John Fisher.
Philosophical Orientation
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. These traits appear not only in his highly imaginative and durably significant creation, Utopia, but also in his most pertinent pronouncements in real life. 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.
During 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. He praised the Aristotelian paraphrases of Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and, in a letter to Erasmus (May 26, 1520), expressed complete agreement with Juan Luis Vives's False Dialecticians (Pseudodialectici).
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