Bernardino Telesio (1509 - 1588) was an Italian philosopher and natural scientist. // Events February 2 - Battle of Diu took place near Diu, India. ... 1588 was a leap year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar or a leap year starting on Monday of the Julian calendar. ...

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, Cosenza is a town and comune in the Calabria region of southern Italy, 39°18N 16°14E, on the Crati River at 238 m (781 ft) above sea-level. ... Calabria, formerly Brutium, is a region in southern Italy which occupies the toe of the Italian peninsula south of Naples. ... Location within Italy Milan (Italian: Milano; Milanese dialect: Milán) is the main city in northern Italy, and is located in the plains of Lombardy, the most populated and developed region in Italy. ... Poets are authors of poems, or of other forms of poetry such as dramatic verse. ... City motto: Senatus Populusque Romanus – SPQR (The Senate and the People of Rome) Founded 21 April 753 BC mythical, 1st millennium BC Region Latium Mayor Walter Veltroni (Democratici di Sinistra) Area  - City Proper  1290 km² Population  - City (2004)  - Metropolitan  - Density (city proper) 2,546,807 almost 4,000,000 1... Location within Italy Tronco Maestro Riviera: a pedestrian walk along a section of the inland waterway or naviglio interno of Padua The city of Padua (Lat. ... Classics, particularly within the Western University tradition, when used as a singular noun, means the study of the language, literature, history, art, and other aspects of Greek and Roman culture during the time frame known as classical antiquity. ... // What is science? There are different theories of what science is. ... Philosophy is a discipline or field of study involving the investigation, analysis, and development of ideas at a general, abstract, or fundamental level. ... By Region: Italian Renaissance Northern Renaissance *French Renaissance *German Renaissance *English Renaissance The Renaissance, also known as Il Rinascimento (in Italian), was an influential cultural movement which brought about a period of scientific revolution and artistic transformation, at the dawn of modern European history. ... Bologna (from Latin Bononia, Bulaggna in the local dialect) is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, between the Po River and the Apennines. ... Pius IV, né Giovanni Angelo Medici (March 31, 1499 – December 9, 1565), pope from 1559 to 1565, was born of humble parentage in Milan, unrelated with the Medicis of Florence. ... Aristotle, marble copy of bronze by Lysippos. ...

Telesio was the head of the great South Italian movement which protested against the accepted authority of abstract reason, and sowed the seeds from which sprang the scientific methods of Campanella and Bruno, of Bacon and Descartes, with their widely divergent results. He, therefore, abandoned the purely intellectual sphere and proposed an inquiry into the data given by the senses, from which he held that all true knowledge really comes. Instead of postulating matter and form, he bases existence on matter and force. This force has two opposing elements: heat, which expands, and cold, which contracts. These two processes account for all the diverse forms and types of existence, while the mass on which the force operates remains the same. The harmony of the whole consists in this, that each separate thing develops in and for itself in accordance with its own nature while at the same time its motion benefits the rest. The obvious defects of this theory, (i) that the senses alone cannot apprehend matter itself, (2) that it is not clear how the multiplicity of phenomena could result from these two forces, and (3) that he adduced no evidence to substantiate the existence of these two forces, were pointed out at the time by his pupil, Patrizzi. Tommaso Campanella (September 5, 1568 - May 21, 1639), baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella, was a Dominican theologian, philosopher and poet. ... Giordano Bruno Giordano Bruno (1548 – February 17, 1600), a. ... Statue of Roger Bacon in the Oxford University Museum Roger Bacon (c. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Francesco Patrizzi (Franciscus Patritus) (1529-1597), was an Italian philosopher and scientist. ...

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. Nicolaus Copernicus (in Latin; Polish Mikołaj Kopernik, German Nikolaus Kopernikus - February 19, 1473 – May 24, 1543) was a Polish astronomer, mathematician and economist who developed a heliocentric (Sun-centered) theory of the solar system in a form detailed enough to make it scientifically useful. ... Hylozoism is the philosophical doctrine that all material things possess life. ... The term God is capitalized in the English language as a proper noun when used to refer to a specific monotheistic concept of a Supreme Being in accordance with Christian, Jewish (sometimes as G-d - cf. ...

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. Empiricism (greek εμπειρισμός, from empirical, latin experientia - the experience), is the philosophical doctrine that all human knowledge comes at first from senses and experience. ...

References

• This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which is in the public domain.

Supporters contend that the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1911) represents the sum of human knowledge at the beginning of the 20th century; indeed, it was advertised as such. ... The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ...

External links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry