Abstract

In the eyes of his own contemporaries and successors, as well as many today, Giordano Bruno is something of an ‘outsider’ because of his views in metaphysics, ontology, cosmology, and theology. Concentrating on his central theses, I will show how, with an immense speculative energy, Bruno escaped the ordinary philosophical, scientific, and theological traditions. He conceived of himself, as it were, as a mirror reflecting an unending universe without a center, and through the power of language and ingenium transfers the structure of this universe to the human mind. Bruno’s philosophy, which he himself referred to as ‘new’ or as a «philosophia nolana», required a semantic transformation of traditional terms, because he, no more than any other thinker, could start completely afresh. Although his views initially appear to place him outside of traditional discussions, they in fact touch, in each case, on central problems of traditional philosophical and theological discourse