“Telesio, Aristotle and Hippocrates on Cosmic Heat,” in: Bernardino Telesio and the Natural Sciences in the Renaissance, ed. Pietro Daniel Omodeo (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 51-65.
In his "Generation of Animals" 2.3, Aristotle suggested that the nature of the heat contained in the seed along with the pneuma corresponds by analogy to the “element of the stars,” which is the celestial substance, aether. A cosmological dimension is thus introduced in the middle of an embryological discourse. The aim of the present article is to examine the impact of this passage on the natural philosophy of Bernardino Telesio (1509-1588) against its historical and intellectual context.