Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance - Hardcover

There is a tendency in modern scholarship to describe the
Renaissance Humanists merely as readers--as interpreters
happily absorbed within the bounds of their chosen classical
texts. In Theory as Practice, Nancy Struever contests
this accepted notion; by focusing on ethical inquiry, she
presents the Humanists as engaged in subtle, innovative moral
work.

Struever argues that the accomplishment of five major
Renaissance figures--Petrarch, Nicolaus Cusanus, Lorenzo
Valla, Machiavelli, and Montaigne--was to consider theory as
practice and thus engage the ethics of inquiry. She
notes three stages of investigation, the first represented by
Petrarch, who "relocated" ethical inquiry from a theoretical
realm to a familiar practice responsive to daily experience.
Next, Struever describes how Cusanus and Valla assume
Petrarch's relocation, yet confect ethics into discursive
disciplines. Finally, while both Machiavelli and Montaigne
produced strong revisions of discipline, they considered the
problems of addressing the non-inquirer as well. Struever
urges modern readers to employ both rhetorical and
philosophical analysis to reveal these Humanists' aggressive
tactics of presentation as well as their novel disciplinary
reorientation. By doing so, she suggests, we discover how
Renaissance ethical inquiry illuminates, and is illuminated
by, the modern ethical theory of such philosophers as Peirce,
Wittgenstein, Bernard Williams, and Quine.