The Idiot

£8,000 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

first edition in English The first edition in English of this scarce collection of philosophical dialogues by the German humanist and Cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), also known as Cusanus and by his German name Khrypffs or Krebs, who was among the great church leaders and thinkers of the fifteenth century. The Idiota de Mente was completed at Fabriano, then part of the Papal States, in December 1450. It consists of a series of four dialogues on the themes of wisdom (de sapiente), the mind (de mente), and the philosophy of nature (de staticis experimentis), which are set in Rome during the year of the jubilee (presumably that of 1450). The dialogues take place between an 'Orator', representing current humanist learning, a 'Philosopher' who takes the scholastic position, and an 'Idiot', or layman, usually identified with Nicholas himself, who functions as an embodiment of the docta ignorantia — that is the theory of learned ignorance developed in Christian mystical circles, which posits that the act of recognising our inability to acquire actual knowledge is a form of wisdom in and of itself. His philosophical doctrine was taken up and developed more than a hundred years later by Giordano Bruno who called him 'the divine Cusanus'. Over the course of the first three books, Cusa shows the deficiencies in both humanist and scholastic reasoning and their claims to have acquired true wisdom. The fourth book, 'On Static Experiments', is important in the history of science, an

• Binding: Hardcover

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