Marco Sgarbi

He studied the epistemology and the new conception of knowledge in the context of vernacular mechanics, physics and meteorology. At the Renaissance Society of America Annual meeting in Berlin in 2015 he showed how besides the Latin production, various Italian vernacular commentaries, expositions and translations of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanical Problems were produced for very practical purposes. Works such as those of Oreste Biringucci, Antonio Guarino, Giuseppe Moletti, and Nicolò Tartaglia were addressed to engineers, architects and bombardiers. He researched on Trifon Gabriele's philosophical works on meteorology, by showing how the eclectic perspective was peculiar of the cultural contexts outside the university, as the academies, which were more open to the contamination of various philosophical traditions.

In March 2014 at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting in New York, Sgarbi presented his conception of Renaissance, called "Liquid Renaissance" and based on reflexive historiography. He employs “liquid” in the same way of contemporary historians and sociologist to characterize "liquid democracy" or "liquid society", that is when one or more parts of the whole constitute dynamically, voluntarily or involuntarily, the whole itself that circularly and continuously redefines the parts. He emphasizes that we cannot help seeing the past from the point of view of the present, but we should do it in a correct way, otherwise, certain aspects of the past may be overlooked or misunderstood. Renaissance should be carefully historically qualified according to time and place and should be constantly redefined according to the progress of scholarship, since what the Renaissance was or is shifts almost kaleidoscopically, establishing the existence of many Renaissances.

Marco Sgarbi (born 14 August 1982) is an Italian philosopher and an historian of philosophy, with a special interest in the history of epistemology and logic. He is associate professor at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He is member of the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana.

Marco Sgarbi was born in 1982 in Mantua, Italy, and received his Ph.D. from the Università di Verona.