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ABSTRACT
This paper tries to present a different view of Francesco Patrizi’s anti-Aristotelian philology such as it transpires in his masterful monograph of 1581, the Discussiones Peripateticae, the influence of which was widely felt in seventeenth-century Europe. The book is the product of a learned, Hellenizing, and deeply inspired critique of a major doctrinal corpus from classical antiquity, and it is usually taken as a stepping stone in a self-righteous fight by “modern” philosophers to replace Aristotelianism as the dominant academic system. This essay is revisionist on the second of these accounts.
Notes on contributor
Stefano Gulizia (PhD, Indiana University) is currently a research fellow at the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies in Warsaw, writing a monograph on the reception of Aristotelian natural philosophy in Central Europe. He serves on the board of the association Scientiae. In 2019, he edited a special issue of Society and Politics on imperial bureaucracy and artificial life.
Notes
1 Falcon, Aristotle and the Science of Nature, 113, argues that Sextus Empiricus, or the source from which he takes this information, conflated the Platonic/Pythagorean context with the Aristotelian discussions of the celestial body. The strategy of these texts is further studied in Algra and Ierodiakonou, Sextus Empiricus and Ancient Physics.
2 Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, 81.
3 Of course, the doxographical tradition here is conflating ‒ exactly like Patrizi will do later ‒ two historical characters, one of whom was a friend and correspondent of Plato; see Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum.
4 Valla, Dialectical Disputations, 14; see Hatzimichali, “Pseudo-Archytas and the Categories”.
5 On this printing network, see below and Perini, La vita e i tempi di Pietro Perna, 184–5. Here I concentrate on the Basel edition (hereafter DP), not on its stand-alone Venetian predecessor, although the originality of approaching the Peripatetic philosopher by espousing and crystallizing the various topoi that built around his life in a single book is in itself worthy of further research; see Ben-Tov, “Biography as a Pedagogical Argument”; Backus, Life Writing in Reformation Europe.
6 The point about Simplicius’ importance is made with admirable clarity in Deitz, “Patrizi’s Criticism of Aristotle’s Logic”, 118.
7 Nejeschleba, “Jessenius, Between Plagiarism and Patrizi’s Philosophy”.
8 Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance. On forgeries, see Grafton, Forgers and Critics; Ligota, “Annius of Viterbo and Historical Method”; Grafton, Defenders of the Text, 80–103. Grafton’s fortunate thesis boils down to appreciating how the forger’s techniques are inherently coessential (and perhaps even chronologically superior) to the tools of the scholar’s trade; forgers and critics are siblings, and the latter steps into a trail first blazed through by the former. With great originality, Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction, 117–8, extends the category of “forgery” to figural artifacts, by stating that labels and framing devices cut across ossified taxonomies and transform a fake into a situational object. In the course of Patrizi’s massive DP, the Greek citations can be said to take on a similar “labelling” function (like paper slips, say, or interleaved folia in a privately owned printed edition); they stop the argument’s flow, stimulating the reader’s eye thanks to the technological diversity of their font, and they play a role in the business of adjudicating rival claims of authenticity.
9 In 1583, two years after the DP, Patrizi published in Ferrara what he understood as John Philoponus’ commentary to the Metaphysics, with the title of Breves expositiones; Sorabji, Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science, 63, considers Philoponus a possible source for Patrizi’s ideas on space and the disrupture of Aristotle’s categories.
10 The literature on these subjects is huge. On the diversity and survival of Aristotelianism, see Blum, Studies on Early Modern Aristotelianism; Tuominen, Hienämaa, and Mäkinen, New Perspectives on Aristotelianism. For an overview of the vernacular context, see Bianchi, “Per una storia dell’aristotelismo ‘volgare’ nel Rinascimento” (which is in many ways the seminal intervention); Sgarbi, The Italian Mind; Refini, The Vernacular Aristotle, and the project on “Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy” led by D. A. Lines (https://vari.warwick.ac.uk/); useful discussion of the categorical fluidity resulting from teaching is Casalini and Sander, “Benet Perera’s Pious Humanism”; finally, the fullest treatment of anti-Aristotelianism up to date is Martin, Subverting Aristotle.
