Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Medieval Philosophy

Finding a Philosophy in Leonardo

Chad Trainer on Leonardo da Vinci as a philosopher.

Francis I, King of France and patron of Leonardo da Vinci, once proclaimed in a conversation with the King of Navarre and the Cardinals of Ferrara and Lorraine that nobody in the world knew more than Leonardo. As much reverence as Francis I had for Leonardo’s sculpture, painting, and architecture, he expressly specified philosophy as the subject in which he thought Leonardo especially excelled. And yet our modern era is not in the habit of reckoning Leonardo da Vinci a philosopher.

In this article I’ll provide an overview of the ideas from Leonardo’s notebooks that came to fruition in subsequent philosophers’ thoughts. It is interesting that so many of the philosophical insights in his notebooks foreshadowed ideas that became staples of later Renaissance and modern Western thinking, even if there is no evidence that Da Vinci was a direct cause, or catalyst, of later philosophy.

…