Bernardino Telesio

Bernardino Telesio (1509 to 1588) was a philosopher of the late Renaissance from Cosenza in Calabria who set out to build a new natural philosophy outside the Aristotelian and scholastic tradition. Born into a noble and wealthy family and educated by his humanist uncle Antonio Telesio, he studied in Milan, Rome and Padua, spent years in a Benedictine monastery without taking oaths, and later settled in Cosenza, where he became the dominant figure of the Accademia Cosentina. He never held a salaried position. Telesio was a fervent critic of metaphysics and insisted on a purely empiricist approach to nature, which made him a forerunner of early modern empiricism. His principal work, On the Nature of Things according to their Own Principles, treats cosmology, biology, sense perception, reason and ethics, and his ideas influenced Tommaso Campanella, Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes.