Bernardino Telesio

His studies included a 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 and he wrote some short poems, brought back to light by Luca Irwin Fragale in 2010.

[2] In 1565 appeared his great work De Rerum Natura Iuxta Propria Principia (On the Nature of Things according to their Own Principles) and the complete edition of nine books was published in 1586.

After the death of his wife, Pope Pius IV offered him the Archbishopric of Cosenza, but Telesio refused in favour of his brother Tommaso.

Bernardino spent the last years of his life in Cosenza where he took over the philosophical-scientific "Telesian" Academy that had been started by Aulo Giano Parrasio.

At the end of his scheme, probably in deference to theological prejudices, 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 gaps in his 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.

[3] Telesio was the head of the great Southern Italian movement which protested against the accepted authority of abstract reason, and sowed the seeds from which sprang the scientific methods of Tommaso Campanella and Giordano Bruno, of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, with their widely divergent results.

(Mundi constructionem, corporumque in eo contentorum magnitudinem, naturamque non-ratione, quod antiquioribus factum est, inquirendam, sed sensu percipiendam.)

Bacon himself acknowledges Telesio as being "the first of the moderns" (De Telesio autem bene sentimus, atque eum ut amantem veritatis, & Scientiis utilem, & nonnullorum Placitorum emendatorem & novorum hominum primum agnoscimus., from Bacon's De principiis atque originibus) for putting observation above all other methods for acquiring knowledge about the natural world.