Marius Nizolius

Marius Nizolius (Italian: Mario Nizolio; 1498–1576) was an Italian humanist scholar, known as a proponent of Cicero. He considered rhetoric to be the central intellectual discipline, slighting other aspects of the philosophical tradition.[1][2] He is described by Michael R. Allen as the heir to the oratorical vision of Lorenzo Valla, and a better nominalist.[3]

Life

He was born in Brescello. He was professor of philosophy at Parma and Sabbioneta.[4]

Works

His major work was the Thesaurus Ciceronianus, first published in 1535 in Brixen but not under this title, and running into many further editions. It was a lexicon of Latin words used in Cicero's works. It was adopted by Renaissance extremists who considered that writing in Latin could only be correct within this restricted vocabulary.[5] His Antibarbarus philosophicus (original title De veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi contra psudophilosophos, Parma, 1553) was edited by Leibniz in 1670 with an important Preface.[6] It was a reply in a controversy with Marco Antonio Maioragio (1514-1555),[7] and going back to a dispute from the mid-1540s over the Paradoxes of Cicero.[8]

He died in Sabbioneta.

Notes
  1. Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (1988), p. 181.
  2. Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner (editors), Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, p. 734.
  3. In Richard Popkin (editor), The Pimlico History of Western Philosophy (1999), p. 297.
  4. Edgar Zilsel, P. Zilsel, Diederick Raven, Wolfgang Krohn, Robert S. Cohen, The Social Origins of Modern Science (2003), p. 26.
  5. Brian Vickers, English Renaissance Literary Criticism (1999), p. 27.
  6. Commented German translation by Klaus Thieme, Marius Nizolius aus Bersello: Vier Bücher über die wahren Prinzipien (1980); cfr. also Christia Mercer, Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development (2001), p. 99.
  7. Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, p. 828.
  8. Lawrence D. Green, John Rainold's Oxford Lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric (1986), p. 414.
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