11 For Gassendi, see Lolordo, Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy, 37; Garber, “Telesio among the Novatores”; the best treatment of the English intellectual ramifications is now Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 230–328.
12 Muccillo, “La storia della filosofia presocratica”; Muccillo, “Ordine e metodo nella filosofia di Patrizi”.
13 The responses and drafts housed in Parma and contained in Biblioteca Palatina, MS 665, would reward more research; see Puliafito, Materiali per una edizione emendata; Palumbo, “Books on the Run”.
14 Muccillo, Platonismo, Ermetismo; Leijenhorst, “Patrizi’s Hermetic Philosophy”; Puliafito, “Metaphysics of Light”; Mulsow, Das Ende des Hermetismus.
15 Conring, De Hermetica Aegyptiorum medicina.
16 Conversely, the notion of a prisca historia appears in Tasso, Le sette giornate del mondo creato, 173. Tasso morphed into an ideal friend and rival in Patrizi’s late life; see Nicolaou-Konnari, “Patrizi’s Cypriot Connections”, 182–5.
17 Patrizi, DP, 25 (C1r).
18 These paragraphs are filled with references to “problem-texts” to the brim; see Mayhew, The Aristotelian Problemata Physica.
19 See, e.g. Patrizi, DP, 25 (C1r):
Libri duo de Plantis, quod nomen inter incontroversos initio positum fuerat, nunc in dubium vocatur: nam eorum interpres ex recentioribus Graecis attestatur eos libros primum de Graecis Latinos factos, de Latinis Arabicos, de Arabicis rursus Latinos, ad demum de Latinis Graecos. Potuerunt forte priores illi germami Aristotelis fuisse; at quos habemus, ut sunt, nequaquam sunt Aristotelis.
20 Blair, “Mosaic Physics”, 35–42; see also Sytsma, Richard Baxter and the Mechanical Philosophers.
21 For instance, in the discussion on the correct order of Aristotle’s works on natural science (t. I, vol. 9), a topic debated with great vigor in the Venetian milieu of Patrizi’s time, Averroes’ opinion is reported with utmost respect; see Patrizi, DP, 112 (K2v); Falcon, “Aristotle and the Study of Animals and Plants”.
22 Ambrosian Library, Milan, MS G 69 inf., f. 212v.
23 I fully agree with Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 8, that if we insist on pagan or heterodox narratives, which in our case means constructing the DP as a gateway to the Nova, figures like Patrizi fall into a scholarly gap: no longer “syncretist” like Ficino and yet not fully “enlightened”.
24 See Tugnoli Pattaro, Metodo e sistema delle scienze nel pensiero di Aldrovandi.
25 Santinello, Models of the History of Philosophy.
26 Muccillo, Platonismo, Ermetismo, 101–9.
27 Muccillo, Platonismo, Ermetismo, 79.
28 In succession, Patrizi interspersed Empedocles in his monograph through Sextus Empiricus (Muccillo, Platonismo, Ermetismo, 120), reworked to his advantage the richness of Democritean physiology (Muccillo, Platonismo, Ermetismo, 130), and provided new links to the Telesian tradition (Muccillo, Platonismo, Ermetismo, 137); these results are reached by a close reading of the DP, t. III, vol. 1. On the doxographical method, see Mansfeld, “Pyrrhonizing Aristotelianism”; Mansfeld, “Diaphonia”.
29 Muccillo, Platonismo, Ermetismo, 115–7; her treatment here follows and develops intelligent remarks first made by Cesare Vasoli, which, as far as I know, have rarely been taken seriously. For more on Patrizi and Ramus, see Oldrini, La disputa del metodo; Artese, “Antonio Persio e la diffusione del ramismo”.
30 Muccillo, Platonismo, Ermetismo, 115–7.
31 The theme has been reprised by Luc Deitz in his contribution to this special issue; see also Muccillo, Platonismo, Ermetismo, 160–74.
32 The most clear statement in this sense is Muccillo, Platonismo, Ermetismo, 93.
33 For Speroni’s “adversarial” rediscovery of another pre-Socratic tradition partially obliterated by Plato’s ideological stance, that of the sophists, see Katinis, Sperone Speroni.
34 Any investigation of the ars historiae in late Renaissance Padua should start with Pinelli’s collection, but almost everything still remains to be done; see, for now, Bragagnolo, “La descrizione di città”; Tutino, Shadows of Doubt; Bravo, “The Rise of the Notion of Historical Criticism”.
35 For Patrizi as historian, see Gulizia, “First Notes on Patrizi’s Methods” and the bibliography cited there.
36 Willmott, “Aristoteles exotericus”.
37 List and discussion in Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 119. It would be worth reflecting on if and in what sense the simultaneous presence of these intellectual genres and techniques modify Patrizi’s opinion of current trends in Aristotelianism, which is generally taken to be quite dismissive, along with his supposed, equally negative opinion of Alexander of Aphrodisias (see, for all, Muccillo, Platonismo, Ermetismo, 186).
38 Fleming, The Invention of Discovery, 65.
39 Case, Sphaera civitatis, 267.
40 Stolzenberg, Egyptian Oedipus.
41 For example, in DP, 67 (t. I, vol. 6; F4r), I find remarkably little ground for an interpretation along the lines of a disrupture or an indictment of the Aristotelian tradition that would signify a further critique of what other writers had already said, or doubted, even though the context is ostensibly fertile to syncretism because it discusses a “conjunction of the Oceans” between Arabic, Etruscan, and Brahmanic sources. What the text is mostly doing is: 1) advancing a Latin translation of a Greek fragment preserved by Gellius (Rose, Aristoteles Pseudepigraphus, 592–3) and proposing an argument that seems to be based on dialogism and territoriality; 2) developing a standard doxographical treatment that builds upon Proclus and Clemens Alexandrinus; and 3) offering a very interesting remark about how in philology nothing is abrupt, but unfolds over time, with the language for such gradualism (paulatim) being borrowed from Virgil, Ecl., 4, 28; see Gottschalk, “Continuity and Change in Aristotelianism”; Mager, “Die Pinakes des Andronikos”).
42 These three points are made, respectively, in Martin, Subverting Aristotle, 60, 69, and 113.
43 Martin, Subverting Aristotle, 104–12.
44 Cavalli, De numero et ordine partium.
45 Siraisi, “In Search of the Origins”, brilliantly observed the eclectic, miscellaneous aesthetic that, with the author’s consent, was bestowed upon Mercuriale’s medical writings.
46 Siraisi, “In Search of the Origins”, 251–4.
47 Muccillo, “La libreria greca di Patrizi”.
48 For the most part, Patrizi’s adventurous attempts to sell a lot of Greek manuscripts to Philip II at the Escorial library have been taken by scholars as an exotic feature of his tormented Renaissance life. But if we move beyond the psychological sphere, it is possible to read the constant search for artifacts as crucial for the rise of Oriental studies in the Venetian environment, including its propensity for camouflages.
49 While there is no equivalent yet of the kind of studies dedicated to Leibniz’s correspondence in Galileo’s case, historians have made enquiries concerning the scientist’s local ramifications; see Reeves, Painting the Heavens; Wilding, Galileo’s Idol.
50 See especially Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 237.
51 Van den Broek and Hanegraaff, Gnosis and Hermeticism, 133, think that Patrizi enlarged Pletho’s outlook with Neoplatonist sources; see also Monfasani, Nicolaus Scutellius.
52 Williams, “Scholastic Awareness”.
53 Stolzenberg, Egyptian Oedipus, 150.
54 Leinkauf, “Patrizi: New Philosophies of History”, 211.
55 Many polemical bits, such as the one about obscurity (Aristotle’s style blackens everything, like the cuttlefish’s ink), are in fact traditional, and already used, for different purposes, by Pico della Mirandola.
56 On which, see Vermeir and Regier, Boundaries, Extents; Bakker, Bellis, and Palmerino, Space, Imagination and the Cosmos.
57 Ebbesen, “Philoponus, Alexander”.
58 On the technique of opposing accounts of equal weight, see Algra and Ierodiakonou, Sextus Empiricus and Ancient Physics, 3.
59 Pomata and Siraisi, Historia.
60 On this strategy, see Bonazzi, “Eudorus of Alexandria and the Pythagorean Pseudepigrapha”; Chiaradonna, “Autour d’Eudore”; Centrone, “The Pseudo-Pythagorean Writings”; Hatzimichali, “Pseudo-Archytas and the Categories”.