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 History of Meteorology 3 (2006) 1 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Experience of the New World and Aristotelian 

Revisions of the Earth’s Climates during the Renaissance 
 

Craig Martin 
 

Oakland University 

Rochester, Michigan, USA 

 

martin@oakland.edu 

 

 

Abstract 

 

It is widely perceived that the discovery of the New World contributed to the eventual 

downfall of Aristotelian natural philosophy.  This discovery demonstrated the unsound nature of 

Aristotle’s view that there exists an uninhabitable “torrid zone” in the area between the Tropic of 

Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer.  It has been argued, among contemporary historians of 

science, that travels through this region of the earth created doubt in Aristotle’s authority and 

thus led people away from the sterile and bookish natural philosophy taught by scholastics.  In 

fact, during the first decades of the sixteenth century, commentators on Aristotle, such as Pietro 

Pomponazzi and Agostino Nifo, were informed, through sailors’ reports, of travels in southern 

regions and, as a result, questioned the existence of a torrid zone. Renaissance Aristotelianism 

was flexible and capable of integrating new experiences into a larger theoretical framework; 

experiential evidence that the “torrid zones” did not exist was utilized by a number of scholars 

who taught Aristotelian natural philosophy in the years after Columbus’ first crossing of the 

Atlantic Ocean. 

 



 Experience of the New World and Aristotelian Revisions 2 
 

 

Introduction 

 

Michiele Monaldi: How did it happen that Aristotle was not capable of 

knowing that the entire earth is habitable? 

Nicolò Vito di Gozze: The Philosopher could not have known this through 

natural reason; but we came to recognize all of this through experience. 

—di Gozze, 1584.
 1
 

 

 

That the scientific revolution chronologically followed upon the discovery of the New 

World is widely perceived as not coincidental.  Columbus’ voyages fundamentally shook many 

received notions among Europeans of the sixteenth century.  Encounters with previously 

unknown peoples altered conceptions of the nature of mankind; and collections of New World 

flora and fauna sparked wonder, making ancient botanical and zoological writings incomplete if 

not obsolete.
2
  It was not just that the explorations of the late-fifteenth and sixteenth centuries 

revealed anomalies to accepted frameworks of knowledge, but that the New World itself was one 

huge anomaly.  In Kuhnian terms, the result of such an anomaly could not but cause a crisis in 

the accepted paradigm.  According to Reijer Hooykaas, it was the exploration of the New World 

that led to greater emphasis on “the fact” among intellectuals, which paved the way for modern 

science.
3
  Thus authorities, such as Aristotle and other ancients, ceased to be trusted, and doubt 

reigned, as evidenced by Montaigne and the renewal of Pyrrhonism, creating a vacuum of 

knowledge.  The traditional story tells us that Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, and Boyle, among 

others, filled this void by rejecting Aristotle and in his place created an experimental philosophy 

that was confirmed by mathematics and eventually reached its apotheosis in the Newtonian 

synthesis.
4
  Thus the discovery of the New World was preparatory for the scientific revolution. 

 By now, this story has been partially disassembled.  The break between traditional natural 

philosophy and those that emerged in the seventeenth century was not clean; and that the 

revolution took one century, if not two, suggests that the scientific revolution was not a rapid 

overturning of the accepted order in the same way that the American, French, and Russian 

revolutions were.
5
  Nevertheless, the belief that the emergence of modern science resulted from 

the rejection of Aristotle’s thought as the absolute truth endures.
6
  Even though a number of 

Aristotelian positions and concepts were rejected in the seventeenth century, the idea of authority 

is often misconstrued, so that Aristotelians are portrayed as defending the theories found in texts 

at all costs.  To the contrary, Aristotelianism was extremely flexible, and the rejection of one or 

more tenets was not sufficient to send the entire edifice of scholastic learning tumbling down.  

This flexibility is especially evident for the field of meteorology because it was viewed as a 

conjectural science that dealt with intractable phenomena.  Meteorological theories were seen as 

provisional and subject to reformulation.  As a result, many Renaissance university professors 

who commented on Aristotle’s Meteorology had no problem rejecting Aristotelian positions if 

experience contradicted them.  For them, authority was evidence, not the final answer. 

 A case in point regards the effect that Columbus’ voyages had in altering the conception 

of the size of the earth and its division into climatic zones.  While Columbus did not prove that 

the earth was spherical, an idea already accepted since antiquity, exploration in the New World 

called into question the extent of the habitable area of the earth.  Aristotle had addressed the 

earth’s climates in Meteorology II.5, where he argued that the terrestrial globe should be divided 

into five belts or climates that wrapped around the world’s circumference.  Assuming that the 



 History of Meteorology 3 (2006) 3 
 

borders of the climates must reflect the astronomical division of the earth, Aristotle defined the 

borders by the two tropics and the Arctic and Antarctic circles.  Two of these zones, thought to 

be habitable, were called oikoumenai; one lies in the north, between the Tropic of Cancer and the 

Arctic circle, and a corresponding region lies in the southern hemisphere.  In between the tropics, 

lies a torrid zone, too hot for the streams and pastures necessary for human life;
7
 and, in the 

extreme latitudes, both northern and southern, the cold prevents human habitation. 

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries reports from sailors about habitations along 

the coast of Africa and in the New World made the torrid zone a potential target for anti-

Aristotelians.  The readiness of some, including Columbus himself, to reject traditional 

understandings of the size of the earth and the nature of its continents is portrayed in contrast to 

the supposed hardheadedness of Aristotelians who were trapped by theory and could not adjust 

their bookish views to observational evidence.  Anthony Grafton points to the Jesuit scholar and 

traveler, Josè de Acosta, whose 1580 treatise on the New World, described his being so cold 

while traveling in the so-called torrid zone that he needed to put on more clothing.  As a result, 

he wrote: “What could I do then but laugh at Aristotle’s Meteorology and his philosophy? For in 

that place and that season, where everything, by his rules, should have scorched by the heat, I 

and my companions are cold.”
8
  De Acosta’s rejection of Aristotle supports Grafton’s claim that: 

“Between 1550 and 1650 Western thinkers ceased to believe that they could find all important 

truths in ancient books.”  De Acosta certainly was willing to challenge Aristotle’s Meteorology 

on a number of points, but his treatment of ancient authority is not as dramatic as it might appear.  

He does not present Aristotle as generally risible for his fallibility, nor did he reject Aristotle 

wholesale, but called him merely incorrect, “the author of this view [regarding the torrid zones] 

is Aristotle, great explorer of nature, but who in this case wanders far from the truth.”
9
   

 De Acosta, however, was not the first to reject the existence of torrid zones or antipodal 

habitations on the basis of experience.  A few years earlier, Francisco Sanchez wrote a far more 

scathing indictment of Aristotelian theories of the earth in his skeptical work, That Nothing is 

Known.  In his invective, Sanchez cited the common experience of travelers to New World to 

show that the theory of uninhabitable climatic zones was untenable and therefore Aristotelian 

science was incomplete and fallible: 

Yesterday you said in the light of your complete scientific knowledge - or rather, 

knowledge that was complete even long ages ago - that the entire earth was 

surrounded by the Ocean; and you divided it into three all-embracing parts, 

namely Asia, Africa, and Europe. But what are you to say today? A New World 

has been discovered - new realities - in New Spain or in the West and East Indies. 

