Niccolò Leonico Tomeo’s Dialogi (1524). The Philosophy of a Renaissance Scholar

The Dialogi (1524) by Leonico Tomeo (1456–1531) is a key philosophical text of the sixteenth century which is now largely forgotten and has been completely excised from the canon of Renaissance philosophical works. This dissertation intends to reclaim for Leonico Tomeo the place he fully deserves in the early modern Republic of Philosophical Letters. It does so by demonstrating that his idea of thinking as an exercise that is both scholarly and critical underpins a philosophy that is sensible to the role that history plays in shaping humanity’s views about the world and the reality it inhabits. Leonico Tomeo’s is also a philosophy that is open to the place that natural and cultural particulars and rituals have in the construction of historically determined worldviews. It is for this reason that Leonico Tomeo’s philosophical investigations tend to be object-oriented. As we have seen in this dissertation, the objects are many: poems, plants, manuscripts, busts, but also all sorts of historical vestiges of the past, including languages. Among these objects, the most complex object of philosophical and scholarly interest is the soul, the animus/anima. Leonico Tomeo observes and studies the soul and its faculties within a linguistic and conceptual galaxy that is the result of centuries of speculations and experiments. In this sense, his philosophical approach is constitutively exegetic and archaeological.

Part 1 of the thesis sheds light on Leonico Tomeo’s intellectual biography, paying particular attention to the critical aspects of his life and works rather than on its chronology, a field that have been accurately investigated in the past by historians. Part 2 of the dissertation expands on the contextual premises of the preceding section dwelling on Leonico Tomeo’s engagement with early modern humanism. Part 3 of the dissertation, finally, explores the major themes of Leonico Tomeo’s Dialogi, organising the complex material around three principal ideas: soul, nature and culture.