Entia appetunt consimilia sibi: senso, conservazione e somiglianza da Telesio a Campanella.

In this article, I argue that the concepts of sense, self-preservation, and likeness, which transversally cut the philosophies of Bernardino Telesio and Tommaso Campanella, lie at the very heart of Telesio’s naturalism and Campanella’s Trinitarian metaphysics of Primalities. I contend that both Telesio and Campanella address the issues of pansensism (i.e., the attribution of a form of widespread percep- tion to every natural being), a radical reformulation of the principles of final causa- tion deemed to be based on a universal tendency to self-preservation in nature and, finally, the centrality of the criterion of likeness between causes and effects to justify the process of natural causation. This is the interpretative framework through which I explore similarities and dissimilarities between the two authors, a comparative analysis that, rather surprisingly, has been rarely addressed by scholars in the past.