PHILOSOPHICAL READINGS ONLINE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY ARTICLES Craig Martin Meteorology for Courtiers and Ladies: Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy 3 Donato Verardi L’influenza delle stelle in un trattato volgare del Cinquecento: Dell’Origine de’ Monti di Cesare Rao 15 IV Eugenio Refini Logic, Rhetoric and Poetics as Rational Faculties in NUMBER 2 Alessandro Piccolomini’s Map of Knowledge 24 SUMMER 2012 Francesco Benoni Nota su Fedone, 70B3 36 Pierpaolo Marrone Rorty’s Politics of Truth 48 Renaissance Argument. An Interview with Peter Mack by Marco Sgarbi 72 REVIEWS 78 Ludovico Gasparini, Filosofia = errore di esistenza. Pagine di quaderno, a cura di Bruna Giacomini (Genova: il Melango- lo, 2011) (F. Negri); Luca Gili, La sillogistica di Alessandro di Afrodisia. Sillogistica assertoria e sillogistica modale nel commento agli Analitici Primi di Aristotele (Hildesheim- Zürich-New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2011) (L. Corda- sco); Gaspare Polizzi, Giacomo Leopardi: la concezione dell’umano, tra utopia e disincanto (Milano: Mimesis, 2010) (M. Balzano); Martin Heidegger, La storia dell’Essere, a cu- ra di A. Cimino (Milano: Marinotti, 2012) (R.M. Marafioti); Gianluca Briguglia e Thomas Ricklin (eds.), Thinking Poli- tics in the Vernacular. From the Middle Ages to the Renaissace (Fribourg: Academic Press Fribourg, 2011) (M. Sgarbi). CALL FOR PAPERS 95 ISSN 2036-4989 ABSTRACTS AND INDEXING 96 Philosophical Readings philosophicalreadings.org Marassi, Università Cattolica di Milano; Roberto Mordacci, Università Vita e Salute San Raffaele di Milano; Ugo Perone, Università del Piemonte Orien- tale; Stefano Poggi, Università di Firenze; Riccardo Pozzo, Lessico Intellettuale Europeo e Storia delle Idee- CNR; José Manuel Sevilla Fernández, Universidad de Philosophical Readings Sevilla. 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The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Associate editor: Eva Del Soldato, University of Warwick. Assistant editor: Valerio Rocco Lozano, Univer- sidad Autónoma de Madrid. Editorial Advisory Board: Laura Boella, Uni- versità Statale di Milano; Elio Franzini, Università Statale di Milano; Alessandro Ghisalberti, Università Cattolica di Milano; Piergiorgio Grassi, Università di Urbino; Margarita Kranz, Freie Universität Berlin; Sandro Mancini, Università di Palermo; Massimo Articles Meteorology for Courtiers and Ladies: During the sixteenth century both non- academic elites and university professors Vernacular Aristotelianism wrote vernacular Italian treatises and dia- in Renaissance Italy logues based on Aristotelian texts and con- cepts for a courtly audience. Courtiers and Craig Martin professors alike considered Aristotelian Oakland University natural philosophy, meteorology in particu- Department of History lar, to be vibrant and applicable to both the (United States) practical and entertainment needs of courts. These authors focused on meteorology be- cause the field, with its emphasis on rare rom the time of Petrarch onward, a wonder-provoking events and practical util- number of humanist thinkers criti- ity, was appropriate for introducing courtly cized Aristotelian scholasticism for audiences to natural philosophy.2 Fits inflexibility and conservatism. Aristote- lianism, in Petrarch’s eyes, was the philoso- phy of the universities and, as a result of its 1. The Use of Italian fealty, reacted to the needs of the institution rather than of society itself. The conserva- hile famous seventeenth- tism of Aristotelianism was, and is, notori- century opponents of natural ous, evident in the continuing use of quaes- philosophy of the schools, such tiones and textual commentaries in discus- Was Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Bacon, wrote sions of the natural world well into the sev- at least some works in the vernacular, the enteenth century.1 While it is true that large shift from Latin to vulgar languages was not portions, even most, of Aristotelian treatises necessarily an attack on Aristotelian phi- were composed within the institutional set- tings of universities, or later Jesuit colleges, Aristotelians nevertheless reacted to larger 2 For courtly interest in wonders during the six- societal issues, and Aristotelian writings had teenth century see: Lorraine Daston and Katharine audiences beyond universities. Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone, 2001), 137-159. Aristotelian me- teorology was concerned with wondrous subjects as early as the fourteenth century, see Joëlle Ducos, 1 For the humanist critique of scholasticism and the “Théorie et pratique de la météorologie médiévale institutionalization of Aristotelianism see: Christo- Albert le Grand et Jean Buridan,” in Le temps qu’il pher S. Celenza, “The Revival of Platonic Philoso- fait au Moyen Âge. Phénomènes atmosphériques dans phy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance la littérature, la pensée scientifique et religieuse, ed. Philosophy, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cam- Claude Thomasset and Joëlle Ducos (Paris: Presse bridge University Press, 2007), 72-73. de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1988), 47-48. 4 ARTICLES losophy.3 Even though Paracelsus lambasted logo delle lingue (1542), it is a character ba- the Latin learning of the universities, and le- sed on perhaps the most famous university gal authorities struck back, not all followers professor of the previous generation who of the Stagirite were staunch defenders of makes some of the strongest arguments for the use of Latin.4 In Sperone Speroni’s Dia- dropping the study of Greek and Latin. The character, named Peretto, which was the ni- ckname of Pietro Pomponazzi, the famed 3 For the view that Descartes’s choice of French for the Discourse on Method rebelled against the teach- and at times controversial professor at Padua ings of Jesuit colleges and Aristotelian professors, and Bologna, argues that studying Greek see: Elaine Limbrick, “To Write in Latin or in the and Latin is “the cause of our ignorance,” Vernacular: The Intellectual Dilemma in an Age of and that if all books were translated into the Transition. The Case of Descartes,” History of Eu- vernacular, philosophers could dedicate mo- ropean Ideas 16 (1993): 75-80. For the view that re time to scientia and less to the study of Harvey wrote in English because his work consid- 5 ered animals and other entities unknown to Aris- language. Speroni’s dialogue, with Pompo- totle or classical authors, see: Roger K. French, nazzi as the spokesman for the vernacular, “The Languages of William Harvey’s Natural Phi- indicates that writing Aristotelian natural losophy,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Al- philosophies in the vernacular in sixteenth- lied Sciences 49 (1994): 24-51. William Eamon points century Italy was not necessarily considered to William Ryff as a popularizer of vernacular a threat to the intellectual hegemony of uni- German science who intended to weaken the stran- glehold academics had on medicine. See William versities. Accordingly, its practice became Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of widespread for meteorological writings by Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, the end of the sixteenth century.