PAVING THE WAY FOR EMPIRICISM

TELESIO, BERNARDINO [BERNARDINUS TELESIUS].

De Mari, Liber Unicus. Ad Illustriss. Ferdinandum Carrasam Soriani Comitem.

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 Platonists (of both contemporary and earlier times), but their clear claim to explore the principles of nature in an original and independent way, tearing themselves loose of an established tradition and authority that kept them in binds. They formulated novel theories andfreed themselves from the ancient philosophical authorities, especially Aristotle, who had dominated philosophical speculation, not least natural philosophy, for centuries.

Telesio, of course, did not stand alone in this group of bold, original thinkers that we call the Renaissance philosophers of nature, and whose quest it was to make new discoveries and to attain knowledge unaccessible to the ancients, it also included for instance Fracastoro, Cardano, Paracelsus, and Bruno. But Telesio in particular protrudes, as his thought is distinguished by such clarity and coherence, and his ideas anticipate important aspects of later philosophy and science.

"Telesio dedicated his whole life to establishing a new kind of natural philosophy, which can be described as an early defense of empiricism bound together with a rigorous criticism of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Galenic physiology. Telesio blamed both Aristotle and Galen for relying on elaborate reasoning rather than sense perception and empirical research. His fervent attacks against the greatest authorities of the Western philosophical and medical traditions led Francis Bacon to speak of him as "the first of the moderns" (Opera omnia vol. III, 1963, p. 114). He was perhaps the most strident critic of metaphysics in late Renaissance times. It was obviously due to his excellent relationships with popes and clerics that he was not persecuted and was able during his own lifetime to publish his rather heterodox writings, which went on the index shortly after his death." (SEP).
"Giordano Bruno speaks of the "giudiciosissimo Telesio" in the third dialog of "De la causa", whilst Francis Bacon based his own speculative philosophy of nature on a blend of Telesian and Paracelsian conceptions (Giachetti Assenza 1980; Rees 1977; 1984). Thomas Hobbes followed Telesio in the rejection of species (Schuhmann 1990; Leijenhorst 1998, p. 116ff.) The physiology of René Descartes in "De homine" shows close similarities to Telesio's physiological theories as they are presented in "De natura rerum" (Hatfield 1992). Telesio also had some influence on Gassendi and on libertine thinkers (Bianchi 1992)." (SEP).

Adams: T:291.

Order-nr.: 46891