Moreover, you used to say that the southern zone, situated below the equator, was 

uninhabitable on account of heat, but that close to the poles, and the extreme polar 

zones, the same thing was true because of the cold. Experience [experientia] has 

now shown both these statements to be false. Construct another "science," then, 

for your first is now false. So how can you maintain that your propositions are 

eternally valid, incorruptible, infallible, and incapable of being otherwise - you 

miserable worm, who scarcely know, and are scarcely even capable of knowing, 

what you are and whence you come and whiter you are going?
10

 
 

Even though Sanchez painted an entertaining picture of know-nothing scholars convinced of 

their infallibility and incapable of reacting to new observations, it must be asked whether this 

picture resembles the reality of sixteenth-century traditional natural philosophy.  Was Sanchez 

parodying fictionalized pompous schoolteachers or the cutting edge of Aristotelian natural 



 Experience of the New World and Aristotelian Revisions 4 
 

 

philosophy?  Moreover, before 1550, did Western thinkers really think that every important truth 

could be found in books, rather than in experience?  And, was it really not until the second-half 

of the sixteenth century that Aristotelians began to notice the discovery of the New World? 

 

The Torrid Zones: Doubt, Conjecture, and Revision 

 

While the idea of the torrid zone was widespread from antiquity through the Renaissance, 

Aristotle’s authority was hardly hegemonic.  Other ancient authors elaborated and questioned 

Aristotle’s division of the earth and his belief in two habitable zones.  Belief in a torrid zone was 

rampant, even though some ancients such as Crates of Mallos (fl. 150 A.D.) and Macrobius (5
th

 

c. A.D.) envisioned four oikoumenai.  Aristotle’s view that humans live in the southern 

hemisphere, however, found an uneven reception.  Some affirmed Aristotle’s position, and others 

considered the possibility of human life in the southern hemisphere either dubious or 

unanswerable.  For example, the geographer Strabo (ca. 63 B.C.- 23 A.D.), believing the Atlantic 

Ocean to be too large to sail across, refused to comment on the possibility of life on the 

antipodes.  On the other hand, Cicero (106-43 B.C.), in The Dream of Scipio, wrote of a different 

race of antipodal men who had no contact with those of the northern oikoumene.
11

   

Perhaps the most significant elaborations of Aristotle’s geography in late antiquity came 

in the persons of Claudius Ptolemy (85-165 A.D.), an astronomer and geographer, and Augustine 

(354-430 A.D.), a Church Father.  Using reports from travelers, Ptolemy expanded the range of 

the habitable zone and divided it into seven climates.  The northern border of the torrid zone, 

however, was not the tropic as it was for Aristotle, but the parallel on which the city Meroe lies, 

which is approximately 165/8 degrees north.  Ptolemy also contended that the polar regions are 

uninhabitable, and that the parallel which runs through Thule, an apparently mythical city, that 

was believed to be somewhere around 63 degrees north and perhaps on what are called today the 

Shetland Islands.
12

  Ptolemy’s arguments are not based on mathematics, despite his skill in that 

field, but rather are informed by histories and empirical evidence and Aristotle’s general schema.  

Like Aristotle, Ptolemy conjectured symmetry and believed that the southern hemisphere was 

habitable could be divided into the same climates as those in the north.
13

  

The division of the earth into specific zones had ramifications not just for geography and 

meteorology, but also for theology.  Augustine dismissed the belief that there was an inhabited 

southern continent and that there could exist a race of men permanently separated from the north.  

A human population on distant continents, however, presents problems for the belief in the single 

creation and common descent of all humans.  The implausibility of the navigation of oceans, 

suggests that God created counterparts to Adam and Eve in the southern hemisphere, if it is 

inhabited.  Furthermore, a just God would not create people in an area inaccessible to Christ’s 

apostles, because they would be damned as a result of unfair conditions.
14

  Thus for Augustine, 

scripture was proof that the antipodes must be free of humans. 

A melding of Augustine’s and Aristotle’s views resulted in the common medieval belief 

that there was only one inhabited zone, which corresponded to the northern orb where Europe is 

found; a torrid zone, too hot to support human life, borders the oikoumene to the south.  In the 

late Middle Ages, the Augustinian/Aristotelian position dominated conceptions of the nature of 

the earth and its climates and is found in the, Sphere of Sacrobosco, the most common 

astronomical text book of the Middle Ages, and its commentaries.  The author of this work, John 

Sacrobosco, a scholar from the late 12
th

 or early 13
th

 century, about whom little is known, 

slightly altered the placement of Ptolemy’s seven climes, agreeing that the southern border was 



 History of Meteorology 3 (2006) 5 
 

at the latitude of Meroe, but maintaining that the northern-most clime was marked by the parallel 

at 50  degrees north.  Although the text is slightly unclear, he seems to have believed that the 

southern hemisphere mirrors the northern.
15

  For Sacrobosco, these limits to the oikoumenai were 

not to be observed as strict rules.  He admitted that in the polar regions there might be islands 

and human habitations, but that the living conditions must be so bad that the area does not 

deserved the category of a clime.
16

  Michael Scot, a famed translator and scholar of the first 

decades of the thirteenth century, revised Sacrobosco’s position by adding Augustine in his 

commentary on the Sphere.  After outlining Augustine’s argument, he concluded that the 

antipodes must not be habitable, because such a proposition contradicts religion (contra fidem).
17

  

We must be careful not to ascribe too much homogeneity to either the ancient or 

medieval positions regarding the extent of the habitable earth.  Columbus read about the 

Augustinian, Aristotelian, and Sacroboscian positions in his annotated copy of Pierre d’Ailly’s 

Imago mundi and disbelieved the claim that the torrid zone was uninhabitable because of reports 

from Portuguese sailors who had crossed the equator while sailing down the western coast of 

Africa.
18

  Columbus’ disbelief, however, was probably not shocking to his contemporaries, but 

found company in highly authoritative texts.  For example, Albertus Magnus (1206-1280) cited 

reports of cities in the distant south.
19

  Pietro d’Abano’s Conciliator (ca. 1310) contains a 

detailed quaestio over the question of the habitableness of the torrid zones and areas below the 

equator, in which he discussed a plurality of views, which included accounts of very southern 

cities in India.  Pietro concluded that indeed some places in the equatorial region are 

uninhabitable and that it was not determined whether anyone lives below the equator, thus 

leaving the question open to new evidence.
20

  

