Boccaccio (1313-1375) was an Italian writer. Born in Paris, he did business in Naples in his early years and lived in Florence for most of his later life. In the political struggle of this city-state, he supported * * * and the regime. He is a good friend of Petrarch, and he loves studying ancient cultural classics as much as Petrarch. Boccaccio was a prolific writer, who wrote legends, narrative poems, epics and short stories. His masterpiece is decameron, a collection of short stories. This work tells the story of 1 young men and women who lived in a villa in the countryside of Florence for 1 days to avoid the Black Death, and told 1 stories, hence the name "decameron". Through these stories, the author exposes the darkness and corruption of the church, satirizes the treachery and hypocrisy of priests, praises the wisdom and talents of craftsmen and businessmen, and praises sincere love and noble sentiments. However, some of these stories have descriptions of indulgence of lust and praise of individualism, which shows the limitations of the author's bourgeois outlook on life. Just as The Divine Comedy laid the foundation for Italian poetry, decameron pioneered modern European short stories.
Machiavelli (1469-1527) was a political thinker and historian in the Italian Renaissance. Born in Florence to a declining aristocratic family. Since 1498, he has served as the secretary of the Committee of Ten in Florence * * * and the Republic of China, and has since been sent to various countries. In 1513, due to regime change, he was forced to leave his post. Retired in his later years and engaged in writing. In his book "The Prince", he clearly put forward the theory of political immorality, and advocated that in order to achieve political goals, all means should be taken, including the most despicable means. He believes: "The purpose always proves that the means are correct." This is the so-called Machiavellianism, which is a theory of extreme individualism and egoism. However, under the historical conditions at that time, his theory expressed the desire of the emerging bourgeoisie to establish an independent and unified Italian country, which played a positive role in opposing feudalism and ecclesiastical theocracy.
Shakespeare (1564-1616) was a great English poet and playwright. He wrote 37 plays, 154 sonnets and two long poems in his life. His plays are based on historical legends and literary materials from various countries. Many stories do not take place in Britain, but actually reflect the broad social life during the disintegration of British feudal system and the rise of capitalism, and express the political ideals and moral principles of humanists. His plays are extremely artistic. Shakespeare is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the world through the ages.
rabelais (about 1494-1553) was a French writer. As its representative, The Biography of the Giant consists of five parts, covering all aspects of law, politics, religion, ethics and philosophy at that time, reflecting the ideological consciousness and spiritual needs of the emerging bourgeoisie. This work is full of romanticism, exaggerated and humorous language, touching on the disadvantages of the times from time to time, with ironic effect.
Cervantes (1547-1616) was a great Spanish writer. Its representative is the novel Don Quixote. The work satirizes the decline of feudal nobles and widely depicts the social life of Spain from the end of 16th century to the beginning of 17th century.
Ptolemy (about 9-168) was an astronomer and geographer in ancient Rome. He is the author of "Astronomy Encyclopedia", which explains Ptolemy's cosmic system: the earth is at the center of the universe, the planets move around the center of this wheel, and the center of this wheel moves around the earth with a uniform wheel. This work was regarded as the authoritative work of astronomy in the Middle Ages. Ptolemy's theory of the center of the earth has dominated the astronomical community for more than 1 years. The reasons are as follows: ① Religion suppressed science, and the theory that was inconsistent with the geocentric theory was attacked and stifled; (2) Heliocentrism does not conform to people's sensory experience, and science has not developed to solve various problems caused by Heliocentrism; (3) Ptolemy tried to establish astronomy on the basis of mathematics, and people's actual observation was close to the result calculated by ptolemaic system.
Copernicus (1473-1543) was a Polish astronomer, who was studious and versatile all his life and was called an encyclopedic scholar in the Renaissance. He analyzed the irrationality of Ptolemy's geocentric theory, and put forward the "sun-centered theory" in his masterpiece "On the Movement of Celestial Bodies": the earth and planets rotate around their axes and revolve around the sun. Copernicus' Heliocentrism overthrew Ptolemy's geocentric theory and caused a fundamental change in people's view of the universe. Copernicus knew the revolutionary significance of his theory, and was afraid that the persecution of the church and the research results would be strangled in the cradle. He was too late to disclose all the research results, and he decided to publish the Theory of the Operation of Celestial Bodies until the age was near ancient times. Because Heliocentrism was against Christianity, the book was banned by the Catholic Church.
Kepler (1571-163) was a German writer and mathematician. He believed in Copernicus' Heliocentrism, but he was troubled by the fact that the circular orbit of the planet did not conform to the accurate observation data. Finally, he abandoned Copernicus's concept of circular orbit and uniform motion and discovered three laws of planetary motion named after him. The first law is the law of orbit: the planets all move along the elliptical orbit, and the sun is at a focus of the ellipse; The second law is the law of area: the motion of planets is not uniform, and the straight line connecting the sun and the planets sweeps the same area in the same time; The third law is the law of periodicity: the square of time for a planet to orbit the sun is directly proportional to the cube of the average distance from the planet to the sun. Kepler's theory laid the foundation of celestial mechanics and made theoretical preparations for the discovery of Newton's law of universal gravitation.
Galileo (1564-1642) was an Italian physicist, astronomer and one of the founders of modern experimental science. In 169, he made a telescope. At first, it could only be magnified 3 times, and after improvement, it could be magnified 32 times. He used to observe celestial bodies, found many stars that were invisible to the naked eye in the past, found the moon mountains, four satellites of Jupiter, sunspots and Venus, and found that the Milky Way is composed of countless stars, and so on. These findings confirm the correctness of Copernicus Heliocentrism. He enthusiastically publicized and defended Heliocentrism, which violated the Bible and the Pope and was sentenced to imprisonment.
Bruno (1548-16) was an Italian materialist philosopher and a strong fighter against feudal church rule. He believes that the universe is an all-encompassing unity, so not only the earth is not the center of the universe, but also the sun is not the center of the universe, because the universe is infinite and there is no absolute center at all. He said that the universe is infinite and there are countless worlds. He opposed theologians' so-called "heaven" and "earth" and pointed out that all natural things, including celestial bodies, were unified in matter. Bruno's philosophical thought not only criticized the geocentric theory advocated by Christianity, but also developed Copernicus' Heliocentrism, which was the highest achievement of the development of new philosophical thoughts in the Renaissance.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was a British materialist philosopher. He was born in a new noble family in London, and served as an important court official. In 1621, he was accused of taking bribes, removed from all official positions, and devoted himself to writing since then. However, his main theoretical writings were all completed during his official career.
Bacon regards epistemology as the central issue of his philosophy. He not only pointed out that man must obey the laws of nature, but also emphasized man's actions. He believes that if we master the laws of nature, human beings will gain truth in understanding and freedom in action. Bacon established his own materialist empiricism in the struggle against scholasticism. He believes that knowledge originates from experience, so he advocates observation and experiment. But he also emphasized the combination of perceptual knowledge and rational knowledge, so he pointed out that you should not be an ant who only collects materials, nor a spider who only spins a web from itself, but a bee who collects and processes. Bacon expounded the idea of establishing real induction in his book "The Theory of New Tools". He believes that one of the basic principles of induction is not to jump but to gradually rise from sensibility to rationality, so he opposes the cognitive method of flying from empirical materials to the most universal axioms at once.