Filippo Bruno was born in Nola, near Naples, the son of Giovanni Bruno, a soldier, and Fraulissa Savolino.
Bruno was attracted to new streams of thought, among which were the works of Plato and Hermes Trismegistus, both resurrected in Florence by Marsilio Ficino in the late fifteenth century.
Because of his heterodox tendencies, Bruno came to the attention of the Inquisition in Naples and in 1576 he left the city to escape prosecution.
The Galileo Project | Christianity | Giordano Bruno(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-17)
Filippo Bruno was born in Nola, near Naples, the son of Giovanni Bruno, a soldier, and Fraulissa Savolino.
Bruno was attracted to new streams of thought, among which were the works of Plato and Hermes Trismegistus, both resurrected in Florence by Marsilio Ficino in the late fifteenth century.
Because of his heterodox tendencies, Bruno came to the attention of the Inquisition in Naples and in 1576 he left the city to escape prosecution.
Bruno's religious attitude was compatible with this group, and he received the protection of the French king, who appointed him one of his temporary lecteurs royaux.
Bruno's cosmological vision certainly anticipates some fundamental aspects of the modern conception of the universe; his ethical ideas, in contrast with religious ascetical ethics, appeal to modern humanistic activism; and his ideal of religious and philosophical tolerance has influenced liberal thinkers.
Bruno visited Geneva, Toulouse, Paris, and London, where he spent two years, from 1583 to 1585, under the protection of the French ambassador and in the circle of the English poet Sir Philip Sidney.
Bruno is considered a forerunner of modern philosophy because of his influence on the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza and his anticipation of the theories of 17th-century monism.
Bruno Giordano: pantheist martyr(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-17)
Bruno was born in 1548, the son of a soldier, in the small town of Nola at the foot of Mount Vesuvius.
Bruno was said to have mocked the resurrection and the virgin birth.
Bruno was transferred to Rome at the request of Holy office, and arrived at the prison of the Holy Office near St Peters on February 27, 1593, where he was to spend a full seven years.
Bruno was born in the town of Nola, near Naples, in 1548, at the dawn of the revolution in astronomy which was heralded by the publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI in 1543.
Bruno was forced to return to France because of the decline in the fortunes of his patron, the Marquis de Mauvissiere, with whom he had travelled to England.
pronounce sentence and declare the aforesaid Brother GiordanoBruno to be an impenitent and pertinacious heretic, and therefore to have incurred all the ecclesiastical censures and pains of the Holy Canon....
Bruno had been well received at Toulouse, where he had lectured on astronomy; even better fortune awaited him at Paris, especially at the hands of Henri III.
To many it has seemed a curious freak of Bruno's that he should have so eagerly adopted a view of thought like that of Lull, but in reality it is in strict accordance with the principles of his philosophy.
Through all this runs the train of thought resulting naturally from Bruno's fundamental principles, and familiar in modern philosophy as Spinozism, the denial of particular providence, the doctrine of the uselessness of prayer, the identification in a sense of liberty and necessity, and the peculiar definition of good and evil.
Bruno conceived of a universe extending outward infinitely, containing suns without end, each, perhaps, racing through space with its own family of planets; Bruno'scosmos was a bold concept indeed, when compared with the stiffing, enclosed systems of Ptolemy and Copernicus.
Bruno built his cosmos without the aid of telescopic observation; he even lacked precise naked-eye observations such as those which his contemporary, Tycho Brahe, was then in the process of making.
It was Bruno, not Copernicus, who introduced to the world the immense universe of modern astronomy with its countless billions of suns shining across space from incredible distances, a universe in which both earth and sun shrink to insignificant size and importance.
The Bruno family was a distinguished one, and the child who was to immortalize the name was called Philip, after the lord of the manor.
He accused Bruno of teaching the doctrine of reincarnation; of denying the actual transubstantiation of bread into the flesh of Christ; of refusing to accept the three persons of the Trinity, and of rejecting the virgin birth of Christ.
Bruno then frankly admitted his inability to comprehend the doctrines of three persons in the Godhead, saying that he considered the Holy Ghost from the Pythagorean standpoint, as the Soul of the Universe.