 While ancient and medieval scholars questioned that the existence of an uninhabitable 

torrid zones was proven, during the Renaissance doubts grew among Aristotelian commentators, 

in part, because of the epistemological status of the field of meteorology.  Some of the leading 

Aristotelian scholars interpreted Aristotle’s Meteorology as advocating the conjectural nature of 

scientific knowledge, thereby recognizing limits to natural philosophy.  Well before de Acosta’s 

travels, leading Aristotelian commentators, such as Pietro Pomponazzi in the 1520s, noted that 

the voyages of discovery brought further doubt on the existence of torrid zones and argued that 

experience trumps the theories found in ancient texts.  For most Renaissance scholars, 

authoritative writings were sources of evidence, which at times contradicted each other as well as 

experience.  Authority in and of itself did not deliver unadulterated truth, but was an aid to 

discovering it.  A number of medieval and Renaissance Aristotelians neither feared contradicting 

Aristotle, nor thought their science was infallible.  For these scholars, the reports of sailors threw 

the existence of uninhabitable zones into doubt.  The rejection of this tenet, however, was not 

seen as fatal to natural philosophy in general and did not create a crisis that demanded a 

paradigm shift. 

 Aristotle’s philosophy provided a framework for natural philosophy in the Middle Ages 

and Renaissance.  This framework was flexible, oftentimes providing methods for inquiry rather 

than dogma.  The prohibition of metabasis is one of these guiding principles.  Based on the 

Posterior Analytics, the principle of the prohibition of metabasis contends that explanations 

should be appropriate to the phenomena that they explain, and that methods from one subject 

cannot be applied to other subjects.
21

  Thus different fields of inquiry require different methods 

and confer corresponding degrees of certainty.  For example, deductive arguments elucidate the 

nature of mathematical entities, such as lines and shapes, but cannot be applied to politics, which 

although ordered, to a degree, cannot be known with the same certainty as mathematics.  Natural 



 Experience of the New World and Aristotelian Revisions 6 
 

 

objects, therefore, can be known with relative degrees of certainty.  Geometry can describe 

accurately the stars and planets that have eternal regular motion.  The sublunary world, however, 

is characterized by chaotic and episodic change.  As a result, according to Aristotle, 

meteorological knowledge is hypothetical and approximate. 

 Meteorology stood out among subjects in Aristotelian natural philosophy because of its 

intractability.  For Aristotle, meteorology was not predictive but examined change in inanimate 

substances in the sublunary region.  Topics that were included in this field were: precipitation, 

rainbows, comets (which were thought to be sublunary), meteors, earthquakes, the motions of 

seas and rivers, and underground springs.  Like all of his natural philosophy, the goal of 

meteorology was to give the causes of phenomena.  Unlike for much of the natural world, 

however, the explanations for meteorology were almost entirely based on material and efficient 

cause, not the formal and final causes that were preeminent in most of his works.
22

  According to 

Aristotle, the four elements (earth, water, air, fire) compose two exhalations, one wet and 

vaporous, the other, hot and smoky, that circulate between the surface of the earth and the moon, 

which is the liminal point between terrestrial and celestial realms.  The elements and the 

exhalations are the material causes of meteorological phenomena.  The efficient cause comes 

from the motions of the celestial bodies, in particular the sun, which drives the exhalations and 

causes their transformations.  These transformed bodies remained imperfect, never truly gaining 

a new substantial form.   

Aristotle’s meteorology stressed irregular and rare phenomena, such as meteors, comets, 

floods, volcanic eruptions, and typhoons, which, because of their episodic nature, defy certain 

explanation.  He wrote: “Of these things some puzzle us, while others admit of explanation in 

some degree.”
23

  [check quotation] The theory of the dual exhalations does not derive from 

syllogistic reasoning, but from abduction, i.e., inference to the best explanation, as Cynthia 

Freeland has argued.
24

  The exhalations provide conceptual unity to a wide range of phenomena, 

that otherwise might be considered disparate.  Other ancient thinkers also noted the difficulty of 

accurately explaining meteorological phenomena; for this field both Theophrastus (d. 287 B.C.) 

and Lucretius (99-55 B.C.) gave a number of possible explanations in their meteorological 

discussions rather than a definitive account.
25

  Thus in antiquity, meteorological queries were 

frequently resolved only in a provisional manner. 

 Medieval and Renaissance meteorology took Aristotle’s Meteorology as its guide and 

starting point.  The subject of meteorology was central to Aristotelian thought.  Medieval and 

Renaissance scholars typically believed that the Meteorology was the fourth part of natural 

philosophy; it follow the Physics, De caelo, and De generatione et corruptione and preceded the 

biological and psychological works.  Scholars developed and expounded upon the subject in 

lecture courses at universities, the content of which can be known from their written 

commentaries and quaestiones derived from William of Moerbeke’s thirteenth-century Latin 

translation of the text.  Teaching of the Meteorologica was a standard part of Italian university 

curriculum at least as far back as the initial years of the fifteenth century if not earlier.  

According to the 1405 university statutes at Bologna, the Meteorology was to be taught in the 

second year as part of the classes in ordinary philosophy.
26

  Although the commentaries that 

emerged from these courses follow the text of Aristotle, they were by no means uncritical or 

unoriginal; nor were the theories developed from them so univocal to suggest that the field of 

meteorology was considered to be complete and certain, as Sanchez described it for 

Aristotelians. 



 History of Meteorology 3 (2006) 7 
 

 By the first decades of the sixteenth century, Aristotle’s own claim of puzzlement with 

regard to meteorological phenomena inspired scholars in Italy, who used the Meteorology to 

support the claim that natural philosophy was a conjectural science.  This view clearly emerged 

in the works of Agostino Nifo (1473-1538), a writer who is most noted for his participation in 

debates over the immortality of the soul and his role in advancing the so-called regressus method 

in natural philosophy, a method that combined induction and deduction, and which some 

scholars have seen to be the historical root of the “scientific method.”
27

  It is unnecessary to 

anachronistically identify the regressus theory with the modern notion of “scientific method,” to 

appreciate its sophistication, and its importance in epistemology from Galen to Galileo.  The 

theory argued that through sense perception, it was possible to establish was called quia, “the 

what there is,” or natural effects, and thus establish basic empirical truths about nature.  Using 

this knowledge as a foundation, induction led to an explanation, called the propter quid, that is, 

the “why” that gave an account for the quia.  An understanding of the propter quid, could then 

serve as a foundation for deduction of further effects, which would in term lead to the 

formulation of a more comprehensive explanation.  It was in this way that natural science was 

thought to be able to progress over time, and that natural philosophy was, to a certain degree 

conjectural.  Nifo relied on the wavering nature of the field of meteorology as evidence of the 

uncertainty of the natural sciences.    

