Frühneuzeitliche Selbsterhaltung

This very detailed study of the sixteenth-century (anti-)Aristotelian philosopher Bernardino Telesio demonstrates the institutional and conceptual proximity of philosophy and medicine in that period. For instance, the ancient dietary controversy over whether it is better to drink hot or cold fluids erupts anew because [End Page 597] what in Aristotelian tradition had been the basic notion "fire is dry" is reversed in the Telesian tradition to "fire is humid" (Telesio considers heat the single primal force). But this dense study of Telesio, of the works he drew on (and deliberately failed to name), and of the currents of important but brief influence he stimulated would be misrepresented as a string of such medico-philosophical nuggets; rather, it is a highly successful contextualization of a branch of philosophy that meant to be natural rather than metaphysical, but that essentially disappeared during the early modern period--not only because it was suppressed by the Counter-Reformation, but because it was nonmathematical and, in spite of itself, too speculative within the Aristotelian tradition

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