Bruno, Giordano (jōrdä`nō br

`nō), 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

orig. Filippo Bruno

(born 1548, Nola, near Naples—died Feb. 17, 1600, Rome) Italian philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, and occultist. He entered a Dominican convent in 1565 and was ordained a priest in 1572. He abandoned the order in 1576 after being accused of heresy. He moved to Geneva in 1578 and thereafter traveled Europe as a lecturer and teacher. Rejecting the traditional geocentric astronomy for a theory even more radical than that of Copernicus, he hypothesized an infinite universe and multiple worlds. His cosmological theories, which anticipated fundamental aspects of the modern conception of the universe, led to his excommunication by the Roman Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran churches. In 1592 he was arrested and tried by the Venetian Inquisition, which extradited him to the Roman Inquisition in the following year. After a seven-year trial, he was burned at the stake. His ethical ideas have appealed to modern humanists, and his ideal of religious and philosophical tolerance has influenced liberal thinkers. His most important works are On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1584) and The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1584).