Renaissance

Matteo Ricci, who carried Euclid to Beijing and Confucius to Rome: 6 October

Matteo Ricci was born in Macerata on 6 October 1552. The Jesuit who entered China dressed as a Buddhist monk and died in Beijing as a Confucian scholar translated Euclid into Chinese, argued for the Christian God in the vocabulary of the classics, and began a dispute about rites that Rome settled only in 1939. Le Corbusier shares the birthday.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Confucius, Matteo Ricci

The dose and the odds: Cardano and Paracelsus on 24 September

Gerolamo Cardano was born in Pavia on 24 September 1501; Paracelsus died in Salzburg on 24 September 1541. Two physicians who quarrelled with every authority they met, and who between them put a number where a quality had been: how much of a substance makes it poison, and how likely a throw of the dice is.

Pomponazzi, Smart, Hurley and Lara: four arguments about the limits of proof

Pietro Pomponazzi was born on 16 September 1462, J. J. C. Smart on 16 September 1920, Susan Hurley and María Pía Lara on 16 September 1954. Four philosophers across five centuries, and one question between them: what can be demonstrated about the mind, and what has to be settled some other way.

David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Daniel Dennett, Saul Kripke, Pietro Pomponazzi, J. J. C. Smart, Susan Hurley

Carnap, Maturana, Bloom and Agrippa: four attempts to police a line

Rudolf Carnap died on 14 September 1970; Humberto Maturana was born on this day in 1928, Allan Bloom in 1930 and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in 1486. Three of them spent their lives fixing a boundary — of the meaningful, the cognising, the educated. The fourth refused to stand on either side of his.

Martha Nussbaum, Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Carnap, Humberto Maturana, Allan Bloom

Pocock: the history of political thought is made by languages, not ideas

J. G. A. Pocock changed the rules for the history of political thought. He asked not what philosophers thought but which language let them think it. His notion of 'political languages' shows that what a text can say is settled in advance — and it applies to today's arguments too.

Five hundred years of misreading Machiavelli

His name turned into an adjective: 'Machiavellian'. Yet he spent most of his life defending a republic, gave his longest book to the wisdom of the people, and wrote The Prince in exile and out of work. His radicalism lies not in immorality but in treating politics as a field of knowledge separate from morality.

This Day in Philosophy — 12 August: the death of Alessandro Achillini

Alessandro Achillini, the Bologna master whose contemporaries called him a second Aristotle, died on 12 August 1512. In the Renaissance, philosophy and medicine still met in the same chair.