Bruno took the ars memoria or Art of Memory, a classical technique of mnemonic coding using the measured placement of visual images to new heights exploiting its philosophical and magical possibilities.
In fact, Bruno was clearly a figure of the late medieval and Renaissance, a mage who sought what he saw as the restoration of the true religion, that of Egyptian Hermeticism.
Bruno has been described as an artist of memory and in his forty nine planetary images we can see his poetic skill at visual description.
Bruno's principal works are: Della causa, principio, ed uno (Concerning Cause, Principle, and Unity); Del' infinito, universo e mondi (On the Infinite, the Universe and the World); Eroici furori (Heroic Furors); De immenso et innumerabilibus (On the Boundless and the Innumerable); De monde, numero, et figura (On the Monad, the Number, and the Figure).
Bruno's moral system is opposed to the teachings of the Catholic Church, but is consistent with his naturalistic immanentism.
GiordanoBruno was the bold harbinger of a new cosmology during the Italian Renaissance.
Bruno's creativity was a result of his freedom from the traditional thought-system grounded in the Aristotelian view of nature and the dogmatic belief-system of the Roman Catholic Church.
In fact, Bruno the infidel became the greatest philosopher of the Italian Renaissance; he had left the gloom of the monastery and the dogma of the Church for the joy and lifelong inspiration that lay in contemplating the endless wonders of this infinite universe.
Bruno is known for his system of mnemonics based upon organized knowledge and as an early proponent of the idea of an infinite and homogeneous universe.
Bruno believed, as is now universally accepted, that the Earth revolves and that the apparent diurnal rotation of the heavens is an illusion caused by the rotation of the Earth around its axis.
Bruno also affirmed that the universe was homogeneous, made up everywhere of the four elements (water, earth, fire, and air), rather than having the stars be composed of a separate quintessence.
Bruno wrote: "Everything, however men may deem it assured and evident, proves, when it is brought under discussion to be no less doubtful than are extravagant and absurd beliefs." He coined the phrase "Libertes philosophica." The right to think, to dream, if you like, to make philosophy.
Bruno answered the sentence of death by fire with the threatening: "Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it." He was given eight more clays to see whether he would repent.
Bruno began to be a symbol to represent the forward- looking free-thinking type of philosopher and scientist, and has become a symbol of scientific martyrdom.
The Galileo Project(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-17)
In 1563, Bruno was admitted, as a probationer, to the monastery of St. Dominico in Naples by the Prior, Ambrogio Pasqua.
In January 1589, Bruno matriculated at the Julian university of Brunswick, at Helmstedt.
The young Duke Julius of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel was rather kind to Bruno, and allowed him, with payment, to deliver an oration to the university of Brunswick on the death of his father, Duke Julius.
SETI Editorial: The Folly of Giordano Bruno(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-17)
Taking the name Giordano upon becoming a member of the Dominican order, he was educated in the Aristotelian and Thomist traditions and eventually came to espouse a mystical Neoplatonism mixed with ideas imbibed from a resurgent interest of that time in the works of the apocryphal Hermes Trismegistus.
The first calls into doubt how closely we should link Bruno with the history of astronomy and what came to be called the "Scientific Revolution", and the second offers a perspective on the undeniable tragedy of his life that make him less of a symbol, but in the balance makes him more human.
While Bruno was fairly successful for a time at finding powerful and sympathetic patrons to shelter him, he invariably did something to alienate and outrage them, usually fairly quickly after entering their service.
Solar Centricity(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-17)
Bruno was imprisoned and tried, first in Venice, and subsequently in Rome.
Bruno's early writings include an Italian comedy (II Candrlaio, 1582), and several treaties on the theories of Ramon Lull and on artificial memory.
A single universalmatter and a single universal form, or soul, are said to be the immediate principles of all particulars; but it is not completely clear whether or not form and matter are ultimately identical with each other or with the Infinite.
Bruno studied the ancient myths and 'secret' lost philosophies of his time, and developed a world view that because of its anachronisms, can often be seen as far more contemporaneous to our own times, than the age of the new rationality in which he lived.
Bruno, being a skilled Renaissance rhetorician, also devised memory systems of the utmost complexity: In them finally are all that can be said, known, imagined; here are all arts, languages, works, and signs [3].