L'insegnamento della filosofia alla "Sapienza" di Roma nel seicento: Le cattedre e i maestri

There is no lack of historical studies of the Roman Studium Urbis, otherwise known as the Sapienza, the university founded in the Papal State in 1303 by Pope Boniface VIII. With the secular unification of Italy in the nineteenth century, the Italian state took over its historical site and later took over the name of the Sapienza as well. In the book considered here, it is the papal Sapienza that is the subject of attention.

The School (or Collegio) of Theology, together with those of medicine and law, governed the papal Sapienza, as they issued academic degrees, and thus they have claimed much of the attention from historians. This book by Candida Carella, however, concentrates on the teaching of philosophy in seventeenth-century Rome, which was affected by events such as the burning at the stake for heresy of Giordano Bruno, followed by the consignment of Copernicus's De revolutionibus to the Index in 1616, and the trial and condemnation of Galileo in 1633.

This volume, which is based on a doctoral thesis in philosophy for the State Università di Roma "La Sapienza," cuts a careful path through the course of that troubled century by concentrating on a considerable amount of previously unpublished documentary material. The first part of the volume discusses the institutional factors that affected the teaching of philosophy in the seventeenth-century Studium Urbis, such as its subordination to medicine, law, and theology. Furthermore, the nearby Jesuit Collegio Romano offered a structured course in all branches of neo-Aristotelian philosophy that not only tended to empty the lecture halls of the Sapienza but also was frequently considered by its academic authorities as an essential philosophical school, leading one student in 1652 to complain about the impossibility of obtaining a degree at the Sapienza if one had not studied philosophy previously with the Jesuits.

Carella's biographical and scientific profiles of the fifty-six lecturers in philosophy at the Sapienza suggest, instead, that they were of some merit. A previously little-known figure discussed here is a lecturer of Greek origin, Demetrio Fallirei (Demetrius Phalereus), who, despite the hostility of the Faculty of Medicine and the competition of the Jesuits, managed to teach philosophy courses for many years to more than a hundred students. His approach mixed Aristotelian physics, Galenic medicine, the Baconian theme of a prolungatio vitae, and Cartesian physiology. Indeed, the study of Fallirei and other lecturers in philosophy at the Sapienza supplies evidence of a discrete diffusion of Cartesianism in seventeenth-century Rome, added to a cautious interest in the new atomistic theories. Thus, this book questions the traditional portrayal of an academic institution in dramatic decline, totally enclosed within the neo-Aristotelian Scholasticism sanctioned by the Council of Trent.