Bernardino Telesio

Bernardino Telesio (Italian: [bernarˈdiːno teˈlɛːzjo]) (7 November 1509 – 2 October 1588) was an Italian philosopher and natural scientist. While his natural theories were later disproven, his emphasis on observation made him the "first of the moderns" who eventually developed the scientific method.

Telesio was born of noble parentage in Cosenza, a city in Calabria, Southern Italy. He was educated in Milan by his uncle, Antonio, himself a scholar and a poet of eminence, and afterwards in 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. In 1553 he married and settled in Cosenza, becoming the founder of the Cosentian Academy. For a time he lived in the household of Alfonso III Carafa, Duke of Nocera. In 1563, or perhaps two years later, appeared his great work De Rerum Natura Iuxta Propria Principia (On the Nature of Things according to their Own Principles), 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.

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, (1) 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, thought it is no less convincing than Aristotles hot/cold, dry/wet explanation, 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.

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