Giordano Bruno | |
---|---|
Born | Filippo Bruno January or February 1548 |
Died | 17 February 1600 (aged 51–52) |
Cause of death | Execution by burning at the stake |
Era | Renaissance |
School | Renaissance humanism Neopythagoreanism |
Main interests | Cosmology |
Notable ideas | Cosmic pluralism |
Giordano Bruno (/dʒɔːrˈdɑːnoʊ ˈbruːnoʊ/; Italian: [dʒorˈdaːno ˈbruːno]; Latin: Iordanus Brunus Nolanus; born Filippo Bruno, January or February 1548 – 17 February 1600) was an Italian philosopher, poet, cosmological theorist and esotericist.[1] He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended to include the then-novel Copernican model. He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets (exoplanets), and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no center.
While Bruno began as a Dominican friar, he embraced Calvinism during his time in Geneva.[2] He was later tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. Bruno's pantheism was not taken lightly by the church,[3][4][better source needed] nor was his teaching of metempsychosis regarding the reincarnation of the soul. The Inquisition found him guilty, and he was burned alive at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori in 1600. After his death, he gained considerable fame, being particularly celebrated by 19th- and early 20th-century commentators who regarded him as a martyr for science. However, most historians agree that his heresy trial was not a response to his cosmological views but rather a response to his religious and afterlife views,[5][6][7][8][9] although some still contend that the main reason for Bruno's death was indeed his cosmological views.[10][11][12] Bruno's case is still considered a landmark in the history of free thought and the emerging sciences.[13][14]
In addition to cosmology, Bruno also wrote extensively on the art of memory, a loosely organized group of mnemonic techniques and principles. Historian Frances Yates argues that Bruno was deeply influenced by the presocratic Empedocles, Neoplatonism, Renaissance Hermeticism, and Book of Genesis-like legends surrounding the Hellenistic conception of Hermes Trismegistus.[15] Other studies of Bruno have focused on his qualitative approach to mathematics and his application of the spatial concepts of geometry to language.[16]
One of the first and most notable developments consisted in a growing awareness that earlier commentators had indeed been right to consider Bruno's trial as being closely linked to that of Galileo (...) Jean Seidengart underlined the particular emphasis to be found throughout the trial on Bruno's doctrine of a plurality of worlds." and "Bruno, however, by admitting so candidly his distance from the Catholic theology, was indirectly questioning such a system of law, which imposed on his conscience views different from his own. (...) he was doing it in the name of a principle of religious pluralism which derived directly from his cosmology.
For Bruno was claiming for the philosopher a principle of free thought and inquiry which implied an entirely new concept of authority: that of the individual intellect in its serious and continuing pursuit of an autonomous inquiry… It is impossible to understand the issue involved and to evaluate justly the stand made by Bruno with his life without appreciating the question of free thought and liberty of expression. His insistence on placing this issue at the center of both his work and of his defense is why Bruno remains so much a figure of the modern world. If there is, as many have argued, an intrinsic link between science and liberty of inquiry, then Bruno was among those who guaranteed the future of the newly emerging sciences, as well as claiming in wider terms a general principle of free thought and expression.
In Rome, Bruno was imprisoned for seven years and subjected to a difficult trial that analyzed, minutely, all his philosophical ideas. Bruno, who in Venice had been willing to recant some theses, became increasingly resolute and declared on 21 December 1599 that he 'did not wish to repent of having too little to repent, and in fact did not know what to repent.' Declared an unrepentant heretic and excommunicated, he was burned alive in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome on Ash Wednesday, 17 February 1600. On the stake, along with Bruno, burned the hopes of many, including philosophers and scientists of good faith like Galileo, who thought they could reconcile religious faith and scientific research, while belonging to an ecclesiastical organization declaring itself to be the custodian of absolute truth and maintaining a cultural militancy requiring continual commitment and suspicion.
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