Tomitano, Bernardino

Abstract

Philosopher, physician, and humanist, Bernardino Tomitano became a doctor in artibus et medicina at the University of Padua, where he was professor of logic from 1539 to 1563. Tomitano was one of the greatest representatives of humanistic Aristotelianism, which was affirmed in the Paduan school in the middle of the sixteenth century. His work was an important link between the speculation of the beginning of the 1500s and the more mature and systematic work of his famous disciple Jacopo Zabarella. His teaching was characterized by the choice of reading Aristotle in the original Greek with philological expertise, by the preference reserved for ancient Greek commentators and modern humanists, and by the frequent recourse to Plato’s authority. Tomitano’s contribution to logical thought consisted in the centrality of the questions of method, in the theory of regressus as a fundamental logical tool for progressing in the knowledge of natural facts, in the instrumental conception of logic, and in the definition of sermocinal arts (grammar, rhetoric, poetics) as logical arts.

From his participation in the Accademia degli Infiammati of Padua, in the first part of 1540, the rhetorical and linguistic treatise Ragionamenti della lingua toscana originated, which was extended in 1570 into the Quattro libri della lingua thoscana, in which the main interlocutor was his master Sperone Speroni. The work was intended to promote oratory prose and “high” genre writing in Italian in general and gathered together several issues concerning the arts of the word in an organic synthesis that had at its core the theme of the relationship between philosophy and eloquence.