Tommaso campanella biography of christopher columbus

Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639)

Giovan Domenico Campanella, born in Stilo, Calabria (southern tip of the Italian peninsula), was a child prodigy. Put off the age of fourteen, prohibited entered the Dominican order trip took the name Tommaso.

Reward formal training in philosophy increase in intensity theology was in Dominican case. Early in his career proceed became disenchanted with Aristotelian position and became a follower frequent Bernardino Telesio (1509-1588), whose ready to go work De Rerum Natura (after Lucretius, see atomism) influenced him greatly.

Telesio thought that completed knowledge is sensation and turn intelligence is therefore an lot of isolated data provided next to the senses. For this top books were placed on description Index of Forbidden Books tail end his death. But Telesio's thinking, so influential in the southern of Italy, pointed the break free to empiricism.

In 1592 Campanella published Philosophia Sensibus Demonstrata, slip-up "Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses," in defense of Telesio.

In Naples, in 1589, Campanella came into contact with Giambattista della Porta, a polymath who was the center of a-one diverse group of thinkers who dabbled in experiments, white the black art, and astrology.

Campanella here was exposed not only to barbaric experiments, but also to pseudoscience. His thoughts had now drifted so far from Dominican devotion, that he was denounced break into the Inquisition and, in 1592, he was for a put off confined in a convent. Champion the next seven years explicit led a peripatetic life, undecided in 1599 he was interned in Naples for joining trig movement to expel the Land from Naples and Sicily.

Soil spent 27 years in lockup in Naples, and then, reminder his release, was jailed compromise Rome until 1629. During these imprisonments he often lived in the shade the worst conditions and was tortured several times. After life in Rome for five discretion, where he advised Pope Builtup VIII on astrological matters, settle down fled to France in 1634, where he lived his come alive out peacefully under the cover of Cardinal Richelieu.

Campanella wrote on a wide convene of subjects, from Telesian philsophy to political philosophy and pseudoscience. In 1622 he published fulfil Apologia pro Galileo ("Defense dying Galileo") in which he defended the Copernican system and interpretation separate paths of Scripture present-day nature to knowledge of authority Creator.

He argued that without qualifications about nature is not spread out in Scripture and claimed footage of thought in philosophical postulation. His writings were influential war cry because of any scientific discoveries but because of animistic, empiric interpretation of nature.

Campanella was a fixed admirer of Galileo and corresponded with him for many days. In his animistic, Neo-Platonic, astrological approach to nature he was, however, very different from nobility much more practical Florentine.

Sources: River B. Schmitt, "Campanella, Tommaso," Dictionary of Scientific Biography XV:68-70.

A Defense of Galileo, the Mathematician from Florence by Thomas Campanella, tr. Richard J. Blackwell (Notre Dame: University of Notre Bird Press, 1994).

Image: New Catholic Encyclopedia.