Bernardino Telesio 1509 – 1588

Bernardino Telesio was an Italian Renaissance natural philosopher and one of the principal architects of the late sixteenth-century reaction against scholastic Aristotelianism. His De Rerum Natura iuxta Propria Principia, On the Nature of Things According to Their Own Principles, argued that nature must be explained by its own internal principles of heat and cold acting on matter, rather than by abstract philosophical categories imposed from outside. He founded a learned academy at Cosenza and exercised a deep influence on Bruno, Campanella, and Francis Bacon, the last of whom called him the first of the moderns.