His attack on contemporary Schoolmen centered on their preoccupation with logic, the universals, and a mere fragment of the Aristotelian corpus. He praised the Aristotelian paraphrases of Jacques Lef èvre d' Étaples and, in a letter to Erasmus (May 26, 1520), expressed complete agreement with Juan Luis Vives's False Dialecticians ( Pseudodialectici ). The latter may be divided into two philosophical periods, roughly separated by the year 1521, the year of publication of Henry VIII's Defense of the Seven Sacraments ( Assertio Septem Sacramentorum ), which More undertook to defend by his pseudonymous diatribe (1523) against Martin Luther's strictures.ĭuring his first period, in his justly famous letters to Martin Dorp (1515), to the University of Oxford (1518), and to a monk (1519 –1520), More opted for a simplified logic, the study of all Aristotle's works in Greek with their classical Greek commentaries, and the mastery of the Greek New Testament and Greek Fathers as well as the pagan classics in the original language. These traits appear not only in his highly imaginative and durably significant creation, Utopia, but also in his most pertinent pronouncements in real life. With respect to his philosophy, Thomas More belonged very much to the early or Erasmian period of the English Renaissance in his emotional and intellectual attitudes -toleration of eclecticism, search for simplicity, stress on ethics, return to Greek sources, and desire for reform: social, political, educational, religious, and philosophical. By the time of the Utopia (1516), he had long since mastered Greek and enjoyed the friendship of such humanists as Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas Linacre, William Grocyn, John Colet, Cuthbert Tunstall, and St. ![]() Increasingly involved in public affairs, More became a member of Parliament in 1504, beginning the career that led to the well-known events of his chancellorship and his martyrdom. However, a Latin translation of four Greek dialogues of Lucian appeared in 1506, and an English translation of the Latin life of his model, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, in 1510. He early composed various English poems and Latin epigrams that were not printed for years. His lectures dealt not only with law but also with St. ![]() More left without a degree to study at New Inn and Lincoln's Inn in London. Anthony's School and was appointed a page in the household of Archbishop (later Cardinal) Morton, who sent him to Canterbury Hall, Oxford, in the early 1490s. More was born the son of a London lawyer who later became a judge. Thomas More, was a lawyer and statesman rather than a philosopher.
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