Nifo’s Commentaria in libris Aristotelis Meteorologicis (first published in 1531, it was 

written in 1523) was the first sixteenth-century exposition on Meteorology to be published in 

Italy.  It enjoyed wide readership and went through more editions than any other commentary on 

this book in the sixteenth century.
28

  He used meteorology, and Aristotle’s confession of the 

inability to understand all causes to distinguish the natural sciences from the mathematical.  He 

writes: “It must be said that natural science is not a science simpliciter, such as the mathematical 

sciences are, but is a science that explains the why (propter quid).  [check quotation] It is the 

science of finding the causes which can be held through a conjectural syllogism, that gives the 

propter quid of the effect.”  This account of the effect however is not definitive. He supported 

this claim by his use of Aristotle’s meteorology and argued that, “Aristotle in the book of the 

Meteorology concedes that he does not provide the true causes of natural effects, but that which 

is possible through conjecture.”
29

  Thus conclusions about the causes of meteorology, unlike 

mathematics, are at best tentative, and subject to revision if there are changes in the 

understanding of the nature of meteorological effects.  For Nifo, contrary to Sanchez, 

meteorology is hardly infallible but rather open to new experiential findings. 

 Experience, during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, was far broader for natural 

philosophers than the narrow definitions of experiment that scientists have since adopted.  What 

fell under this rubric and was appropriate as evidence included not just personal observations or 

contrived tests, but also truths about the natural world that were thought to be universally agreed 

upon and experiences of others either contained in books or transmitted by word of mouth. 

Reports made by navigators and their crew, having been deemed reliable, were sufficient 

evidence for questioning and revising Aristotle.  

 Nifo’s rejection of the Aristotle’s division of the world into habitable and uninhabitable 

zones is a good example of one stage of the application of the method of regressus.  According 

to Nifo, when Aristotle claimed that the pole regions and the tropics were uninhabited he did so 

without consulting history books (historia).  Following Alexander of Aphrodisias, the 

Aristotelian commentator from the second-century A.D., Nifo claimed that perhaps in Aristotle’s 

time there were no reports that contradicted his schema.  By Nifo’s time, however, there were 



 Experience of the New World and Aristotelian Revisions 8 
 

 

such accounts; sailors had reported that people do live close to the North Pole, above sixty 

degrees, “thus what Aristotle attempted to establish by conjecture, is not verified by history.”
30

  

Nevertheless, Nifo maintained the rectitude of the barrenness of the torrid zone.  Even though, 

even during Alexander’s time, it was known that Ethiopians lived in this zone, the zone itself 

could not be declared habitable in a strict sense because they live, “almost beyond the norms of 

nature.”
31

  Thus Nifo rejected some of Aristotle’s conjectures because of experience, while the 

general framework persisted and the meaning of habitable zone could be interpreted so that it 

included only the regions where people could live well and not the areas where Ethiopians 

allegedly lived poorly. 

 The insistence on the conjectural nature of knowledge about the physical world, that Nifo 

held, was even stronger in the thought of his rival and contemporary Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-

1524).  Pomponazzi spent most of his professional life as first a professor at Padua and then 

Bologna.  Famed for his brushes with ecclesiastical authority, for his denial that the immortality 

of the soul could be proven philosophically, rather it was an article of faith not reason, he moved 

from a position of fideism to that of near skepticism, which runs through the lectures on 

Aristotelian text that his gave in the last years of his life at Bologna.
32

  These courses treated 

Aristotle’s biological works and the Meteorology.
33

 

Despite his more than occasional pride in uncovering what he considered to be the true 

opinion of Aristotle, Pomponazzi actively encouraged his students to doubt accepted knowledge.  

Such doubting was directed toward Aristotle and his interpreters.  His doubts primarily arose 

from contradictions among texts, interpretations, logic, and experience.  And unlike earlier 

masters of textual conciliation, Pomponazzi admitted that he could not solve all of the 

contradictions.  Furthermore, he argued that the best way to solve a number of these 

contradictions is to claim that Aristotle is wrong.  In his view, the job of the philosopher is to 

discover the truth for himself, independent from past authorities.
34

  The concept of certainty 

played scarcely any role in his meteorological commentaries, and the chosen solutions are often 

described not as true but as better, more tolerable, or more pleasing.
35

  

Pomponazzi found significant authority in Aristotle.  Authority, however, was 

conditional, and the role of the philosopher is to judge authorities, “because in philosophy,” 

Pomponazzi writes, “one should not believe an authority without reason.”
36

  The authority 

derives from Aristotle’s words themselves and the commentators should only be used with care, 

especially the works of certain unnamed commentators, who Pomponazzi believed to have put 

forth interpretations that are based on caprice and unsound readings of the text.  In his view, the 

good philosopher is aware of Aristotle’s authority, in fact, “the good philosopher should pore 

himself over Aristotle’s text,”
37

 yet uses reason to solve interpretative problems as well as to 

judge the validity of Aristotle’s arguments.  For example, after being unable to explicate 

Aristotle successfully, he urged his readers to find a solution for themselves.  He told his 

students: “Aristotle’s authority is great. And it does not seem easy to find a solution to this 

question. You consider it.”
38

 

Unquestioning acquiescence to Aristotle is not a philosophical method, according to 

Pomponazzi.  He repeatedly argued that Aristotle was human, and thus erred, like the rest of us.  

He bluntly wrote: “many want Aristotle to have spoken well with respect to everything, and they 

are stupid.”
39

  The formulae and theories that structure natural philosophy are provisional and 

should be overturned whenever experience demonstrates their failings.  He wrote: “If he 

[Aristotle] was wrong, let there be a condemnation of him.”
40

  When he finds that Aristotle has 

contradicted himself he confesses his inability to save his arguments, claiming that, “I do not 



 History of Meteorology 3 (2006) 9 
 

know how to answer except that Aristotle was a man and was capable of making mistakes.”
41

  

Rejecting all earthly authority when he found two opinions of equal value, he stated: “I believe 

neither Aristotle nor Galen knew which opinion is more true, but only God does.”
42

   

Pomponazzi’s corrections to Aristotle, and to his interpreters, most often come from 

experience, because Aristotle at times induced larger rules from an insufficient amount of 

experience.
43

  Experience for Pomponazzi was broad and not equivalent to Baconian empiricism.  

