Marius Nizolius

Marius Nizolius (Mario Nizzoli or 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][5]

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.^[6] His Antibarbarus philosophicus (original title of 1553 De veris principiis) was edited by Leibniz in 1670.^[7] It was a reply in a controversy with Marco Antonio Maioragio (1514-1555),^[8] and going back to a dispute from the mid-1540s over the Paradoxes of Cicero.^[9]

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. ^ http://www.compilerpress.atfreeweb.com/Anno%20Zilsel%20Humanism.htm
6. ^ Brian Vickers, English Renaissance Literary Criticism (1999), p. 27.
7. ^ Christia Mercer, Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development (2001), p. 99.
8. ^ Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, p. 828.
9. ^ Lawrence D. Green, John Rainold's Oxford Lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric (1986), p. 414.

External links

• Ignacio Angelelli, Nizolius' notion of class (multitudo) (PDF), in Anales de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias de Buenos Aires, XXXV(2), 2001, 575-595.
• (German)[1]
• (German)[2]

Persondata
Name	Nizolius, Marius
Alternative names
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Date of birth	1498
Place of birth
Date of death	1576
Place of death