Philosophy in the Kingdom of Naples: The Long Renaissance from Giovanni Pontano to Giambattista Vico.

A chapter dedicated to the history of early modern philosophical traditions in the Kingdom of Naples immediately evokes the names of illustrious representatives of European thought during the early modern period. I am thinking here of such philosophers as Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), Bernardino Telesio (1509–1588), Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) and Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), whose lasting impact on the international landscape of philosophical inquiry is testament to their enduring value. In particular, we are accustomed, beyond the physical and ideal boundaries of the Kingdom, to regard Telesio, Bruno, and Campanella as the philosophical leading lights of the Italian Renaissance. In fact, this view is a later acquisition in philosophical historiography. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the impact of Telesio’s, Bruno’s, and Campanella’s thought was discussed abroad more than in Italy. Through Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Tobias Adami (1481– 1643), Telesio’s ideas circulated in England and Germany and became part of a distinctive natural philosophical vulgate. In Italy we can trace a specific Telesian line of philosophical investigations when we concentrate on the works of Marco Aurelio Severino, Tommaso Cornelio, and Lionardo di Capua, but we owe the rediscovery of De natura iuxta propria principia (1465, 1570, 1586) as a classic of philosophical literature to the 19th-century historian Francesco Fiorentino and his monograph Bernardino Telesio. Regarding Bruno, he lived as an expatriate in Europe for the greatest part of his life and his philosophical and historiographic fortunes revived only later between the 18th and the19th centuries, in large part in Germany through the likes of Johann Jakob Brucker (1696–1770), Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819) and Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854). The philosophical fame of Campanella, finally, travelled in England where it was perceived as a contaminated product of Counter-Reformation propaganda and political Machiavellianism, while in France his renown depended on a composite philosophical pastiche that those French thinkers we have become accustomed to call erudite libertines made out of the Italian traditions of heterodox thinking. By contrast, Campanella’s theory of universal sentience spread in a more sporadic way through less treaded paths. And so it happened that, while the ghosts of Telesio, Bruno, and Campanella were—in different fashions and at different times—haunting the European Republic of Letters, the early modern philosophy of the Kingdom of Naples was in fact being shaped by the autochthonous tradition of juridical thinking, by the influence of such intellectual trends as the philosophical movements initiated by Galileo, Descartes, Gassendi, and Newton and by different strands of physical, chemical, and medical corpuscularianism. If the philosophical Quattrocento and Cinquecento of the Kingdom have a place within the major intellectual developments of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, it is because of the persistence and continuity of the humanist traditions of natural history, chorography, meteorology, political and historical inquiries, ethnography, and rhetoric. Telesio himself had important links with the rich milieu of Southern humanism through his uncle Antonio Telesio (ca. 1482–1534) and, more generally, through the scholarly expertise of the literati who gathered around the Accademia Cosentina, founded between 1511 and 1512 by Aulo Giano Parrasio (1470–1521).