TELESIO, Bernadino (1509-1558)

De rerum natura iuxta propria principia Libri IX ... Neapoli apud Horatium Salvianum. M.D. LXXXVII

Naples: Orazio Salviani, 1587.
Folio: [dagger]2 A--2I6 2K--2L4 2[dagger]4, 206 leaves, [4] 400 [8] (last page blank) but mis-bound with [dagger]2 after A6. Roman letter. Woodcut printer's device on title, 8 and 6-line initials. Woodcut diagram on p. 151. Leaf size and condition: 313 x 210mm. Titlepage dustsoiled and frayed in the outer margin and strengthened with tissue. 3 wormholes through the text at the beginning, dissappearing after sig. E. A good clean copy. Binding: Eighteenth-century English calf, red edges, recently rebacked. Corners worn. Provenance and annotation: No contemporary marks of ownership or annotations. An unidentified eighteenth-century owner, 'E. C.' has noted Bacon's references to Telesio on the front free endleaf, annotated the last leaf 'Collated Perfect E:C:' and repeated his initials on the rear endleaf. Walter Pagel (1896--1983); B. E. J. Pagel (1930--2007). References: EDIT16 CNCE 30886; Adams T293 (1586 issue); Riccardi, I, pt. 2, col 512 no.4.
The first complete edition with books 3--9 printed for the first time, second issue with reset prelims and final gathering. This edition was first issued in 1586 and some copies of that issue have the same final gathering as here. First published as De natura iuxta propria principia liber primus et secundus (Rome, Antonio Blado, 1565); second edition, De rerum natura iuxta propria principia, liber primus, et secundus, denuò editi, (Naples, Giuseppe Cacchi, 1570). EDIT16 also notes an edition of all nine books published by Salviani in 1580 with an unconfirmed location at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Rome, but I can find no other copies of such an issue or edition.
§ Telesio is celebrated for being wrong for the right reasons. His system is based on the opposing factors of heat and cold which take the place of Aristotelian forms. This system is not, he insists, to be based on reason but on an examination of the data presented by the senses. He thus 'sowed the seeds from which sprang the scientific methods of Campanella and Bruno, of Bacon and Descartes, with their widely divergent results... 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.' (Encyclopaedia Britannica.) Neal W. Gilbert in DSB is at pains to point out that earlier commentators' view of Telesio's book as an empiricist manifesto is misleading and that Telesio is no more, nor less, an empiricist than Aristotle himself, but still he reaches much the same conclusion, that Telesio showed the way forward. He also notes that in making the sun fiery, Telesio 'unwittingly' contributed to the breakdown of the Aristotelian barrier between celestial and sublunary physics; and in his concepts of space and time he anticipated Newton and allowed for the possibility of a vacuum. Telesio was educated at Milan by his uncle, Antonio, then at Rome and Padua. He lectured at Naples and founded the academy of Cosenza. Telesio's anti-Aristotelian views were problematic for the Catholic Church but surprisingly his books were not put on the index until shortly after his death. Literature: Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition, 1911), 26, p. 573; Neal W. Gilbert, DSB, 14, pp. 277--280.

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