Abstract
Immanence in Renaissance philosophy is primarily an epistemological category derived from a reading of Aristotle and the Medieval Aristotelian tradition. Immanent actions are considered operations of the soul which remain in the operating one itself and do not have a cause or effect on external matter. These immanent actions are distinguished from transient actions. The main issue for Renaissance philosophers involved determining which activities of the soul (nutrition, sensation, intellection, will) can be assessed as immanent. Immanence as a metaphysical category only emerged in the seventeenth century with Spinoza’s concept of God as causa immanens and was later extrapolated by philosophy historians, who were influenced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment and by German idealism, on the description of two originally Neoplatonic ideas: (1) the intrinsicness of the world soul in the world as the immanence of the soul in the world in connection with panpsychism and (2) the presence of the divine in the world as the immanence of God in the world in connection with pantheism.
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Nejeschleba, T. (2019). Immanence, Renaissance Idea Of. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_432-1
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