeller’s interpretation of humanism, which strongly emphasized a distinction between rhetoric and philosophy, was influenced by his intellectual formation in Germany and, later, Italy. Kristeller’s notably hard-nosed approach to scholarship was first honed at the Mommsen-Gymnasium in Berlin, were he met Ernst Hoffmann (his teacher of Greek), whom he followed to Heidelberg for his university career. Here he studied with Heinrich Rickert, a prominent neo-Kantian whose methodology in historiographical research Kristeller embraced, and Karl Jaspers, who introduced him to existentialism. Both influences are at play in Kristeller’s dissertation on Plotinus, published in 1929. Having received what he perceived as a less-than- excellent assessment of his dissertation, Kristeller moved to Berlin and trained to become a schoolteacher of Greek and Latin (with no less than Werner Jaeger, Eduard Norden, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, and Richard Walzer). He subsequently returned his attention to philosophy and chose Marsilio Ficino as the topic of a Habilitationschrift advised by Martin Heidegger, whom he had met during a short stint in Marburg in 1926. Because of anti-Semitic laws enacted in Germany, Kristeller moved to Italy in 1934 and became the protégé of Giovanni Gentile, securing positions as lecturer of German at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and at the University of Pisa. In 1939, Kristeller was again forced to emigrate, this time to the United States, where he found a home at Columbia University in New York.

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