Liceti, Fortunio

Abstract

Liceti is the last of the great Paduan Aristotelians. His extensive works cover all areas of natural philosophy, and while Liceti is always careful to give full expositions of the diverging strands of Aristotle interpretation on any given subject, he does not hesitate to use traditional conceptual frameworks to develop innovative theories. One example for this is his conception of rational souls as immaterial but quantitative, extended beings. To explicate this conception, he uses an analogy between rational souls and the theory of light developed by the eclectic medieval natural philosopher Albert the Great, who argued that the dependence of light on a source from which it arises through emanative causation renders light existentially independent from the medium that it illuminates. Another innovative aspect of Liceti’s thought can be found in his version of the traditional theory of spontaneous generation. Unlike any thinker before him, he held that the substantial forms of living beings arising through spontaneous generation could be understood as material structures that arise through the completing of previously existing, but essentially different material structures.