ZIMARA, MARCO ANTONIO

Renaissance philosopher of the Paduan Averroist School; b. San Pietro di Galatina (Lecce) c. 1470; d. Padua, 1532. Of humble origin, he was sent by an uncle, a priest, to Padua, where he acquired a remarkable encyclopedic education and in 1501 received the doctorate in arts. He devoted his life to intensive publishing activity, compiling numerous treatises and editing the works of the most discussed philosophers of the time, including averroËs, St. albert the great, harvey nedellec, and john of jandun. In 1509, because of the war against Venice, he withdrew from Padua; in 1514 he was in his native town; in 1519 he taught at Salerno; in 1523 he was professor of metaphysics at the Conventual studium in Naples; in 1525 the Venetian Senate recalled him to Padua for three years; and from then on nothing is known of his activities. An expert on the entire Corpus Aristotelicum and the commentaries of Averroës, Zimara is of importance for his exposition and defense of aristotelianism from the Averroistic point of view, against the errors of the Bolognese School, who espoused the cause of siger of brabant, and later those of the so-called Simplicians, who followed the interpretation of the De anima by Simplicius. His most significant works are the Solutiones contradictionum in dictis Averrois (Venice 1508) and the Tabula et dilucidationes in dicta Aristotelis et Averrois (Venice 1537).

See Also: renaissance philosophy.

Bibliography: g. saitta, Il pensiero italiano nell'-Umanesimo e nel Rinascimento, 3 v. (Bologna 1949–51) v.2. b. nardi, Saggi sull'Aristotelismo Padovano dal secolo XIV al XVI (Florence 1958) 321–363. f. corvino, "Le lezione di M. A. Zimara In primum Posteriorum, " Atti del XII Congresso Internazionale di Filosofia 9 (1960) 41–51.

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