Bruno Giordano - Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance

Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno

Philosopher of the Renaissance

Edited by

HILARY GATTI

First published 2002 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

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Copyright Hilary Gatti and the contributors, 2002

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance.

1. Bruno, Giordano, 15481600. 2. Philosophy, Renaissance.
3. Philosophy, Italian.

I. Gatti, Hilary.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2001099632

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-0562-1 (hbk)

Contents

Giovanni Aquilecchia

Lars Berggren

Maurice A. Finocchiaro

Ingrid D. Rowland

Lina Bolzoni

Hilary Gatti

Tiziana Provvidera

Michael Wyatt

Elisabetta Tarantino

Leen Spruit

Stephen Clucas

Ramon G. Mendoza

Ernesto Schettino

Leo Catana

Paul Colilli

Andrew Gregory

Stuart Brown

Paul Richard Blum

.

.

Giovanni Aquilecchia, formerly of University College London

Lars Berggren, University of Lund, Sweden

Paul Richard Blum, Peter Pazmany University, Budapest

Lina Bolzoni, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa

Stuart Brown, Open University, Milton Keynes

Leo Catana, University of Copenhagen

Stephen Clucas, Birkbeck College, University of London

Paul Colilli, Laurentian University, Canada

Maurice A. Finocchiaro, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Hilary Gatti, University of Rome La Sapienza

Andrew Gregory, University College London

Ramon G. Mendoza, Florida International University

Tiziana Provvidera, University College London

Ingrid D. Rowland, Andrew Mellon Chair, American Academy in Rome

Ernesto Schettino, National University of Mexico

Leen Spruit, University of Rome La Sapienza

Elisabetta Tarantino, Oxford Brookes University

Michael Wyatt, independent scholar

Giordano Bruno has been depicted in many ways in the course of the four centuries which separate us from his tragic death, burnt as a heretic in the Campo dei Fiori (The Field of Flowers) in Rome on 17 February 1600. For some he has been a prophet of the new science, who first supported and then extended to infinity the still suspect Copernican, heliocentric astronomy; for others a practitioner of a vividly symbolic and imaginative version of the classical art of memory; an inspiring or dangerous libertin rudit, according to the point of view being proposed; or a metaphysician or mystic with a rich talent for expressing his vision of God in complex and moving verse. More recently he has been depicted as a Renaissance version of an ancient Egyptian or Hermetic Magus, according to an influential reading proposed by the late Dame Frances Yates.

Bruno, however, defined himself constantly and coherently as a philosopher: a definition to which he repeatedly resorted during his eight-year long trial at the hands of first the Venetian and then the Roman Inquisition. For Bruno saw his trial as a struggle for the right of the philosopher to follow a line of thought to its logical conclusion, whatever objections might be put forward by the theologians. Throughout his trial, he declared his respect for a religion in which he had participated as a Dominican monk from 1565 to 1576, and then abandoned when he was found reading forbidden books. For he was even more resolute in his respect for the right of the enquiring, individual mind to follow, unimpeded, its search for truth. His famous last words in the public arena, warning his judges that they feared pronouncing his sentence more than he feared receiving it, anticipate a time when the rights of the philosopher and the rights of religion and theology would have nothing to fear, one from the other. The British Society for the History of Philosophy decided to commemorate Giordano Bruno in its summer conference of June 2000, in memory also of Brunos years in Elizabethan London, from 1583 to 1585, in which he wrote and published his six Italian dialogues, considered by many his philosophical masterpieces. The conference was held at University College London.

Renaissance philosophy was a less narrowly, or if one prefers a less rigorously defined, discipline than present-day philosophy, particularly of the Anglo-Saxon, analytic kind. For those such as Bruno, especially, who tended to be hostile to Aristotelian categories and to favour Neoplatonism, the boundaries of the discipline were thought of as open and unguarded by disciplinary police. Bruno himself declared more than once that the philosopher, the poet and the artist were all involved in the same search for truth, and he would often resort to poetry in the attempt to give expression to his most cherished and complex ideas. This interdisciplinary bent of Brunos own work was respected in the programme of the London conference, where professional philosophers were invited to speak together with literary scholars, historians of science and the arts, and intellectual historians or historians of ideas. The results can now be judged in the various and varied contributions to this volume, which offers a rich spectrum of approaches to multiple aspects of Brunos thought, as well as to his historical figure and reputation.

The papers published in this volume often differ considerably from the texts read at the conference itself. The contributors have put to good use the lively discussion of their subjects which developed both on the public platform and during the social events held throughout the conference. Both I and the British Society for the History of Philosophy are grateful to contributors for this enduring interest in, and meditation on, their chosen Brunian themes. We are grateful too for their participation in the conference to those few speakers who, for various personal reasons, have not presented their text for publication.

The conference itself also benefited from an exhibition of early printed editions of works by Bruno and his contemporaries, drawn from the Rare Books Library of University College London. Photographs from a selection of these titles have been chosen to illustrate the papers published here.

It is not the intention of this Preface to comment on the contributions to this volume, which is presented to the attention of its readers in the hope of making better known to an English-speaking public the work of whom many in continental cultures consider the major philosopher of the European Renaissance. But one exception must, sadly, be mentioned, for it transforms the volume into a double commemoration, not only of Giordano Brunos death, but also of the death, on 3 August 2001, of the distinguished editor and commentator of his works, Professor Giovanni Aquilecchia.