Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the history of philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode, pen pals, later French humanism.

As an American living in Germany, I obviously have regular opportunities to regret that I am not a native German speaker, but I also have regular opportunities to be glad that my mother tongue is English.

This is especially so in academic settings. When there's an international meeting of scholars from, say, France, Finland, Italy, Germany, and Greece, their common language is bound to be English.

I'm often the only native speaker in a group like that, which is sort of like showing up to a tennis tournament with a state of the art, graphite, and carbon fiber racket, while everyone else is using wooden ones.

Most academic publishing is in English, too, which suits me just fine. Of the European nations, it's really only France that has maintained its own language as the cheap vehicle for writing about philosophy.

The French, of course, have a long and proud history of refusing to learn English, but in an earlier period of that history, they did switch into another foreign tongue in academic contexts, Latin.

This is illustrated by the correspondence of Joseph Scaliger, the son of Julius Caesar Scaliger, whom we covered in episode 401.

In a letter written in 1608, the younger Scaliger relates with Sonsha Grin, how he fell into an awkward conversation with an Englishman in the Dutch city of Leiden.

This visitor, admitted Scaliger, might as well have been speaking Turkish, and unfortunately, even the most learned Englishman pronounced Latin very badly.

sneering at the English for their lack of linguistic achievement, another longstanding French custom.

Scaliger's letter was written in Latin, not in French, which was not unusual. His voluminous surviving correspondence runs to 1653 letters, more than a thousand of which are in Latin.

Scaliger regularly corresponded with other Frenchmen, not in their shared tongue, but in Latin, especially when discussing scholarly matters.

This may seem surprising, but I've often seen something similar, Germans choosing to give papers in English in front of German speaking audiences,

on the grounds that they are not used to talking about philosophy in their native language.

The correspondent to whom Scaliger sent the most surviving letters was the humanist, Isaac Hazalborn, of whom Scaliger said that he was the greatest Greek scholar that we have, he is my superior.

The many messages they sent to one another exemplify a phenomenon that we have seen before, as with the surviving correspondence of Erasmus, and these stylish letters written by Italian humanists.

It's also a phenomenon that will need extensive discussion when we get to early modern philosophy. I have in mind the so-called Republic of Letters, in which learned men, and occasionally women, around Europe, pursued scientific and philosophical questions by writing to one another, usually in Latin.

By the turn of the 17th century, this Republic of Letters was well on its way to being founded.

Scaliger, for instance, wrote two among many others, Tico Brache, Johannes Kepler, Theodore Beza, Eustus Lipsius, Philippe Dumone, and for good measure, the kings of France and Scotland.

But it makes sense that Cazalborn was Scaliger's favorite penpal, because they had so much in common, both were Huguenos, who passed through the unofficial capital of the Calvinist world, Geneva.

Cazalborn studied there as a young man, while Scaliger became a professor of philosophy there, after fleeing France following the St. Bartholomew's day massacre.

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