Bruno, Giordano
BRUNO, GIORDANO (1548–1600), Italian philosopher. Bruno was a brilliant and encyclopedic though erratic thinker of the Italian Renaissance, a man who synthesized and transformed thought in terms of the situation of his own times. Born in Nola, Bruno joined the Dominican order in Naples at the age of fifteen. He was expelled for his views on transubstantiation and the immaculate conception and fled Rome about 1576. After wandering over half of Europe, he finally returned to Italy, only to be imprisoned by the Roman Inquisition for his cosmological theories and burned as a heretic, the "martyr of the Renaissance."
Bruno was strongly influenced by the German philosopher Nicholas of Cusa and the latter's theory of the "coincidence of opposites," namely, that the infinitely great coincides with the infinitely small, and that God relates to the world as does one side of a piece of paper to the other side (panentheism). Drawing on Neoplatonic philosophy in developing his theories about the universe, Bruno rejected Aristotle's conception of the structure of the universe, held to a theory of animate monads, taught the relativity of space, time, and motion, and maintained that the universe is infinite in extension and eternal in its origin and duration.
Bruno was a prolific author and, especially in his Italian works, a beautiful writer, though some of his Latin works were prolix and confused. He had obsessions, such as his preoccupation with mnemonic theories, and he was easily distracted by strange thinkers like Ramón Lull (c. 1235–1315). Among Bruno's better-known works are On Heroic Rages, expounding a Neoplatonic theodicy cast in mythical form, describing the soul's ascent to God as its return to the original and highest unity; An Ash Wednesday Conversation, discussing the Copernican heliocentric theory; On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, an ecstatic vision of a single infinite universe; The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, an allegory dealing mostly with moral philosophy; and On the Beginnings, Elements and Causes of Things, his cosmic philosophy. Bruno's writings influenced Jakob Boehme, Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes, Schelling, and Hegel.
Bibliography
Virgilio Salvestrini's Bibliografia delle opere di Giordano Bruno (Pisa, 1926) is an excellent comprehensive bibliography of Bruno's works, including references to him by other writers. The best book in English on Bruno is Dorothea Waley Singer's Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought with Annotated Translation of His Work "On the Infinite Universe and Worlds" (New York, 1968). An authoritative treatment of his thought is Giovanni Gentile's Giordano Bruno e il pensiero del rinascimento, 2d ed. (Florence, 1925). Irving Louis Horowitz's The Renaissance Philosophy of Giordano Bruno (New York, 1952) offers a general introduction to his natural philosophy or ontology and an analysis of the interactions of his philosophical system and method. Frances A. Yates's Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964) relates his thought to the mystical and Platonic tradition.
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