He included as experience in his meteorological work, observations taken from Plutarch’s 

histories on the existence of a man whose toe would not burn, Avicenna’s observations on the 

actions of poisonous snakes, as well his own memories of a spectacle that took place in Mantua 

when he was a child.
44

  His appeals to experience are often vague and rely on commonplaces; in 

multiple discussions he adds phrases such as “as is clear from experience” to justify or reject a 

claim.
45

   

While Pomponazzi advocated the use of reason to form philosophical positions, 

experience holds a higher position.  Citing Avicenna’s Canon and Aristotle’s Physics, he writes 

that: “When reason is contrary to experience, then reason must be thrown out and put to 

experience.”
46

  Thus, while Aristotle, at times, used an insufficient amount of evidence in 

induction, Pomponazzi, nevertheless, saw Aristotle as privileging experience over reason in 

explaining natural phenomenon.  After asking why Aristotle only puts forth only the phenomena 

without giving an explanation when he describes how honey is affected by the moist and the 

cold, Pomponazzi answers with the dictum that “it is possible to be known better through 

experience than theory.”
47

  The promotion of experiential approaches to natural philosophy is not 

foreign to Aristotle’s natural philosophy.  His use of observation, experiments, and experience is 

well documented.
48

  Pomponazzi’s emphasis on experience, however, contrasted with the 

analytic methods of many late-medieval practitioners of natural philosophy that was more often 

dependent on logic and mathematics than observation.
49

 

Given Pomponazzi’s position with respect to the epistemological roles of experience, 

authority, and theory, his take on the existence of the habitableness of the antipodes and the 

torrid zones is somewhat curious.  He prefaced his discussion by examining the Peripatetic view, 

which he claimed clearly holds that the zones between the tropics are uninhabitable.  After going 

through the arguments for this position, and pointing out their weakness, he cited a letter from 

the Venetian ambassador to Spain.
50

  According to this letter, the ambassador crossed the torrid 

zone and traveled toward the south pole, where he saw over 300 islands, discontinuous with 

continental land masses, and an “infinity of inhabited locales.”  In Pomponazzi’s opinion, the 

contents of this letter show that Aristotle’s theory is fatuous.  Moreover, this experiential 

evidence suggests that other parts of natural philosophy, such as astronomy, are monuments to 

human vanity rather than certainty, “the desire of glory and attention leads us to say things about 

the heavens, when we are ignorant of even the terrestrial regions.”
51

  If natural philosophy errs 

with respect to subjects in our proximity, such as meteorological phenomena, it is even less 

likely that we can know with certainty about the composition of the distant celestial realm. 

 Given this assessment, it would seem that whether the torrid zones and antipodes are 

inhabited would be an open-and-shut case.  For Pomponazzi, however, there was one strong 

argument that humans did not live in these regions, namely the authority of Augustine.
52

  Even 

though, philosophers’ sense experience contradicts Augustine’s position, Pomponazzi could not 

bring himself to directly reject the Church Father.  After rejecting the potential solution that 

because these inhabitants are wild and without discipline, they should be damned as lacking in 

sense, he confessed that he could not solve the dilemma and refused to reject Augustine.  His 



 Experience of the New World and Aristotelian Revisions 10 
 

 

reasons have his personal history behind him. In 1518, his teachings on the immortality of the 

soul were condemned by the Church, which, at the time, was heavily influenced by 

Augustinians.
53

  Pomponazzi recanted and agreed not to teach arguments that might be construed 

to deny the personal immortality of the soul.  In explaining his refusal to disagree with 

Augustine, he mentioned his skirmish with the Church, writing that the position for which he 

was declared in error was “fatuous” and claimed that when it “comes to issues of faith, I always 

subject myself to Priests and whatever they tell me.”  As a result, he offers no definitive solution 

since he “does not know how the Priests solve this argument.”
54

 

 Scholars have more than once charged Pomponazzi with deception in his deference to the 

Church, because of his presentation of coherent arguments for a position antithetical to Church 

doctrine, which is followed in a later chapter by a denial of the ability of philosophy to answer 

the same question, because it was a matter of faith.
55

  These charges are problematic because of 

their assumption of Pomponazzi’s heterodoxy and their transference of modern anti-clerical 

attitudes to the Renaissance.
56

  It is more than reasonable (and common among medieval 

Christian theologians) to believe that the personal immortality of the soul or the creation of the 

universe can be known only through faith.
57

  One wonders, however, to what extent this fideism 

is possible with the issue of the habitability of the antipodes and torrid zones.  Even though once 

experience shows that these zones are inhabited, there seems little else to do but not interpret 

Augustine as being literally true, but it is not necessary to accuse Pomponazzi of 

disingenuousness.  Given that he was a layman, Pomponazzi was most likely correct in claiming 

making such interpretation was not his business, but that of priests.  Pomponazzi, a philosopher 

untrained in theology, ignorant of their solution, thus refused to make more pronouncements on 

how to solve a theological question.  Nonetheless, it is easy to suspect that Pomponazzi was a bit 

gleeful that the Augustinians, who by the 1520s had fallen out of favor in Rome because of 

Martin Luther, a former Augustinian monk, would be forced to perform some exegetical 

acrobatics in order to save the coherency of Augustine’s pronouncements.  Even Augustinians, 

however, did not seem to be overly concerned with maintaining a literal interpretation of 

Augustine.  During the sixteenth century numerous Augustinian monks traveled to the New 

World and Asia as missionaries.   

 

Conclusion 

 

Later Aristotelians followed Nifo’s and Pomponazzi’s rejection of Aristotle’s conjecture 

of uninhabitable regions.  Francesco Vimercati, originally from Milan but later a professor of 

Greek and the College Royale, in Paris, noted, in his 1556 commentary on the Meteorology, that 

the torrid regions, the southern hemisphere, and the northern polar regions were inhabited.  He 

wrote that these locals were discovered after the time of Ptolemy and Aristotle, but are readily 

recognized by more recent geographers.
58

  The most common Jesuit textbooks on natural 

philosophy, those by the Coimbrans, which were commentaries on Aristotle as well, citing 

Christopher Columbus by name, gave a six-prong explanation of why the torrid zones were 

indeed habitable: the equal nights and days prevented excessive warming, the areas were full of 

vapors and therefore cooling rains, God endowed the primeval earth in such a way as to make 

them cool enough to support human life, they were full of mountains and valley, the oceans cool 

them, and winds, which have their ultimate source in God’s providence, disperse the heat of the 

sun.
59

  The Jesuit order, at this time, was both a starch defender of Aristotle and a promoter of 



 History of Meteorology 3 (2006) 11 
 

worldwide voyages and missions.  The experiences derived from the discovery of the New 

World, however, were stronger than maintaining a strict adherence to Aristotle’s authority. 

 When compared to later debates over the mutability of the heavens and the location of 

comets, it does not appear that writers of Aristotelian commentaries had much trouble 

relinquishing Aristotle’s position at all.
60

  This willingness to go against Aristotle is due to the 

lack of ambiguity of the evidence that these zones were inhabited.  While the telescope could be 

doubted as an inaccurate instrument, providing distortions of experience rather than 

enhancement,
61

 and disputes over the application of mathematics to the physical world provoked 

questions about the conclusions made by Tycho Brahe and Galileo,
62

 by the middle of the 

sixteenth century it would have been impossible to deny the numerous claims made by sailors 

who had seen the New World.  Moreover, Aristotle’s position had been a matter of debate within 

the Aristotelian tradition since antiquity; it was not a central tenet and thus was subject to 

revision. 

