CESALPINO, ANDREA. — Philosopher and naturalist, born at Arezzo in 1519, died in Rome on 23 February 1603. He taught medicine at the Pisan Athenaeum, directed the botanical garden of Padua, and from 1592 held a chair at the Sapienza, having been called there by Clement VIII, who also wished him to be his chief physician. A versatile intellect, he began, like Cardano and Pomponazzi, in medicine, but, like them, went beyond its limits, also taking an interest in and writing about philosophy, botany, and mineralogy. As a philosopher, C. has been the subject of assessments that are not merely divergent but contradictory: some assert that he was almost a pantheist and a precursor of Spinoza, others that he was an anti-Scholastic Aristotelian, an Averroist, or a Neoplatonist. One fact can be established, namely Pomponazzi’s influence, which explains certain of his ambiguous positions, particularly in the problem of personal immortality. In general, care must be taken not to overestimate the philosophical importance of C., whose system is rather eclectic and not always coherent. His merits as a botanist, on the other hand, are undisputed.
In the De plantis (Venice 1571), he was the first to study the plant as a whole of its parts, seeking to clarify their origins, functions, and purposes; he classified plants by choosing the fruit-bearing organs as his principal criterion. C.’s position was pioneering in physiology as well; in his Quaestionum peripateticarum libri V (ibid. 1571), he described the great circulation, using for the first time the term circulation for the continuous movement of blood from the veins to the right heart, from there to the lungs, from the lungs to the left heart, and from the left heart to the arteries. C. set out the experimental evidence for this discovery in his work Quaestionum medicalium libri II (ibid. 1593). He thus anticipated Harvey’s demonstration (1628), although he appears in turn to have been preceded by Serveto (died in 1553).
Other works by C.: Daemonum investigatio peripatetica (Florence 1580); De metallis libri III (Rome 1596); Praxis medica (Treviso 1606), etc.