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Pietro Pomponazzi at Padua HEIKKI MIKKELI WHY BOTHER WITH METHODS? THE CONTEXTS OF LATE 16TH-CENTURY PADUAN DISCUSSIONS ON METHOD: PIETRO POMPONAZZI AT PADUA I have the impression that the somewhat provocative main title of my article is not completely strange to university teachers even today. At least in Finland I have sometimes met this question when young students are not quite aware what to do with those funny creatures called ‘methods’. Nobody really seems to know what ‘the methods’ look like, but still you are supposed to use them in your work. The crucial question seems to be how to catch something that you are not even able to see? In the Renaissance the situation was perhaps slightly different. At least the university libraries all around Europe still have thousands of volumes written during this period that include the magic word ‘method’ in their titles.1 In the following I shall ask whether it is any use for us to read these books now, or could they just mercifully fall into oblivion. I would like to remind you that in the following I shall concentrate on Paduan Aristotelianism. In other Italian and European universities there may have occurred quite different discussions on methods. I shall begin my story with an incident that took place in the University of Padua on March 18, in 1523. On that spring day professor Pietro Pomponazzi was lecturing to his students on Book I of Aristotle’s Meteorology. Having first explained what Aristotle had said about the impossibility of finding human life below the Antipodes, and then what Aristotle’s Arab commentator Averroes believed Aristotle to have meant by saying it, Pomponazzi turned to his students: That, gentlemen, that is what Aristotle and Averroes think. But what should we today think? I am of the belief that where experience and reason are in conflict, that we should hold to experience and abandon reason. Averroes had himself said this, but then had failed to do so, for his reasoning is truly sophistical. And you should know that I have received a letter sent to me by a Venetian friend who accompanied the Papal nuncio to the King of Spain, and who, finding him- self there, went on an expedition sent by that King to the southern hemisphere and he travelled for twenty-five degrees after having crossed the Torrid Zone. Now he writes to me that having passed through the Pillars of Hercules, they have sailed in the southern hemisphere for the three months and came across more than three hundred islands each separate from the next, which were not 1 On German libraries, see Kuhn 2002. 336 HEIKKI MIKKELI only inhabitable, but which were also inhabited. These arguments which the commentator calls ‘demonstrations’, how are they demonstrations? For one can- not make demonstrations contrary to truth. Because... if we are ignorant about things on earth which we can see, how will we know about the heavens?2 By reason Pomponazzi apparently meant the reason derived from the study of the canonical authorities on which he had been lecturing. As Anthony Pagden has commented on this passage, Pomponazzi’s denunciation of the Aristote- lian book on Meteorology should not, however, be taken as a condemnation of Aristotelianism as a whole. Instead his whole project could perhaps be seen as an attempt to return philosophy to a purified form of Aristotelianism stripped of the corrupting accretions laid upon the text by later interpreters, such as Averroes. But Pagden also notes that it still remained the case that Aristotle had been wrong here, and therefore he might be wrong elsewhere as well. However suggestive his philosophy might still be, his claim to authoritative status had collapsed. And furthermore, Pagden continues, it had collapsed in the face of a single piece of empirical data. Various Aristotelianisms Nevertheless, I think we should not exaggerate the meaning of this passage. None of this implied that the painstakingly collected, carefully collated texts together with the massive intellectual systems, which had been built upon them, had lost their credibility entirely. But some changes in the attitude towards Aristotle and other canonical authors had indeed appeared. These changes had begun already in the latter part of the fifteenth century. As David Lines has recently shown, the discipline of ethics gradually became in- dependent from physics, in Florentine humanist circles in particular, and won a more independent academic position.3 Moreover, in the late fifteenth century there emerged a new way of reading Aristotelian texts, which Eckhard Kessler has named “the humanist method of grammatical reading of Aristotle’s texts”.4 Compared with scholastic interpretations, the new method no longer saw Aristotle as the philosopher above all others but simply as one among many. Rather than gaining an understanding of the entire Aristotelian corpus and solving the incongruities in his works, the aim was to clarify the philosophical problems posed in them and to arrive at a teaching method of maximum clar- ity. As a result of this new approach to Aristotle, the logical structure of the 2 Cited from Pagden 1993, 90-91. 3 Lines 2002. 4 Kessler 1999. .
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