Scaliger, Julius Caesar

Abstract

Julius Caesar Scaliger is an Italian physician who practiced medicine in Agen and produced a highly diverse literary output that documents both his interest in humanistic studies and in Aristotelian natural philosophy. He is one of the foremost Renaissance scholars on literary history and theory, produced massive commentaries on ancient botanic and zoological works, and authored a 1000-page critique of Girolamo Cardano’s natural philosophy. As far as matter theory is concerned, Scaliger combines the traditional doctrines of minimism – the view that substantial forms require a minimal portion of suitably structured matter – and “Latin pluralism” – the view that composite substances such as living beings possess a plurality of substantial forms standing in relations of subordination – with numerous corpuscularian explanations of natural phenomena derived from the corpuscularian aspects of the Aristotelian Meteorology. However, Scaliger also departs from a central tenet of the Aristotelian tradition, namely, the view that ascribing essences to living being implies that plants and animals cannot give rise to beings of a different biological species. Contrary to species fixism, Scaliger argues that the conception of a plurality of substantial forms in the bodies of living beings could provide an explanation for how, in singular cases, living beings can arise that belong to a species that did not exist before.