Bernardino Telesio

Telesio was born of noble parentage at Cosenza , a town in Calabria , a region of Southern Italy. He was educated at Milan by his uncle, Antonio, himself a scholar and a Poet of eminence, and afterwards at Rome and Padua . His studies included all the wide range of subjects, Classics , Science and Philosophy , which constituted the curriculum of the Renaissance savants. Thus equipped, he began his attack upon the medieval Aristotelianism which then flourished in Padua and Bologna . Resigning to his brother the archbishopric of Cosenza, offered to him by Pope Pius IV , he began to lecture at Naples and finally founded the academy of Cosenza. In 1563, or perhaps two years later, appeared his great work ''De Rerum Natura'', which was followed by a large number of scientific and philosophical works of subsidiary importance. The heterodox views which he maintained aroused the anger of the Church on behalf of its cherished Aristotelianism , and a short time after his death his books were placed on the Index,

Telesio was the head of the great South Italian movement which protested against the accepted authority of .

Moreover his theory of the cold earth at rest and the hot sun in motion was doomed to disproof at the hands of Copernicus . At the same time, the theory was sufficiently coherent to make a great impression on Italian thought. When Telesio went on to explain the relation of mind and matter, he was still more heterodox. Material forces are, by hypothesis, capable of feeling; matter also must have been from the first endowed with consciousness. For consciousness exists, and could not have been developed out of nothing. This leads him to a form of Hylozoism . Again, the soul is influenced by material conditions; consequently the soul must have a material existence. He further held that all knowledge is sensation ("non ratione sed sensu") and that intelligence is, therefore, an agglomeration of isolated data, given by the senses. He does not, however, succeed in explaining how the senses alone can perceive difference and identity. At the end of his scheme, probably in deference to theological preiudices, he added an element which was utterly alien, namely, a higher impulse, a soul superimposed by God , in virtue of which we strive beyond the world of sense.

The whole system of Telesio shows lacunae in argument, and ignorance of essential facts, but at the same time it is a forerunner of all subsequent Empiricism , scientific and philosophical, and marks clearly the period of transition from authority and reason to experiment and individual responsibility. Beside the ''De Rerum Natura'', he wrote ''De Somno'', ''De his guae in acre fiunt'', ''De Mari'', ''De Comelis et Circulo Lactea'', ''De usu respirationis'', etc.

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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry

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Bernardino Telesio