Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich.

Online at historyofilocity.net. Today's episode, boundless enthusiasm, Giordano Bruno.

There seems to be a widespread assumption that it was humbling for humankind to abandon the old cosmology of Aristotle and Ptolemy and accept the new astronomy of Copernicus.

No longer do we find ourselves at the literal center of attention on an earth which sits unmoving at the midpoint of a finite spherical universe.

Instead, we are moving around the sun, which has usurped the earth's place.

In fact, we now realize our whole solar system takes up only a tiny part of a vast universe.

There's no doubt that this shift of perspective did upset many people and many preconceptions about people and their role in the cosmos.

But it's worth remembering that in the ancient and medieval worldview, the earth was never seen as the best part of the universe.

The middle of everything was also the bottom of everything, with the celestial bodies above being seen as far superior, even divine in some sense.

As we saw over the last couple of episodes, these heavenly bodies were typically assumed to influence, if not completely determined, events down here on earth, while we cannot influence them at all.

They are the instruments of God, steered by angels, free of decay and perfection, and the thousand natural shocks that our flesh is heir to, as people were saying at about the same time over in England.

In light of this, being moved away from the center of the cosmos could be seen as a promotion.

But neither did the Copernican Revolution simply reverse the older view, with the sun occupying the new down and the previously static earth catapulted into the heavens,

now moving at the thrilling speeds previously reserved for planets and stars.

His discoveries did not so much turn the universe upside down, as show that the universe has no up and down at all.

That at least was the lesson drawn by Giordano Bruno.

In several treatises beginning with the Ash Wednesday supper, a dialogue published in 1584 in London, he presented a mind-boggling vision of the universe, infinite in extent and containing an infinity of worlds.

Her cosmos is just one of those worlds and has the sun at its center with the earth revolving around it.

Not everyone was impressed, the vice-chanceler of Oxford University, where Bruno presented his ideas, mocked him as that little Italian, with a name longer than his body, referring to the philosopher's full and rather splendid moniker, Filoteus, Giordano's Bruno's Nolanos.

The chancellor summarized Bruno's performance like this. He undertook among very many other matters to set on foot the opinion of Copernicus, that the earth did go round and the heavens did stand still, whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round.

Then as now, Oxford was a unique place, but not by virtue of producing hostility towards Bruno.

In his itinerant career which brought him from Italy to cities including Paris, to Luz, Geneva, Paris, London and Vittenburg, he made plenty of enemies.

...