Background
Francesco Buonamici was born in 1533, very likely in Florence, Italy, where his father served as a notary.
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book
Discorsi poetici nella Accademia fiorentina in difesa d'Aristotile
https://www.amazon.com/Accademia-fiorentina-dAristotile-Francesco-Buonamici/dp/B07R1Y13RH/?tag=2022091-20
1597
Francesco Buonamici
Edit Profileeducator philosopher physician writer
Francesco Buonamici was an Italian physician, philosopher, professor of natural philosophy at the University of Pisa, and writer of the treatise On Motion (De motu). His De motu was read and cited by Galileo, who often used Buonamici’s bulky treatise as a source for mastering Aristotelian natural philosophy.
Education
Buonamici studied philosophy and medicine at the University of Pisa, and he was friend and disciple of two eminent philologists of the age, Piero Vettori and Ciriaco Strozzi, under whose guidance he gained an excellent competence in reading Greek texts.
Career
In 1565, Buonamici became an assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Pisa. Then, in 1571, he became a full professor of Natural Philosophy, with the duty of teaching Aristotle’s De caelo, De Anima, and Physica in 3-year cycles. He stayed at the University of Pisa all his life, although, after 1598, he was asked to succeed Francesco Piccolomini on the chair of Natural Philosophy in Padua.
Before his death, Buonamici published a book on nourishment and embryology, De alimento, printed in Florence in 1603. The book deals with various topics related to the action of food on human body, and it also discusses the making and development of fetus.
Yet, Buonamici’s major work remains the De motu, completed in 1587 but issued in 1591. The treatise is divided into ten books. In the first one, Buonamici establishes his method, giving the rules to be followed in natural research. The second book provides the definition of motion, touching the problems of its continuity and its relationship with quiet. The third and the fourth books discuss the motion of the elements, mainly surveying the role of the form in producing it, with interesting digressions on the motion in the void and on acceleration in free fall. In the fifth book, Buonamici, after discussing Copernican cosmology, examines the concepts of "heaviness" (gravitas) and "lightness" (levitas), expounding his views on the fall of heavy bodies. The next books till the eighth are devoted to aspects of motus different from the local motion, such as the substantial transformation, the generation, the increasing and decreasing, the condensation and rarefaction, the alteration, the intension, and remission of qualities. Then, the last two books deal with the celestial circulation and its movers, the matter of heavens, the eternity and perfection of the world, and finally with God, who Buonamici, echoing Epicurus, outlines as an entity which eternally contemplates itself, without any worry about human events.
Achievements
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Francesco Buonamici was a professor of philosophy at the University of Pisa for almost 40 years, whose most important work is the treatise On Motion (De motu), a huge volume of 1011 pages, which covers the whole range of aspects of Aristotle’s concept of motion. Buonamici supplies a careful survey of the topic, with an extended discussion of the Aristotelian views as well as of the opinions of a number of ancient and early modern authors who played a major (sometimes innovative) role in philosophical debate of the Sixteenth century.
Works
Views
Francesco Buonamici was a firm advocate of Aristotelian philosophy. Notwithstanding, his thought was permeated of classical influences and willing to take into account the opinions of modern authors. His philosophical approach was purely naturalistic, since it did not take into account occult or supernatural explanations.
Some of the main topics treated in Buonamici’s De motu resonate also in the pages of Galileo’s early writings on dynamics. In particular, it can be found implicit references to Buonamici’s work in the discussion of the questions of falling bodies and of Archimedean extrusion. Hence, Buonamici’s treatise can be considered as a valuable source for the knowledge of Renaissance natural philosophy as well as of the intellectual context in which Galileo matured his early theories on motion.
Connections
References
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Born
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Died
September 29, 1603 (aged 70) -
Nationality
Italian
Career
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1565 - 1571
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1571 - 1603
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1598 - 1603