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History and Evolution:
By William E. Steinman:
Part 77, Campanella:
September 13, 2004:
Another outstanding Italian was Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639). This Campanella did not play baseball. He was a less physically vigorous philosopher and writer. He is best know for his book, La Citta del Sole (The City of the Sun). He wrote it while he was in prison by courtesy of the Inquisition.
This City of The Sun was Campanella's expression of the classic utopia theme. He defines the ideal commonwealth. This was a city to be governed by enlightened men of reason. Every man's work would be defined and designed to contribute to the good of the whole community. Private property, undue wealth, and poverty would be nonexistent in that no man would be permitted more than he needed. This theme, which presumes a nobler man than has ever existed, is as old as Plato's Republic and as dumb as Marx's Manifesto, but it continues to influence otherwise reasonable people.
Campanella started young. He was only fourteen when he entered the Dominican order and began his training. He studied philosophy and theology with the Dominicans, but he was a bit put off by the Aristotelian philosophy. The ideas of Telesio made a lot more sense to him. Recall that we touched briefly on the life of Telesio in essay 67.
Telesio's contribution to philosophy were his nine books, De Rerum Natura (On Nature According to Its Own Principles). Briefly this was his expression of the notion that knowledge is sense data and intelligence is just the accumulation and organization of this sense data. He insisted that matter is a tangible datum. He further concluded from his studies of plants and animals that heat is the source of life and that heat and cold are sufficient to explain all natural phenomena. Although his conclusions were not completely accurate, Telesio did make a convincing case for shifting to the evidence of the senses. This was the beginnings of empiricism.
Empiricism is the philosophical doctrine that all knowledge is derived from experience, whether of the mind or of the senses. Thus it opposes the Aristotelean rationalist belief in the existence of innate ideas. Briefly rationalism is the theory that the exercise of reason, rather than the acceptance of empiricism, authority, or spiritual revelation, provides the only valid basis for action or belief and that reason is the prime source of knowledge and of spiritual truth.
Empiricism is a doctrine basic to the scientific method developed by Galileo and is associated with the rise of experimental science. It has been a dominant tradition in British philosophy, a fact we can keep in mind when we get to Locke, Hume, and Berkeley. Most empiricists acknowledge certain a priori truths like the principles of mathematics and logic.
Taking his cue from Telesio, in 1592 Campanella published his own take in a book, Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses. This was a defense of Telesio's ideas. We could have guessed that Campanella did not make any friends in the church with this revelation. Sure enough, he was denounced by the Inquisition. He was confined for a while, but he was incorrigible. He went on propagating the empiricist philosophies. It all caught up with him in 1599 when he went to Naples and worked against the Spanish occupiers. He was tossed in the slammer and spent 27 years there.
He was finally released, but the reprieve was temporary. He was promptly jailed in Rome for a couple of years. Torture, of course, was a routine part of his life during those prison stays. He got out of the Roman clink in 1629 and became advisor on astrology to Pope Urban VIII for five years. Go figure! He finally had sense enough to leave Italy and go to France where he spent the remainder of his life. His protector was none other than Cardinal Richelieu. This guy was a heavy in French politics and a key figure in the suppression and massacre of the Huguenots and the thirty year war against the Hapsburgs.
In or out of prison Campanella continued to write including
a book in defense of Galileo called, appropriately enough, Defense
of Galileo. This was another defense of the Copernican theories.
With stuff like that, it's no wonder he piqued the thin skin of
the holy fathers. We can only marvel and admire the courage of
these men of science risking that horror filled fiery death for
their principles. At the same time we can fully despise the monstrously
evil men who committed such obscene crimes of vengeance against
them.
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