February 17: A Philosopher Burns

2014-02-17bOn 17 February 1600, Giordano Bruno was walked from his dark prison cell in the riverside prison of Tor Di Nona to a stake waiting for him at the execution grounds of Campo de’ Fiori. He was stripped naked, tied to the stake, and set ablaze while still alive. His crime was heresy.

Giordano Bruno was born in the small town of Nola just outside of Naples. When he was 14 he began his journey of enlightenment moving to near by Naples to study humanities, logic, and dialect. He later joined the Dominican convent of San Domenico Maggiore in 1565. He was a cynical and sarcastic man who enjoyed playing devil’s advocate with almost every widely held doctrine and belief.

The beliefs Bruno held that lead to his early demise were truly revolutionary for the time. He believed that the universe was infinite. This was a frightful concept to the ancient Greek mathematicians who could not explain the concept of infinity through geometry, which was the bedrock of their mathematics. It took Arab philosophers, using a numerical notation borrowed from India to formulate a new way of working with numbers.

Bruno lived a century before calculus was invented but began to ask the questions that it was designed to answer: “How to account for motion, convergences, and how a straight line can curve?” His ideas of infinity also breached the human body. He prefigured the atom, and a smaller unit that the atom was divisible by further.

Bruno was one of the first philosophers to believe that there were many Earths, and on each one it’s own Garden of Eden, thus making him the first man to believe in aliens. He was also a forerunner in the belief of a multiverse and other suggestions of Quantum theory. But Bruno was ahead of his time and therefore went the way of most freethinkers in an age where conformity meant self-preservation. But Bruno left behind a legacy that is prevalent in today’s society, which for a man who loved to teach would be his highest honor.

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Photo Caption: Eighteenth-century engraving of Bruno published by N.H. Gundling in Neue Bibliothec, oder Nachricht und Urtheile von Neuen Büchern in 1715.


2014-02-17Meet the Author

I am currently a student at Schoolcraft College. The past three years I spent in the Army where I traveled the world and met many new people giving me a much wider worldview. I am currently planning on transferring to Madonna to study nursing.

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