The Transformation of Final Causation: Telesio’s Theories of Self-Preservation and Motion

In an attempt to overcome the widespread narratives of Telesio as a precursor of Newton (Cassirer) or as a prisoner of an unscientific form of hylozoism (Gentile), current scholarship has increasingly emphasized the anti-Aristotelian traits of Telesio’s philosophy as his most historically relevant contribution to the development of early modern natural philosophy. In a paper tellingly entitled The First of the Moderns or the Last of the Ancients?, Guido Giglioni argued that the notion of sentience, far from representing an outmoded vestige of a naive animism, provided the basis for a radical shift from the Aristotelian notion of movement, and thus must be seen as the most original trait of Telesio’s natural philosophy. Giglioni writes,