1,721,048 research outputs found
Aristotle's Zoology and its Renaissance Commentators (1521-1601)
No full textAlmost neglected in the Middle Ages, Aristotle's libri de animalibus received increasing attention in the Cinquecento, and were often commented on by several professional Aristotelians. Dr. Perfetti reconstructs this commentary tradition: a parabola that goes from Pomponazzi's lessons on the De partibus animalium (held in Bologna, 1521-23) up to the publication of Cristoforo Guarinoni's Commentaria in primum librum De historia animalium, Frankfurt 1601, and includes other bright lights of the Aristotelian scene, such as Niccolo Leonico Tomeo, Agostino Nifo, Julius Caesar Scaliger, Simone Porzio, Francesco Vimercato, Cesare Cremonini, and Theodore Gaza. The author pays special attention to the peculiar techniques of analysis employed by each commentator and to the balance between philology, erudition, and natural philosophy. This study also provides a reading key that explains the reasons for this renewed interest for philosophical zoology in the first half of the century and explains why commentators transformed their use of Aristotle's zoology throughout the second half of the century, to reach, eventually, the extinction of exegesis per modum commenti
Posthumanism, Nihilism and Midrash: the dissolution of all hopes in Giacomo Leopardi’s Canticle of the Sylvan Cock
No full textIn the Canticle of the Wild Cock (1824), one of his Moral Essays, Giacomo Leopardi portrays the possibility of a lifeless, post-biological and totally dehumanized world. Life itself and human self-consciousness are depicted as temporary anomalies within the economy of universal naked material existence. At this stage, not having yet at his disposal the conceptual instruments to give these conclusions a materialistic physical foundation, Leopardi reaches them through poetical and rhetorical strategies. In particular, he reverses the midrashic figure of a cosmic rooster: far from being a symbol of awakening and regeneration, this Cock proclaims a chilling message, according to the visual angle of a dehumanized universe, and invites us to dry up all hope. This paper analyses: (i) cultural substitutions and reversals in Leopardi’s discourse, (ii) his techniques of argumentation, and (iii) the relationship between the Canticle and Leopardi’s nihilism and materialism
Review of G. Pomata - N.G. Siraisi (eds.) Historia. Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA - London, England 2005
No full textAn anima nostra sit mortalis. Una quaestio inedita discussa da Pietro Pomponazzi nel 1521
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Biblical Exegesis and Aristotelian Naturalism: Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and the Animals of the Book of Job
Full text linkThis essay examines the biblical discourse on animals in Job 38-41, as interpreted by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas in their 13th-century biblical commentaries. In God’s first reply to Job (chapters 38 and 39) twelve species of animals are introduced and realistically described, including accurate details of their behavior. Subsequently, chapters 40 and 41 introduce two more complex animals, Behemoth and Leviathan, in which realistic and symbolic features intertwine. This peculiarity of the book of Job – long sequences dedicated to descriptions of animals – allows to investigate to what extent and how the availability of Aristotelian zoology, whose study was prescribed in the Dominican program promoted and practiced by Albert himself, became an instrument for a renewed biblical exegesis, different from the allegorical and theological moralizing hitherto prevailing in the Christian tradition of commentaries on Job
Armando Carlini e il “problema religioso” di Aristotele
No full textIn his many books devoted to Aristotle (mainly selections of texts in translation, with annotations and interpretative essays), Armando Carlini sketches out an original theoretical analysis, echoing the main tenets of his own philosophical development. According to Carlini, Aristotle’s “religious problem” goes beyond philosophy of religion and links ontology and gnoseology within a framework of philosophical ‘actualism’. At different degrees, the essence of God and man is thought and self-cosciousness. God is the full actuality of self-thinking, the perfect form of self-consciousness. Man, as he experiences that contemplative life described in Nicomachean Ethics bk. 10, is a self-consciousness in search of the self; and he does it by going up the other from himself (multiplicity, world etc.). In his actualistic analysis of bks. 7-8-9 and 12 of the Metaphysics, Carlini points out that Aristotle’s inquiry on the “on he on” (“being qua being) is fully revealed as “act within the act of knowledge”. There is a complete coincidence of the actuality of substance and the act through which we attain its knowledge: Aristotle’s ousia is the perfect synthesis of ‘act of thinking’ and ‘the thought object’
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