Concordantia, coincidentia e praecisio nel pensiero di Nicola Cusano

The thesis is an attempt to understand Cusanus’ modernity as an open question, something that put the interpreter himself in question. Thus, the ambigous – even contradictory – nature of Cusanus’ ouvre is revealed as its very historical content, and not just the consequence of a confused and metaphysical mind. The work is organized around three basic concepts: concordantia, coincidentia and praecisio. We believe that such concepts form the dynamic unitiy of Cusanus’ thought, a unity that should be preserved either from the linguistic and conceptual dissolution that some philological analyses often bring into Nicholas’ text and from the abstract unity of certain systematic reconstructions of his thought. The thesis is divided into three sections; such distinction is (1) thematical, (2) hermeneutical, (3) methodological. The chapter on Concordance deals with the political-religious writings of Cusanus (De concordantia catholica, De pace fidei, etc.). The chapter on Coincidentia is centred on his most “speculative” and metaphysical production (De docta ignorantia, De coniecturis, De possest, De non aliud etc.). The chapter on Praecisio deals with his scientifical and mathematical writings. Aim of this division is to shows how concordantia, coincidentia and praecisio should be seen as a constellation and that they’re all implied in Nicholas’ religious, philosophical and mathematical thought. The three chapters also differ from the point of view of the hermeneutical approach to the text: the chapter on Concordantia reveals the historical foreground of such plexus, the chapter on Praecisio the Wirkungsgeschichte of Cusa’s epistemological views, while the chapter on Coincidentia unveils the inner historical structure of Nicholas’ metaphysics. Whereas the historical sources of the Concordantia are to be found in Christian Neoplatonism (mainly Dyonisius and Augustinus), Cusa’s understanding of a conjectural universe needs to be confronted with the weak Wirkungsgeschichte it had on the later Scientific Revolution (Bacon, Galieli). The analysis of “coincidence” is an attempt to show the inner developement of Cusa’s philosophy, describing its hidden theoretical reasons. It is clear that such distinctions only make sense if we believe that Cusa’s text can be analysed under different points of view. It is true that no historical reconstruction can do without a moment of theoretical interpretation. Nevertheless the method followed in the first and the third chapter (concordantia, praecisio) is mainly historical, while the second chapter (conincidentia) is an immanent, theoretical analysis of the reasons that led Cusanus to perpettualy change, from work to work, his language and rise the question of God’s incomprehensibility and of the limited nature of human knowledge