At first glance, in Valla’s thinking, his ‘poor’ conception of metaphysics seems to contrast with his appreciation of the ‘richness’ of rhetoric, as opposed to the indigence of dialectic. However, poverty can be understood in two senses: on the one hand, it designates a lack, even an insufficiency; on the other, it expresses the search for something simple, even essential. So, poverty, like nakedness (Séris 2021)1, is a concept with an opposite polarity. What is elementary can therefore be fundamental. Consequently, how can we understand, in Valla’s thought, the link between the ontological reduction of all transcendentals to the res and the opulence of rhetoric? To try to answer this question, this paper seeks to analyze the ambivalent nature of the opposition between poverty and wealth in order to reinterpret it in the opposition between simplicity and complexity. It is not certain that gain will be found on the side that we would expect to find it.

This essay considers the philosophy of Tommaso Campanella by examining it in light of a metaphysics conceived from the relationship between history, science, and experience. The desire to reform scientific knowledge beyond Aristotelian boundaries, integrating history and experience as the foundations of science, leaves Campanella’s philosophy still steeped in the logical distinctions between natural science and metaphysics. After all, Campanella positioned the entire philosophy of nature as an intermediate knowledge capable of uniting logic and metaphysics. Nevertheless, his metaphysics breathes the cultural atmosphere of early modernity, which, while referencing the past, looks towards a future still uncertain, balancing between ancient concepts and new meanings that will eventually be attributed to the vocabulary of modern metaphysical language.

Despite its extraordinary predictive power, quantum mechanics has been hailed as a paradoxical, self-contradictory theory of nature. How does it question the intelligibility of physical worldview? The wave-particle dualism, the incompatibility of physical quantities, the complementarity between the space-time description and the causal description of phenomena question key-notions of the traditional metaphysics, such as substance and cause, but they also call attention to the vital dialectical contrast between the continuous and the discrete, the infinite and the finite, consciousness and matter, and to the essential relational character of measuring, seeing, and knowing. Does quantum physics also question the Western way of thinking? The aim of this article is to show how quantum monadology not only breathes new life into Leibniz’s and Nicholas of Cusa’s monads, but also echoes Nishida’s ‘dialectical monadology’ and orients our gaze towards a metaphysics of universal harmony, i.e., a metaphysics of the dialectical universal or a metaphysics of indeterminacy.

Is Nicholas of Cusa’s neglect of Aristotelian logic and a theory of substance that is both underlying and, at the same time, dependent on that logic sufficient to say that metaphysics disappears from his thought? The answer is, of course, in the negative. In the following, I will attempt to illustrate the characteristics of what could be called a metaphysics of mind rather than being, which is linked in Nicholas of Cusa’s writings both to mysticism and to a measuring theory. Metaphysica paupera, mathesis, meta-mathesis, are non-asseverative knowledge, linked to a problematic nature, insufficiency, movement, shadow, rather than to the solidity and density of ontology, recognizable in those fields in which the disproportion between mensura and mesuratum, i.e., between the infinite and the finite, is most evident.

The humanist theory of the nude is one of the places where what can be called a ‘poor metaphysics’ developed during the Renaissance. To construct the concept of the nude as a representation of man in his own right, art theorists used common scholastic categories such as substance and accident, form and matter, potentiality and actuality, quantity and quality, whole and part, soul and body. Resolutely poor in its object – the human body, the work of art – and in its form – technical treatise, fictional dialogue, or simple working notes – this reflection is nonetheless rich and original because of what constitutes its very weakness: the contamination of the Aristotelian metaphysical tradition with Neoplatonism, Vitruvianism, elements of natural philosophy, musical theory, and even Kabbalah. It testifies less to the permanence of scholastic metaphysics during the Renaissance than to the ingenious adaptation of its tools to new, humbler, and more rebellious objects of thought.

This article aims to explore a theme of the metaphysica paupera from the reflections of the Friar Minor Luca Pacioli, highlighting their roots in the Neo-Platonic and Augustinian tradition, but also in some aspects of the Franciscan one. I will show, firstly, how in the early Franciscan environment the idea of minor beauty was progressively developed in relation to the form of life that places poverty at its centre. Secondly, I will outline how, in Bonaventure’s reflections, this idea, initially associated with a practical and moral dimension, is reframed in a theological sense, in terms of evangelical perfection, and in a metaphysical sense, finding its full foundation in the idea of a proportional beauty that establishes a metaphysics of relationship. Finally, I will highlight how both ideas – that of a metaphysics of relationship and a Franciscan matrix – persist in Pacioli, in his mathematization of knowledge, capable of including minor beauty as the metaphysical principle of the world, as well as of all human activities and forms of knowledge.

This paper develops two perspectives. On the one hand, it analyzes and reconstructs the relationship between wealth and poverty as addressed by Giordano Bruno in the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, both against the backdrop of the new geographical discoveries and mercantilist theories and in relation to Bruno’s project of ethical, political, and religious renewal. On the other hand, it recovers Bruno’s passages on the ‘minuzzarie’ as a key concept to redress ‘ontological poverty’ by locating in every aspect of reality, even insignificant ones, a center of vital energy. At the beginning and at the end of the paper, mention is made of some Heideggerian writings that reveal some common assumption with Bruno’s ideas.

Dante Alighieri’s thought, particularly as expressed in the treatise The Banquet, provides a rich ground for investigating the presence of ‘weak first philosophy’ in late medieval thought. There is no anti-metaphysical motivation in Dante’s approach; rather, he proposes a hermeneutic conception of ‘metaphysics’ that resonates with a ‘poor’ determination of it. This poverty is poised for transformation, as illustrated in a famous Pauline passage: precisely because it is poor and ‘indirect,’ such metaphysics opens the door to a fresh foundational understanding of human knowledge and conduct, taking as axioms the principles of the first cause as grace and of human nature as marked by original failure.

The foundation of Telesio’s physics is remarkably straightforward: he assumes that every phenomenon is explained by referring to the agency of two main principles, heat and cold. Yet, Telesio’s apparently simple physics leads to paradoxes when dealing with two specific problems which Aristotle had already discussed: the explanation of how rivers form and of how insects might be generated in a furnace. If water is simply earth made fluid by the action of the heat, why do rivers maintain a regular course, and how can the flow of water remain constant? And if generation can occur whenever spirit is enclosed to form a living being, thanks solely to the action of the heat, would it not be possible for animals to be generated by controlling any source of heat? This essay shows that Telesio’s answers to these questions reveal his approach to metaphysics, and that this in turn must trigger a historiographical reassessment of the portrait of Telesio at the threshold of modernity.

Pontus de Tyard may be well known as a poet of la Pléiade, also as the bishop of Chalon-sur-Saône towards the end of his life, yet throughout all these, he was a philosopher. He played an important part in the Royal Academy in promoting philosophy in the French language, being one of the first to write in French. His metaphysics is a good example of the poverty of philosophy in the Renaissance. His first philosophical works were devoted to the arts: Solitaire premier (1552) and Solitaire second (1555). Metaphysics appears for the first time in the Second Curieux (1578), when De l’Univers ou Discours de la nature du Monde et de ses parties, published 20 years prior, was divided into two parts. Hence one of the first metaphysics in French was born of physics and astronomy. There are three characters in Tyard’s Curieux: Curieux gathering all opinions he can find, Hieromnime expressing an orthodox theology, and Solitaire proposing in first person generally skeptical philosophical conclusions. The metaphysics of the future-bishop sometimes resemble a cabinet of curiosities, but with a theological guardrail. For metaphysical reasons, Tyard overpasses geocentrism and infinite universe to a universe in expansion of modern sciences.