 Jacopo Zabarella, a leading professor at Padua, believed that Aristotelian natural 

philosophy, despite Aristotle’s being fallible, attained perfection with regard to its structure and 

form, that is, its general principles and methods, but not with regard to its characterization of all 

natural things.
63

  Geocentricism, supralunary comets, mutations in the heavens each, to a great 

extent, threatened the form and structure of the Aristotelian cosmos, by rendering key doctrines, 

such as the distinction between the supralunary and sublunary, the relativity of direction, the 

relation between celestial powers and earth, as meaningless.  To the contrary, Aristotle’s 

conjectures about geographic regions, about which he knew nothing firsthand, provoked laughter 

in de Acosta and scorn in Sanchez, were not part of the structure and form of his account of the 

natural world but rather a description of some of its contents, which could be revised without 

throwing general principles in doubt.  Although the inhabitability of the torrid zones was 

rejected, the belief in the existence of climates that affected persons, peoples, and animal species 

persisted.  As late as the 18
th

 century, Montesquieu endorsed the theory that climate affects 

government and mores in his Spirit of the Laws, and Thomas Jefferson felt obliged to use the 

phrase “torrid zone” to describe the natural habitat of wooly mammoths and elephants.
64

  

Renaissance Aristotelians, such as Pomponazzi and Nifo, were more than willing to revise 

Aristotle.  His authority was not absolute, but merely the best guide available; and well before 

1550, scholars thought that not all important truths, such as the earth’s climate, were to be found 

only by reading texts. 

 

Endnotes 

 
1
 Nicolò Vito di Gozze, Discorsi sopra le Metheore d'Aristotele, Ridotti in dialogo & divisi in 

quattro Giornate.  (Venezia, 1584), 77r. 
2
 Lorraine Daston & Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: 

Zone Books, 1998), 146-159.  
3
 Reijer Hooykaas, “Humanism and the Voyages of Discovery in 16

th
-century Portuguese Science 

and Letters,” Mededelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van wetenschapen, AFD. Letterkunde 

Nieuwe Reeks Deel 42, no. 4 (1979); Reijer Hooykaas, “The Rise of Modern Science: When and Why?” 

British Journal for the History of Science 20 (1987), 453-473. 
4
 For the historiography of the scientific revolution see: H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific 

Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 
5
 Christoph Lüthy, “What to Do with Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy? A Taxonomic 

Problem,” Perspectives on Science 8 (2000), 164-195, esp. 166-170. 



 Experience of the New World and Aristotelian Revisions 12 
 

 

 
6
 For example, see: Margarita Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis 

Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 36. 
7
 Aristotle, Meteorology, 363a15. 

8
 Antony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of 

Discovery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1. 
9
 José de Acosta, De natura novi orbis libri duo (Cologne, 1592), 22 

10
 Francisco Sanchez, That Nothing is Known, (tr.) Douglas F. S. Thomson (Cambridge, 

Cambridge University Press, 1988), 221-222. 
11

 James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and 

Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 121-140. 
12

 Ptolemy, Geography, 7.5. For the identification of Thule see: J. Lennart Berggren and 

Alexander Jones,  Ptolemy’s Geography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 180.  Ptolemy’s 

Geography was not available in Western Europe until the fifteenth century, although his positions 

regarding this issue were passed on indirectly. 
13

 Ptolemy, Geography, 7.5. 
14

 Augustine,City of God, Bk. XVI, Chap. 9. 
15

 Lynn Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and its Commentators (Chicago: University of 

Chicago Press, 1949), 129. 
16

 Thorndike, The Sphere, 139-140. 
17

 Thorndike, The Sphere, 321. 
18

 Edmond, Buron, Ymago Mundi e Pierre d’Ailly. Teste latin et français des quatre traités 

cosmographicques de d’Ailly et des notes marginales de Christophe Colomb. Etudes sur les sources de 

l’Auteur, 3 vols. (Paris: Maisonneuve frères, 1930); W. G. L. Randles, “Classical Models of World 

Geography and Their Transformation Following the Discovery of America,” in Geography, Cartography 

and Nautical Science in the Renaissance (Burlington , Vt: Variorum , 2000), I: 38-39. 
19

 Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia, (ed.) August Borgnet (Paris: L. Vivès, 1890) 4:604. 
20

 Pietro d’Abano, Conciliator differentiarum philosophorum et praecipue medicorum (Venice, 

1565 [reprint Padova: Antenore, 1985]), Differentia LXVII, fol. 100v-102v. 
21

 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 75a38-75b6.  For the history of this prohibition see: Amos 

Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 299-

327.  
22

 For a discussion of the relative absence of teleology in the Meteorology see: Liba Taub, Ancient 

Meteorology (London: Routledge, 2003), 80-84.   
23

 Aristotle, Meteorology, 339a2-3. 
24

 Cynthia A. Freeland, “Scientific Explanation and Empirical Data in Aristotle’s Meteorology,” 

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 8 (1990), 67-102.   
25

 Hans Daiber, “The Meteorology of Theophrastus in Syriac and Arabic Translation,” in 

Theophrastus: His Psychological, Doxagraphical, and Scientific Writings, William W. Fortenbaugh and 

Dimitri Gutas, eds., (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1992), 166-293, English trans. of treatise, 261-

271. 
26

 See rubrica lxxviii: “De lectura et ordine librorum legendorum.” in Carlo Malagola (ed.), 

Statuti delle università e dei collegi dello studio bolognese (Bologna: N. Zanichelli, 1888), 274. 
27

 For the regressus see: John Herman Randall, Jr., The School of Padua and the Emergence of 

Modern Science (Padua: Antenore, 1961); Nicolas Jardine, “Epistemology of the Sciences,” in Charles B. 

Schmitt et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 1988) 708-711; Charles B. Schmitt, “L’aristotelismo nel veneto e le origini della scienza 

moderna,” in Luigi Olivieri (ed.), Aristotelismo veneto e scienza moderna (Padua: Antenore, 1983) 79-

103, (English version) 104-123; W. L. Wisan, “Galileo’s Scientific Method: a Re-examination,” in R. E. 

