Elementi di psicologia empirica in Aristotele e Pomponazzi

Abstract

Pietro Pomponazzi is an author who never gained prominence in the history of philosophical thought. He lived between the late 15th and early 16th centuries, and is one of the most significant figures in the Italian philosophy of the Renaissance. His main work De immortalitate animae, published in 1516, witnesses the “rebirth” of human sciences in the wake of the Aristotelian tradition established at the University of Padua. Thanks also to his work, while Florence was the seat of Platonism, Padua was the seat of Aristotelianism, confirming the rediscovery of a classical culture that was the foundation of modern culture. In the case of Pomponazzi, it should be emphasized that the return to Aristotle involved the empowerment of empirical psychology, as can be read in De anima. Thus, we can compare De immortalitate animae with De anima in order to find in Pomponazzi the philosophical roots of the new psychology, which leads from the modern age to the contemporary era. Therefore, Pomponazzi ultimately anticipated the authors (Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume) who began to build empirical psychology in the 17th and 18th centuries, a psychology that became experimental in the 19th and 20th centuries.