Pietro Catena

Pietro Catena, who lived from 1501 to 1576, was an Italian astronomer, philosopher, mathematician, theologian and Catholic priest, a citizen of the Republic of Venice born in Venice. He was a precursor of the Renaissance Scientific Revolution and investigated the relationships between mathematics, logic and philosophy, and he was considered excellent in Greek and Latin. From 1548 to 1576 he was a public lecturer of metaphysics and professor of mathematics at the University of Padua, in the chair that Giuseppe Moletti and later Galileo Galilei held after him. In 1556 he published in Venice Universa loca in logica Aristotelis in mathematicas disciplinas, a collection of passages from Aristotle recognising the prevailing speculative character of mathematical knowledge.