Butts and J. C. Pitt (eds.), New Perspectives on Galileo (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978), 1-57.  For a 



 History of Meteorology 3 (2006) 13 
 

 
biography and the chronology of Nifo’s teaching see: Edward P. Mahoney, “Agostino Nifo,” DSB X 

(1974), 122-124.  
28

 For the editions of this work see: Charles H. Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries II: 

Renaissance Authors (Florence: Olschki, 1988), 282-287.  
29

 Agostino Nifo, Expositio super octo Aristotelis Stagiritae libros de Physico Auditu (Venice, 

1552), 6v: “Dicendum, scientiam de natura non esse scientiam simpliciter, qualis est scientia 

mathematica, est tamen scientia propter quid: quia inventio causae, quae habetur per syllogismum 

coniecturalem, est propter quid effectus. per haec delentur obiectiones, quae contra haec fieri solent: 

Prima quidem delentur ex eo, quia non est circulus in demonstratione, cum primus processus sit tantum 

syllogismus, secundus vero demonstratio propter quid. deletur etiam Secunda obiectio, quia effectus 

semper est notior ipsa causa in genere notitiae quia est. nunquam enim causa potest esse ita certa quia est, 

sicut effectus, cuius esse est ad sensum notum. Ipsum vero quia est causae, est coniecturale, utrum tale 

esse coniecturale est notius ipso effectu, in genere notitiae propter quid. nam posita inventione causae 

semper scitur propter quid effectus. unde & Aristo., in libro Meteororum concedit se non tradidisse veras 

causas effectuum naturalium, sed quo erat sibi possibile coniecturabiliter. sed de his hactenus.” 
30

 Agostino Nifo, In libros Meteorologicorum, in librum de Mistis, sive Quartum Meteororum, ab 

antiquis nuncupatum & ordinatum (Venice, 1560), 329: “Est ergo opinio Aristotelis terrae habitabilis 

partes, quae bene, & ordinatae habitantur, esse duas: nostram, quae est in cona cancri, & illam, quam 

antipodes habitant, quae est sub cona capricorni, hanc nostram habitabilem esse videmus. Sed illam 

Aristoteles habitatam esse, ut Alexan. inquit, Non per historias tradit, sed per coniecturas, eo quia Sol 

eodem modo se habet ad illam, sicut ad nostram. Et licet temporibus Aristotelis fortasse habitatio in illa 

per historias non erat cognita, ut Alexan. inquit. Tamen temporibus nostris per navigationes habitata 

reperitur.  Asserunt enim invenisse gentes adeo versus illum polum habitantes, ut polus elevetur ad gra. 

60. & sic quod Aristoteles coniecturis probavit, historia [non?] comprobatur.” 
31

 Ibid.: “Respondet Alexan. Aristotelem  esse locutum de bene habitantibus, modo isti aethiopes 

non bene habitant, sed propre aquas, quasi praeter naturaliter viventes.” 
32

 On his promotion of doubting see: Stefano Perfetti, “Docebo vos dubitare. Il commento inedito 

di Pietro Pomponazzi al De partibus animalium,” Documenti e Studi sulla Tradizione Filosofica 

Medievale 10 (1999), 439-466. 
33

 Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries 347-362.  
34

 For Pomponazzi’s spirit of independence see the introduction to: Antonino Poppi, Corsi inediti 

dell’insegnamento padovano vol. 1 (Padua: Antenore, 1966), xv.  For his method of commentary on De 

partibus animalium see: Stefano Perfetti, Aristotle’s Zoology and its Renaissance Commentators (1521-

1601) (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2000), 33-63. 
35

 E.g., Pietro Pomponazzi, Dubitationes in quartum Meteorologicorum (Venice, 1563), Dubitatio 

XIII, 8r: “Quare Alexandri expositio mihi videtur melior,”; Dubitatio, XXVI, 17r: “& haec responsio 

magis tolerabilis est.”; Dubitatio XXVIII, 20v: “Mihi, ut verum fatear, magis place sententia Thomae de 

Garbo.”; Dubitatio XLVII, 28r: “multo magis mihi placet haec responsio.”; Dubitatio XLIX, 31v: “& 

mihi verior opinio,”; Dubitatio LXXIII, 41r: “Valeat haec responsio quantum potest.”  On the limits of 

certainty in this philosophical setting see: Luigi Olivieri, Certezza e gerarchia del sapere: crisi dell’idea 

di scientificità nell’aristotelismo del secolo XVI (Padua: Antenore, 1983), 117-133. 
36

 Dubitatio XLIX, 30v: “(in philosophia enim non credendum authoritati sine ratione)” 
37

 Dubitatio XLIX, 33v. 
38

 Dubitatio XL, 37v: “Magna est authoritas Aristotelis. & solvere quaestionem hanc mihi non 

videtur facile. Vos considerate.”  See also: Dubitatio LXXXI, 40v: “Certe ego non video modum salvandi 

Aristotelem in hoc loco, … Meliorem solutionem ego non habeo. Si vultis meliorem, quaerite.” 
39

 40v: “Multi volunt Aristotelem in omnibus bene dixisse, & stulti sunt.” 
40

 Dubitatio LXXXIII, 42v: “Domini ego nescio dici oporteat, neque possum Aristotelem 

defendere. Si erravit, eius fit damnum.” 



 Experience of the New World and Aristotelian Revisions 14 
 

 

 
41

 Dubitatio CXXVI, 49r: “Aliud dubium, videtur Aristoteles sibi contradicere...nescio 

respondere, nisi, quod Aristoteles fuit homo, & potiut errare.”  On the history of this phrase see: Luca 

Bianchi, “‘Aristotele fu un uomo e poté errare’: sulle origini medievali della critica al ‘principio di 

autorità,’” in Luca Bianchi (ed.), Filosofia e teologia nel Trecento. Studi in ricordo di Eugenio Randi, 

(Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération internationale des instituts d’études médiévales, 1994), 509-533 [reprinted 

in updated version in Luca Bianchi, Studi sull’aristotelismo del Rinascimento (Padua: Il poligrafo, 2003), 

101-132]. 
42

 Dubitatio XLII, 22v: “quae tamen opinio sit verior, credo ego nec Aristotelem, nec Galenum, 

hoc scivisse: sed solum Deum.” 
43

 Dubitatio XIIII, 17v: “Adde quod videtur philosophus facere insufficiente inductionem...” See 

Antonino Poppi, Introduzione all’aristotelismo padovano 2
nd

 edition (Padova: Antenore, 1991), 13-44, 

for a characterization of Paduan Aristotelianism as privileging experience at the expense of metaphysics. 
44

 Dubitatio LXIIII, 38v.  Plutarch’s story of the man with the incombustible foot as well as 

similar observations on the venom of snakes is also found in: Pietro Pomponazzi, De naturalium 

effectuum causis sive De incantationibus (Basel, 1567) 46-47. 
45

 See Dubitatio LXXI, 40v: Certe ego non video modum salvandi Aristotelem in hoc loco, 

propterea quod si ex spiritu fit aqua, haec est humectatio, ut patet ad sensum”; Dubitatio CVIII, 47r: “Sed 

haec solution non placet, quoniam eadem pars terrae potest madefieri & etiam liquefieri, ut patet 

experientia.”; Dubitatio IX, 4r: “& huius opinionis author fuit Calculator. quae tamen salvo meliori 

iudicio mihi videtur falsa est: est enim contra experientiam.”; Ibid: “Verum meo iudicio melior est opinio 

communis, quam opinio Gaiet. ideo probo ego hoc esse contra sensum & experientiam, quod Gaietanus 

dicit.” 
46

 Dubitatio XII, 6v: “Avic. autem quarta primi, & Arist. 8 physicae ausc. Dicit, quod quando 

ratio adversatur experientiae, tunc omittenda ratio, & standum experientiae.” Cf. Aristotle, Physics 8.1, 

262a18ff. 
47

 Dubitatio LXXVI, 41v: “Ego dicerem quod hoc potest sciri magis per experientiam quam per 

rationem.” 
48

 E.g., Louis Bourgey, Observation et experience chez Aristote (Paris: J. Vrin, 1955); G. E. R. 

