Giambattista Vico

Francisco Suárez was a Spanish Jesuit priest, philosopher and theologian, one of the leading figures of the School of Salamanca movement, and generally regarded among the greatest scholastics after Thomas Aquinas. Francisco Suárez was born in Granada, Andalusia . At age sixteen... Suárez entered the Society of Jesus in Salamanca, and he studied Philosophy and Theology there for five years from 1565 to 1570. It seems he was not a promising student at first; in fact, he nearly gave up his matters of study after failing the entrance exam twice. After passing the exam at third attempt, though, things changed, and he completed his course of Philosophy with distinction, going on to study Theology, to then teach Philosophy in Ávila and Segovia. He was ordained in 1572, and taught Theology in Ávila, Segovia , Valladolid , Rome , Alcalá , Salamanca , and Coimbra . He wrote on a wide variety of subjects, producing a vast amount of work .
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Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, orator, political theorist, Roman consul and constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists. He introduced the Romans... to the chief schools of Greek philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary distinguishing himself as a linguist, translator, and philosopher. Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited for initiating the 14th-century Renaissance. According to Polish historian Tadeusz Zieliński, "Renaissance was above all things a revival of Cicero, and only after him and through him of the rest of Classical antiquity." The peak of Cicero's authority and prestige came during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and his impact on leading Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, and Montesquieu was substantial.
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Lorenzo Valla was an Italian humanist, rhetorician, and educator. His family was from Piacenza; his father, Luciave della Valla, was a lawyer. In 1431 he entered the priesthood, and after trying in vain to secure a position as apostolic secretary, he went to Piacenza, whence he proceeded to... Pavia, where he obtained a professorship of eloquence. His tenure at Pavia was made unpleasant by his attack on the Latin style of the great jurist Bartolus de Saxoferrato. Valla wandered from one university to another, accepting short engagements and lecturing in many cities. In 1433 Valla made his way to Naples, to the court of Alfonso V of Aragon, who made Valla his private Latin secretary and defended him against the attacks on account of his public statements about theology, including one in which he denied that the Apostles' Creed was composed in succession by each of the twelve Apostles. These charges were eventually dropped. By this time Valla had won a high reputation for two works: his dialogue De Voluptate, and his treatise De Elegantiis Latinae Linguae.
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Augustine of Hippo , also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin, St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius . He was a Latin philosopher and theologian from Roman Africa. His writings were very influential in the development of Western... Christianity. According to his contemporary, Jerome, Augustine "established anew the ancient Faith." In his early years he was heavily influenced by Manichaeism and afterward by the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. After his conversion to Christianity and baptism in AD 387, Augustine developed his own approach to philosophy and theology, accommodating a variety of methods and different perspectives. He believed that the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom, and he framed the concepts of original sin and just war. When the Western Roman Empire was starting to disintegrate, Augustine developed the concept of the Catholic Church as a spiritual City of God , distinct from the material Earthly City.
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