Western Philosophy and the Becoming of Possibility: 5 Humanism and the Renaissance Re-Opening of Potential

The Renaissance marked a reawakening of possibility after centuries of scholastic constraint. Where medieval philosophy had tethered thought to divine hierarchy, Renaissance humanism reopened the horizon of construal by rediscovering agency, perspective, and worldly knowledge. This was not a simple rejection of theology but a reorientation: from the transcendent authority of God toward the capacities of human beings to know, create, and transform their world.

Classical texts, newly recovered and translated, offered resources for reimagining the conditions of thought. Petrarch, Erasmus, and other humanists looked to antiquity not for scholastic reconciliation but for inspiration in eloquence, ethics, and civic life. The humanist project construed possibility as grounded in human faculties: reason, imagination, and expression. To know was not only to contemplate divine order but to engage actively with worldly affairs.

This shift was epitomised in the rediscovery of perspective. In art, linear perspective transformed representation, situating the viewer at the centre of a calculable space. In philosophy, perspective became a metaphor for the finitude and creativity of human vision. Knowledge was no longer confined to universal hierarchy but construed as perspectival and situated, anchored in the embodied position of the human subject.

At the same time, Renaissance science and exploration expanded the horizons of possibility. Copernican astronomy displaced Earth from the centre of the cosmos; voyages across oceans revealed worlds beyond the medieval imagination. Such discoveries reconfigured construal by demonstrating that knowledge could grow through empirical encounter, measurement, and experiment. The world was no longer a fixed hierarchy but an open field of inquiry.

Humanism thus marked a re-opening of potential: an insistence that meaning, truth, and value could be construed within human capacities and worldly contexts. The dignity of man, as Pico della Mirandola declared, lay in the ability to shape one’s own becoming — to actualise potential through choice, creativity, and reason.

This Renaissance construal did not abolish theology, but it decentered it. Divinity remained, but it was no longer the sole horizon of possibility. Human beings emerged as active participants in the shaping of knowledge and meaning. In this reorientation, the Renaissance laid the groundwork for modern thought: a world where construal would increasingly be understood as the activity of human reason within an ever-expanding field of potential.