Nicoletto Vernia and the Division of Philosophy: Continuation and Innovation

• In Event: Renaissance Aristotelianism(s) Reconsidered

Abstract

Nicoletto Vernia (1420-1499) was probably the most important philosopher, in the ‘formal’ academic-institutional sense of this term, in Italy during the last decades of the fifteenth century. He represents not only the continuation of the Aristotelian traditions in the Renaissance – and one is reminded that ‘continuation’ does not mean ‘repetition’, and certainly does not imply a necessary lack of originality – his intellectual activity as an interpreter and editor of philosophical texts belonging to different scholastic schools, ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ alike (thus, his ‘Paduan roots’ were balanced by a visit to the Studium of Pavia and by his interests in the ‘modern way’) clearly reflects innovative elements, in matters of both methods and practices. In this paper I shall focus on Vernia’s 1482 Quaestio de divisione philosophiae, which had appeared in print in his edition of Walter Burley’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics.

Author

• Amos Edelheit, National University of Ireland, Maynooth