Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno , 1548-1600, Italian philosopher, b. Nola. He entered the Dominican order early in his youth but was accused of heresy and fled (c.1576) to take up a career of study and travel. He taught briefly at Toulouse, Paris, Oxford, and Wittenberg, but, personally restless and in constant opposition to the traditional schools, he found no permanent post. His major metaphysical works, De la causa, principio, et uno (1584, tr. The Infinite in Giordano Bruno, 1950) and De l'infinito, universo et mondi (1584), were published in France. Further works appeared in England and Germany. Bruno also wrote satire and poetry. In 1591 he returned to Venice, where he was tried for heresy by the Inquisition. After imprisonment at Rome, he was burned to death. Bruno challenged all dogmatism, including that of the Copernican cosmology, the main tenets of which, however, he upheld. He believed that our perception of the world is relative to the position in space and time from which we view it and that there are as many possible modes of viewing the world as there are possible positions. Therefore we cannot postulate absolute truth or any limit to the progress of knowledge. He pictured the world as composed of individual elements of being, governed by fixed laws of relationship. These elements, called monads, were ultimate and irreducible and were based on a pantheistic infinite principle, or cause, or Deity, manifest in us and in all the world. Bruno's influence on later philosophy, especially that of Spinoza and Leibniz, was profound.

Bibliography: See P. H. Michel, The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno (tr. 1973); S. Drake, Copernicus—Philosophy and Science: Bruno—Kepler—Galileo (1973); F. A. Yates, Lull and Bruno (1982).

Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600), Italian philosopher. In 1562 he joined the Dominican Order at Naples, but on being censured for unorthodoxy he fled in 1576. In 1592 he was captured by emissaries of the Inquisition and was kept in confinement until he was burnt at the stake. He was a fierce opponent of Aristotelian doctrines and an admirer of N. Copernicus. His enthusiasm for nature led him to hold an extreme form of pantheistic immanentism.