De Mari, Liber Unicus. Ad Illustriss. Ferdinandum Carrasam Soriani Comitem. - [PAVING THE WAY FOR EMPIRICISM]

"TELESIO, BERNARDINO [BERNARDINUS TELESIUS].

About this Item

Napoli, Apud Iosephum Cacchium, 1570. 4to. Bound in 18th century marbled boards. Completely fresh and clean copy. Two small marginal holes to last two leaves, far from affecting text. Good, wide margins. Telesio's woodcut title-device (a beatiful naked woman, all alone, far from the troubles of the world, illuminated by the sun, surrounded by a border carrying the saying in Greek: "mona moi fila" - presumably depicting the goddess of Truth), and 11 lovely, illustrated woodcut initials. 12 ff. The rare first edition of one of Telesio's smaller scientific treatises, his treatise on the sea, which was based on purely empirical knowledge. The work constitutes a corrective to Aristotle and a continuation of his magnum opus on the things of nature, the important second edition of which was printed in the same year, also by Cacchium. The empiricism that Telesio propounds in his novel, empirically based scientific treatises, like the "De Mare", caused him to be to be considered "the first of the moderns" (Francis Bacon),"Bernardino Telesio (1509-1588) belongs to a group of independent philosophers of the late Renaissance who left the universities in order to develop philosophical and scientific ideas beyond the restrictions of the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition. Authors in the early modern period referred to these philosophers as 'novateurs' and 'modern'. In contrast to his successors Patrizzi and Campanella, Telesio was a fervent critic of metaphysics and insisted on a purely empiricist approach in natural philosophy-he thus became a forerunner of early modern empiricism. He had a remarkable influence on Tommaso Campanella, Giordano Bruno, Pierre Gassendi, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and authors of the clandestine Enlightenment like Guillaume Lamy and Giulio Cesare Vanini." (SEP).Telesio was born in Cosenza "and in a sense he opens the long line of philosophers through which the South of Italy has asserted its Greek heritage, a line that links him with Bruno and Campanella, with Vico in the eighteenth century, and with Croce and Gentile in our own time." (Kristeller, Eight Philosophers, p. 97). He was educated by his uncle, the humanist Antonio Telesio, in Milan and Rome, and he studied philosophy and mathematics at the university of Padua, where he got his doctorate in 1535. He had a great respect for the famous Aristotelian Vicenzo Maggi, with whom he discussed his magnum opus, obtaining his approval before publishing the seminal second version of it in 1570. He was closely connected not only with Maggi, but also with the other leaders of the most intelligent and official Aristotelianism of his age. But Telesio opposes the Aristotelianism of both his own and earlier times, claiming that they all erected arbitrary systems that consisted of a strange mixture of reason and experience. They created their systems without consulting nature, and thus they merely obtained arbitrary ideas of the world. What separates Telesio and his contemporaries from the great Renaissance thinkers that had gone ahead is not merely the passing of a few decades, but the emergence of a completely different intellectual atmosphere. "The tradition of medieval thought, which was still felt very strongly in the fifteenth century and even at the beginning of the sixteenth, began to recede into the more distant background, and it was now the tbroad thought and learning of the early Renaissance itself which constituted the tradition by which the new generations of thinkers were shaped, and against which their immediate reactions were directed." (Kristeller, Eight Philosophers, p. 91). Telesio belongs to a group of thinkers that we call the Renaissance philosophers of nature. They are considered a group by themselves, different from the humanists, Platonists, and Aristotelians that we usually group other Renaissance thinkers into. What distinguished these philosophers of nature, however, was not a different subject matter from that of the Aristotelians and the P. Seller Inventory # 46891

Bibliographic Details

Title: De Mari, Liber Unicus. Ad Illustriss. ...

Binding: Hardcover

Edition: 1st Edition