Cremonini, Cesare

CREMONINI, CESARE. - Philosopher, b. at Cento in 1550 or 1552, d. in 1631. After having taught at Ferrara, he was a colleague of Galileo at the University of Padua, where he enjoyed such esteem as to receive double the salary of the Pisan. C. was called the last great Italian Aristotelian, but in reality his doctrinal position cannot be defined so simply. Though he professed himself a strenuous follower of the Stagirite, to the point of not wanting to aim his telescope at the sky so as not to see the philosopher's astronomical system contradicted, he always wavered between the Alexandrian and the Averroist interpretation.

C.'s orthodoxy too is highly questionable; he defends himself, to be sure, by asserting that he is merely reporting the opinion of others, but he seems to have acted thus solely in order to escape the condemnations in which Pomponazzi had already incurred, whose spirit is often alive and at work in his theories. One of his works, however, the Disputatio de coelo, was placed on the Index (decrees: 15 Jan. 1622; 3 July 1623). By giving the world a soul, an eternal principle of its existence, he seems to deny the dogma of creation and consequently to ignore Providence. Free will too is saved only with difficulty, given the fatality of the sidereal influences under which one is born and from which one frees oneself only by an effort of will. Of the soul C. writes that it is impossible ut sit anima et non sit in corpore, and yet he wants to save its immortality.

The less benign interpretation we have given to C.'s theories seems confirmed by the axiom dear to him and which clarifies many of his ambiguities: intus ut libet, foris ut moris est.

Felicesimo Tinivella