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The Drawing Board of Imagination: Federico Commandino and John Philoponus
- Journal of the History of Ideas
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 76, Number 4, October 2015
- pp. 499-515
- 10.1353/jhi.2015.0031
- Article
- Additional Information
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Federico Commandino (1509–1575) can be considered the personification of the renaissance of mathematics in sixteenth-century Italy. Previous scholars have generally reduced the philosophy of mathematics developed (1572) by Commandino in the preface to his translation of Euclid’s Elements to a superficial synthesis of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian elements. Until now, no attention has been paid to Commandino’s use of the sixth-century commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima by John Philoponus. In his article I will argue that, in depicting imagination as a mental drawing board for geometrical figures, Commandino directly relies on Philoponus’s concept of mathematical imagination.