Lloyd. “Experiment in Early Greek Philosophy and Medicine,” Proceedings of the Cambridge 

Philological Society N.S. 10 (1964), 50-72, reprinted with introduction in Method and Problems in Greek 

Science: Selected Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 70-99. 
49

 John E. Murdoch, “The Analytic Character of Late Medieval Learning: Natural Philosophy 

without Nature,” In L. D. Roberts (ed.) Approaches to Nature in the Middle Ages (Binghamton, NY: 

Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1982), 171-213. 
50

 Pietro Pomponazzi, In secundum librum Meteororum, Ms. Ambrosiana 96 R sup., fol. 69v:  

“Notetis quod ego habeo epistolam missam a quodam Veneto. qui iverat in Legationem ad Regem 

Hispaniae, et venit versus polum Australem, opportuit ergo ut transiret torridam zonam, dixitque ibi esse 

plusquam trecentum insulas, tamen scribit illas esse discontinuas et quod ibi sunt infinita loca habitata.  

Ideo en quae hic dicitur ab Aristotele sunt fatuitates, ut videtis.” A portion of this quotation and a similar 

reportatio are transcribed in: Bruno Nardi, Saggi sulla cultura veneta del Quattro e Cinquecento (Padua: 

Antenore, 1971), 52.  On the widespread availability of printed reports of the discovery of the New World 

in Northern Italy, see: Liz Horodowich, “Armchair Travelers and the Venetian Discovery of the New 

World,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 36 (2005), 1039-1062; Rudolf Hirsch, “Printed Reports on the 

Early Discoveries and their Reception,” in Fredi Chiappelli (ed.), First Images of America: The Impact of 

the New World on the Old (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1976) 2:537-

538.  
51

 Pomponazzi, In secundum librum, fol. 69v: “Cupiditas tamen gloriae et affectionis ducit nos ad 

dicendum saepe de superis, cum inferiora ignoremus.”   



 History of Meteorology 3 (2006) 15 
 

 
52

 Pomponazzi, In secundum librum, fol. 71v: “Tamen argumentum adduco, quod omnium est 

fortissimum, quoniam Divus Augustinus ibi de Civitate dei cap. ultimo ubi disputat utrum sint antipodes 

vel non dicit ipse quod non sunt, imo ponere ipsos antipodes nihil aliud sit nisi fictio, et fatuitas 

Astrologorum, et Philosophorum.” 
53

 For the influence of Augustinians on the Papacy during this time see: John W. O’Malley, Giles 

of Viterbo on Church and Reform (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 41-49. 
54

 In secundum librum., fol. 71v-72r: “Unum est quod Augustinus negat illa loca, et tamen 

philosophi tenent et experientia et sensus unius haec docere. Quid conclusio dicendum est. etiam ibi sunt 

homines bestiales, et non disciplinabiles, quo ergo docebimus eos quod credant, ea quae sensum fugiuntur 

profecto res est magna difficultatis, quo modo ergo deberent ipsi damnari, cum ipsi sint quasi bestiae, et 

feri sic, et forsan, quod nihilo sciunt de fide, imo sine forsan nihil credunt de his, quae non credimus, 

Cum ergo non sint in causa, quare debent damnari? Domini mei quoniam ego pervenio ad aliquem 

passsum ubi agitur de fide tunc ego me subijcio Fratribus, et quicquid ipsi mihi dicunt, ego credo: subijcio 

me semper correctioni ecclesiae: Profecto ego miror de multis qui se multa scire profitentur et minima 

videtis nos ignorare: maxime tamen miror de Averroe qui iurat animam suam has esse demones quas onit, 

et sunt mera sophismata. ego dimitto hoc, et cogitetis, et volo quod dicatis vestram sententiam, quantum 

credatis ipsum scivisse de copulatione intellegentis possibilis cum intellectu agente, quae mihi videtur 

maxima fatuitas. videtur autem homini ambitionbem, qui pollicetur demonstrationem causae et esse, quae 

profecto non valet unum quadrantem. Taceo de illa copulatione intellegentis. Unum est quod Aristotelis 

via est animam fuisse mortalem, manendo in via sua, et puris naturalibus. Infide ego nescio quid sit 

respondendum: Nescio enim quomodo illi Frates solunt argumentum, ego enim nescio solvere, tam 

Augustinus expresse negat illas habitationes quas diximus, et dicit esse phantasias Philosophorum, et 

Astrologorum.” 
55

 On Pomponazzi’s condemnation and his recantation, see: Martin L. Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi, 

Radical Philosopher of the Renaissance (Padua: Antenore, 1986), 126-131.  For accusations of his 

undercover attacks on established religions see: Martin L. Pine, “Pietro Pomponazzi’s Attack on Religion 

and the Problem of the De fato,” in Atheismus im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance, Friedrich 

Niewöhner and Olaf Pluta (eds.), (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1999), 145-172. 
56

 Paul O. Kristeller, “The Myth of Renaissance Atheism and the French Tradition of Free 

Thought,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 6 (1968), 233-243. 
57

 For fideism and its opponents in the Middle Ages see: Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation 

in the Middle Ages (New York: Scribner, 1950). 
58

 Francesco Vimercati, In quatuor libros Aristotelis Meteorologicorum commentarii (Paris, 

1556), 229. 
59

 Collegium Conimbricense,  In quatuor libros de Caelo (Lyon, 1608), col. 402-406.  
60

 Stillman Drake & C. D. O’Malley, Controversy on the Comets of 1618 (Philadelphia: 

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960). 
61

 William R. Shea, Galileo’s Intellectual Revolution, 2
nd

 ed. (New York: Science History 

Publications, 1977), 79-81. 
62

 Anna De Pace, Le matematiche e il mondo: richerche su un dibattito in Italia nella seconda 

metà del Cinquecento (Milano: FrancAngeli, 1993); Rivka Feldhay, “The Use and Abuse of 

Mathematical Entities,” in Cambridge Companion to Galileo, (ed..) Peter Machamer (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1998), 92-93. 
63

 Heikki Mikkeli, An Aristotelian Response to Renaissance Humanism (Helsinki: SHS, 1992), 

43. 
64

 Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, (tr.) Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, & 

Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Bks. 14-17, pp. 231-284; Thomas 

Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: Library of America), 168.  

 

 



 Experience of the New World and Aristotelian Revisions 16 
 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


