Giordano Bruno - Böcker

Giordano Bruno's notorious public death in 1600, at the hands of the Inquisition in Rome, marked the transition from Renaissance philosophy to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. In his philosophical works he addressed such delicate issues as the role of Christ as mediator and the distinction, in human beings, between soul and matter. This volume presents new translations of Cause, Principle and Unity, in which he challenges Aristotelian accounts of causality and spells out the implications of Copernicanism for a new theory of an infinite universe, and of two essays on magic, On Magic and A General Account of Bonding, in which he interprets earlier theories about magical events in the light of the unusual powers of natural phenomena.

Giordano Bruno’s Cabala del cavallo pegaseo (The Cabala of Pegasus) grew out of the great Italian philosopher’s experiences lecturing and debating at Oxford in early 1584. Having received a cold reception there because of his viewpoints, Bruno went on in the Cabala to attack the narrow-mindedness of the university--and by extension, all universities that resisted his advocacy of intellectual freethinking.The Cabala of Pegasus consists of vernacular dialogues that turn on the identification of the noble Pegasus (the spirit of poetry) and the humble ass (the vehicle of divine revelation). In the interplay of these ideas, Bruno explores the nature of poetry, divine authority, secular learning, and Pythagorean metempsychosis, which had great influence on James Joyce and many other writers and artists from the Renaissance to the modern period.This book, the first English translation of The Cabala of Pegasus, contains both the English and Italian versions as well as helpful annotations. It will have particular appeal to all Renaissance scholars and those interested in the Renaissance cabalistic underpinnings of modern literature.

Giordano Bruno was an itinerant Italian friar who was burned at the stake in 1600 for heresies, that included his rejection of the Ptolemaic cosmology. Like Galileo, who met a similar fate for similar reasons later in the century, Bruno has been accorded martyrdom to the cause of scientific truth and regarded as a visionary whose ideas were out of joint with the superstitions of his time. In fact, as editors Edward Gosselin and Lawrence Lerner point out, Bruno was far more complex, and his thought far more intricate, than simple stereotype would suggest.Possibly mad, certainly brilliant, vain, obstreperous, and often ignorant, Bruno was a Christian deeply immersed in Hermeticism and mysticism; simultaneously he was Copernican in his non-homocentric view of the universe. His La Cena de le ceneri was one of the first works in which Copernican theory was received outside the sphere of the natural sciences. These dialogues have never been generally accessible, and are translated into English as The Ash Wednesday Supper.Using Copernican theory as both a foundation of and a metaphor for his own vast philosophical-theological-political-social program, Bruno united his conflicting beliefs and frustrated his critics. Arguing for the physical reality of the infinite universe with no centre, yet whose centre is everywhere, Bruno sought to prove that each man is every other man. Using this radical cosmology and the imagery of Lenten regeneration, the messianic Bruno sought to heal the secular and religious wounds of sixteenth-century Europe by reconciling Catholic and Protestant, France and England.In this edition Gosselin and Lerner have provided a broad understanding of Bruno and his time, with background and interpretive discussion. They have also preserved the flavour and ferment of the original discourses and maintained Bruno's eclectic if somewhat obscure style.

The itinerant Neoplatonic scholar Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), one of the most fascinating figures of the Renaissance, was burned at the stake for heresy by the Inquisition in Rome on Ash Wednesday in 1600. The primary evidence against him was the book Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, a daring indictment of the church that abounded in references to classical Greek mythology, Egyptian religion (especially the worship of Isis), Hermeticism, magic, and astrology. The author of more than sixty works on mathematics, science, ethics, philosophy, metaphysics, the art of memory, and esoteric mysticism, Bruno had a profound impact on Western thought.