{"id":3560,"date":"2013-10-31T10:30:43","date_gmt":"2013-10-31T14:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/?p=3560"},"modified":"2013-10-28T15:55:07","modified_gmt":"2013-10-28T19:55:07","slug":"machiavellis-notion-of-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/2013\/10\/31\/machiavellis-notion-of-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Machiavelli’s notion of truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week we discussed Machiavelli’s potent shock-value. Now,\u00a0Arts & Letter Daily <\/em>has\u00a0linked us to The New Criterion<\/em>‘s post<\/a> on Machiavelli’s philosophical musings of truth. The claim is that they are just as important as his political work. ALDaily<\/em> writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cI depart from the orders of others.\u201d With that, Machiavelli reconceived both politics and philosophy. He was not a product of his time, but the father of ours…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here is an extract from\u00a0The New Criterion<\/em>‘s post:<\/p>\n

To see how important Machiavelli was one must first examine how important he meant to be. In the\u00a0Discourses<\/i> he says he has a \u201cnatural desire\u201d to \u201cwork for those things I believe will bring common benefit to everyone.\u201d A natural desire is in human nature, not just in the humans of Machiavelli\u2019s time, and the beneficiaries will be everyone, all humanity\u2014not just his native country or city. He goes on to say that he has \u201cdecided to take a path as yet untrodden by anyone.\u201d He will benefit everyone by taking a new path; he is not just imitating the ancients or contributing to the Renaissance, that rebirth of the ancients, though obviously his new path makes use of the them. In the middle of\u00a0The Prince<\/i> he declares: \u201cI depart from the orders of others,\u201d also emphasizing his originality. One soon learns that he departs from the tradition of thought that begins with Greek, or Socratic, philosophy, as well as from the Bible. All this he refers to elsewhere as \u201cmy enterprise.\u201d
\n…
\nIs Machiavelli a philosopher? He does not say that he is. He uses the word very sparingly and does not openly address those he calls \u201cphilosophers.\u201d He seems to confine himself to politics, but politics he refers to expansively as \u201cworldly things\u201d (cose del mondo<\/i>). And yet he indicates that he is a philosopher, and repeatedly, insistently, in several ways. To expand politics to include the world implies that the world governs politics or politics governs the world or both. In his day the notion of the \u201cworld\u201d immediately raised the question of which world, this one or the next? Here religion and philosophy dispute the question of which world governs the other and whether politics can manage or God must provide for human fortunes\u2014Fortuna<\/i> being, as everyone knows, a prominent theme of Machiavelli\u2019s.
\n…
\nTo reform contemplative philosophy, Machiavelli moved to assert the necessities of the world against the intelligibility of the heavenly cosmos and the supra-heavenly whole.\u00a0His<\/i> nature, as opposed to that of Plato and Aristotle, lacked the lasting or eternal intelligibles of nature as they conceived it. To assert the claim of nature against theology Machiavelli changes nature into the world, or, more precisely, because the world is not an intelligible whole, into \u201cworldly things.\u201d This world is the world of sense. In replacing the world of intelligible nature with the world of sense, he discovered the world of fact underneath the reason of things. In doing so he laid the foundation for modern philosophy, which is modern epistemology (as it came to be called) and its two modes, modern empiricism and modern rationalism. To see how Machiavelli discovered \u201cfact,\u201d we may return to his \u201ceffectual truth of the thing\u201d in the paragraph of\u00a0The Prince<\/i> being featured. That notion was contrasted to the imagination of the thing that led to making a profession of good, from which he drew a moral lesson for the prince or indeed for man as such: You will come to ruin if you base yourself on what should be done rather than on what is done.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read on here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week we discussed Machiavelli’s potent shock-value. Now,\u00a0Arts & Letter Daily has\u00a0linked us to The New Criterion’s post on Machiavelli’s philosophical musings of truth. The claim is that they are just as important as his political work. ALDaily writes: \u201cI depart from the orders of others.\u201d With that, Machiavelli reconceived both politics and philosophy. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3740,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3857,3856],"tags":[3915,48536,3884,437,72,6653,4280],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3560"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3740"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3560"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3564,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3560\/revisions\/3564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}