A friend of Galileo and author of the renowned utopia The City
of the Sun, Tommaso Campanella (Stilo, Calabria,1568- Paris, 1639)
is one of the most significant and original thinkers of the early
modern period. His philosophical project centred upon the idea of
reconciling Renaissance philosophy with a radical reform of science
and society. He produced a complex and articulate synthesis of all
fields of knowledge - including magic and astrology. During his
early formative years as a Dominican friar, he manifested a
restless impatience towards Aristotelian philosophy and its
followers. As a reaction, he enthusiastically embraced Bernardino
Telesio's view that knowledge could only be acquired through the
observation of things themselves, investigated through the senses
and based on a correct understanding of the link between words and
objects. Campanella's new natural philosophy rested on the
principle that the books written by men needed to be compared with
God's infinite book of nature, allowing them to correct the
mistakes scattered throughout the human 'copies' which were always
imperfect, partial and liable to revisions. It is in the light of
these principles that he defended Galileo's right to read the book
of nature while denouncing the mistake of those - be they
Aristotelian philosophers or theologians - who wanted to stop him
from carrying on his natural investigations. However, Campanella
maintained that the book of nature, far from being written in
mathematical characters, was a living organism in which each
natural being was endowed with life and a degree of sensibility
that was appropriate for its preservation and propagation. Nature
as a whole was an organism in which each single part was directed
towards the common good. This is the reason why Campanella thought
that nature had to be regarded as an ideal model for any political
organisation. Political structures were often ruled by injustice
and violence precisely because they had departed from that natural
model. This book charts Campanella's intellectual life by showing
the origin, development and persistence of some of the fundamental
tenets of his thought.
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