IT 1751 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Francesco Guicciardini

• School: York University
• Department: Italian
• Course: IT 1751
• Professor: John Picchione

Document Summary

Experience is emphasized throughout most of his work, including ricordi. In ricordi , experience has to face constant changes of the historical realities and these experiences are not sufficient to deal with chance or risks. Machiavelli is able to provide us with a theory through history and what can be learned from history. Provides us with excellent tools for examination. He lacks the theoretical breath machiavelli has because guiccardini lacks optimism. In guiccardini"s works, there is lots of relativism (things are becoming relative to experience) means we don"t have a solid foundation we can build trans-historical (or information that is farther from history) knowledge from. How wrong it is to cite the romans at every turn. For any comparison to be valid, it would be necessary to have a city with conditions like theirs, and then govern it according to their example.