Cusano e la scienza

In this article, the author focuses her attention on two themes of Cusanus’s reflection: the “squaring of the circle” and “cosmology”. If the cosmological problem is addressed by Cusanus above all in the second book of the De docta ignorantia, where the principles of “learned ignorance” and the “coincidence of opposites” are applied to the universe, to the vexata questio of squaring the circle and to that, equivalent, of the rectification of the circle, many mathematical writings between 1445 and 1460 are dedicated to it. In both areas of research, beyond the results, a new approach to scientific questions emerges, through intuitions and principles that, even if they have not contributed, or only partially, to expand knowledge, they have had the potential to stimulate further reflection and break with traditional theories, helping to create a forma mentis which opened, in a more or less conscious way, the way to modernity.