Marius Nizolius (; 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.Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (1988), p. 181.Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner (editors), Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, p. 734. He is described by Michael R. Allen as the heir to the oratorical vision of Lorenzo Valla, and a better nominalist.In Richard Popkin (editor), The Pimlico History of Western Philosophy (1999), p. 297.
Life and works
He was born in Brescello. He was professor of philosophy at Parma and Sabbioneta.Edgar Zilsel, P. Zilsel, Diederick Raven, Wolfgang Krohn, Robert S. Cohen, The Social Origins of Modern Science (2003), p. 26. He died in Sabbioneta. 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.Brian Vickers, English Renaissance Literary Criticism (1999), p. 27. 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.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. It was a reply in a controversy with Marcantonius Majoragio (1514–1555),Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, p. 828. and going back to a dispute from the mid-1540s over the Paradoxes of Cicero.Lawrence D. Green, John Rainold's Oxford Lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric (1986), p. 414.
Notes
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. Nizolius, Marius (1498-1566)