Julius Caesar Scaliger, Renaissance Reformer of Aristotelianism

This monograph is the first to analyze Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Exotericae Exercitationes (1557). Though hardly read today, the Exercitationes was one of the most successful philosophical treatises of the time, attracting considerable attention from many intellectuals with multifaceted religious and philosophical orientations. In order to make this massive late-Renaissance work accessible to modern readers, Kuni Sakamoto conducted a detailed textual analysis and revealed the basic tenets of Scaliger’s philosophy. His analysis also enabled him to clarify the historical provenance of Scaliger’s Aristotelianism and the way it subsequently influenced some of the protagonists of the “New Philosophy.” The author thus bridges the historiographical gap between studies of Renaissance philosophy and those of the seventeenth-century.

Kuni Sakamoto, Ph.D. (2012) in history of science, University of Tokyo, is an affiliated researcher at the Center for the History of Philosophy and Science, Radboud University Nijmegen. He has published on early modern natural philosophy, with a particular focus on its interaction with theology and philology.

"Sakamoto has provided a very useful glimpse into the philosophical notions underpinning Scaliger’s system of thought, as well as a very welcome addition to the field."
- David A. Lines (University of Warwick), Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. LXX, No. 4, 1482-1483

Sakamoto’s book [...] presents central strands of Scaliger’s most important work in natural philosophy, a thousand-page critique of Girolamo Cardano’s De Subtilitate, as a systematically integrated whole.
- Andreas Blank (Bard College Berlin), Journal of the History of Philosophy, 55:3 (July 2017), 543-544