GIORDANO BRUNO
COLLIER'S ENCYCLOPEDIA
PAUL OSKAR KRISTELLER, Vol 4, 1987 ed., pg. 634
BRUNO, GIORDANO [bru'no] (c. 1548-1600), Italian philosopher,
was born in Nola. He attended school in Naples, where he entered
the Dominican order at the age of fifteen. Charged with heresy in
1576, he fled and began a wandering life that took him to Geneva;
to Toulouse, where he taught for two years: to Paris (1582); to
London (1583), where he lived for two years in the household of
the French ambassador; again to Paris; hence to Marburg,
Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstedt, and Frankfurt. In 1591 he was
denounced by the Venetian nobleman, Giovanni Mocenigo, and
delivered to the Inquisition (1592). Bruno was imprisoned and
tried, first in Venice, and subsequently in Rome. The numerous
charges against him included blasphemy, immoral conduct, and
heresy in matters of dogmatic theology, and involved some of the
basic doctrines of his philosophy and cosmology. Upon his refusal
to recant, he was sentenced to death and burned at the stake on
the Campo del Fiori in Rome, Feb. 17, 1600.
Bruno's early writings include an Italian comedy (II
Candrlaio, 1582), and several treaties on the theories of Ramon
Lull and on artificial memory. Most important for his philosophy
are the Italian dialogues written in England, and the Latin poems
written in Germany. In the dialogue Deglieroici furori, Bruno
follows the traditions of Renaissance Platonism in praising the
"heroic" love of the infinite. His metaphysical doctrine is found
in his dialogue Della causo, in which he maintains that God (the
Infinite) includes or combines all attributes, whereas particular
phenomena are nothing but particular manifestations of the one
infinite principle. A single universal matter and a single
universal form, or soul, are said to be the immediate principles
of all particulars; but it is not completely clear whether or not
form and matter are ultimately identical with each other or with
the Infinite. Bruno's cosmology is contained in his dialogue Del
infiniro. In this work he refutes the traditional Aristotelian
cosmology and states that the physical universe is infinite and
includes an indefinite number of worlds each consisting of a sun
and several planets. The earth becomes thus a small star among
the others in an infinite universe.
In his metaphysics, Bruno provided a connecting link between
Cusanus and Spinoza and also exercised a direct influence on
classical German idealism. In his cosmology, Bruno followed
Lucretius and Copernicus, but he developed the implications of
the Copernican system much further than Copernicus himself had
done. More than the other Italian philosophers who were his
contemporaries, Bruno deserves to be called a forerunner, if not
a founder, of modern science and philosophy. In his thinking as
well as in his writing he is bold and imaginative rather than
precise or careful. yet his agreement with later scientific and
philosophical theories that were unknown in his own time is
often surprising. His tragic end has made him a martyr of
philosophical liberty.