Abstract

This is a translation of a work, which appeared originally in French in 1923, that exposes in considerable detail the doctrine of Giordano Bruno on various kinds of minima. Bruno is justly famous for his teachings on infinity, but is little known for adumbrating atomic concepts through his finalist approach to the ultimate constituents of matter and mathematical continua. The author proposes to remedy this defect by exposing, in a systematic way, the contents of Bruno’s somewhat confusing Latin poem De triplici minimo et mensura, ad trium speculativarum scientiarum et multarum activarum artium principia, first published in 1591 at Frankfurt. Like others of Bruno’s compositions, this is "a tiresome melange of irregular hexameters," in imitation of Lucretius, interspersed with Latin scholia "occasionally more poetic than the verses themselves". In three chapters the author successively details the various forerunners of Bruno’s doctrine ; makes sense of the three minima ; and offers a critique.