Francesco Patrizi 1529 – 1597

Francesco Patrizi da Cherso was an Italian Renaissance Platonist philosopher, polymath, and the first holder of a chair of Platonic philosophy at Ferrara, later moving to a corresponding chair at Rome. A Croatian by origin, he combined wide humanist learning with a vehement opposition to Aristotelian scholasticism, expressed in the four-volume Discussiones Peripateticae. His Nova de Universis Philosophia developed an original Platonic-Hermetic cosmology centered on light as the fundamental principle of the universe and proposed an infinite cosmos open to natural philosophical investigation. The work was placed on the Index after his death, but it shaped later Italian and German nature philosophy.