Bernardino Telesio

Works

• 1565On the Nature of Things according to Their Own Principles

  Explains nature without Aristotle’s forms, from heat, cold and matter perceived by the senses; first published in two books in 1565 and expanded to nine in 1586.

Position

Telesio is on the map as one of the first who rejected Aristotle’s natural philosophy as a whole rather than correcting it. His programme is in the title: nature is to be explained “according to its own principles”, as the senses show it, not through forms and essences devised by reason. Two active forces, heat and cold, contend for a passive bodily matter; every being strives to preserve itself, and this striving also grounds his ethics. Knowledge begins with sensation, and the intellect works by comparing and extending what the senses have given. Living beings perceive through a fine, warm spirit; for humans Telesio added an immortal soul created by God, which did not protect his work from church censorship after his death. His physics remained qualitative and did without mathematics, so historians usually place him at the threshold of the new science of Galileo rather than within it. His influence was nevertheless considerable. Campanella defended him in “Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses” (1591); Francis Bacon called him “the first of the new men”, while objecting that he had merely revived Parmenides’ pair of principles, heat and cold. Through such readers his naturalism and his reliance on the senses became part of the background of early modern philosophy of nature.

Life & context

Bernardino Telesio was born in 1509 in Cosenza in Calabria into a family of the local nobility. He was educated by his uncle, the humanist Antonio Telesio, in Milan and Rome, and then studied philosophy, mathematics and medicine in Padua, where he took his degree in 1535. After years of private study he returned to Calabria; in 1553 he married, and in 1561 his wife died. In 1565 Pope Pius IV offered him the archbishopric of Cosenza, which he declined in favour of his brother Tommaso. In the same year the first two books of “De natura iuxta propria principia” appeared in Rome; a revised edition, now titled “De rerum natura iuxta propria principia”, followed in Naples in 1570, and the final version in nine books in 1586. He lived alternately in Naples, supported by noble patrons, and in Cosenza, where he led the local academy, later named the Accademia Telesiana after him. Shorter treatises on the soul, the sea, colours, sleep and other natural phenomena appeared partly in his lifetime and were collected by Antonio Persio in 1590. Telesio died in Cosenza in 1588. In 1596 his writings were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books until corrected.

Further main works

• On Nature according to Its Own Principles, Books I–II (De natura iuxta propria principia liber primus et secundus, 1565)
• Various Short Treatises on Natural Things (Varii de naturalibus rebus libelli, ed. Antonio Persio, 1590)