Empiricism

===Renaissance Italy===
In the late [[renaissance]] various writers began to question the [[medieval]] and [[classical philosophy|classical]] understanding of knowledge acquisition in a more fundamental way. In political and historical writing [[Niccolò Machiavelli]] and his friend [[Francesco Guicciardini]] initiated a new realistic style of writing. Machiavelli in particular was scornful of writers on politics who judged everything in comparison to mental ideals and demanded that people should study the "effectual truth" instead. Their contemporary, [[Leonardo da Vinci]] (1452–1519) said, "If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and it contradicts what some authority has written down, then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings."<ref>"Seeing the Body: The Divergence of Ancient Chineseand Western Medical Illustration", Camillia Matuk, Journal of Biocommunication, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2006, [http://www.sesp.northwestern.edu/docs/publications/6074956944509ac426aaa6.pdf] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170124012747/http://www.sesp.northwestern.edu/docs/publications/6074956944509ac426aaa6.pdf|date=2017-01-24}}</ref>

Significantly, an empirical metaphysical system was developed by the Italian philosopher [[Bernardino Telesio]] which had an enormous impact on the development of later Italian thinkers, including Telesio's students [[Antonio Persio]] and [[:it:Sertorio Quattromani|Sertorio Quattromani]], his contemporaries [[Thomas Campanella]] and [[Giordano Bruno]], and later British philosophers such as [[Francis Bacon]], who regarded Telesio as "the first of the moderns".<ref name= Tele> Boenke, Michaela, "Bernardino Telesio", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/telesio/. </ref> Telesio's influence can also be seen on the French philosophers [[René Descartes]] and [[Pierre Gassendi]].<ref name=Tele />

The decidedly anti-Aristotelian and anti-clerical music theorist [[Vincenzo Galilei]] (c. 1520 – 1591), father of [[Galileo Galilei|Galileo]] and the inventor of [[monody]], made use of the method in successfully solving musical problems, firstly, of tuning such as the relationship of pitch to string tension and mass in stringed instruments, and to volume of air in wind instruments; and secondly to composition, by his various suggestions to composers in his ''Dialogo della musica antica e moderna'' (Florence, 1581). The Italian word he used for "experiment" was ''esperimento''. It is known that he was the essential pedagogical influence upon the young Galileo, his eldest son (cf. Coelho, ed. ''Music and Science in the Age of Galileo Galilei''), arguably one of the most influential empiricists in history. Vincenzo, through his tuning research, found the underlying truth at the heart of the misunderstood myth of '[[Pythagorean hammers|Pythagoras' hammers]]' (the square of the numbers concerned yielded those musical intervals, not the actual numbers, as believed), and through this and other discoveries that demonstrated the fallibility of traditional authorities, a radically empirical attitude developed, passed on to Galileo, which regarded "experience and demonstration" as the ''sine qua non'' of valid rational enquiry.