Cosmology and ethics

a cosmological-ethical critique by Giordano Bruno to the conquers of America in De Immenso (1592)

Abstract

The article has it`s point of departure in the investigation of how a specific cosmological system can determine a specific ethical and moral system. That will be shown through an analysis of the critique made by the italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) about the discovery of the Americas in his book De Triplice Immenso et Mensura (1591). Bruno sees the discovery of the Americas as a discovery similar to that of the new celestial discoveries of his time, by wich the apocaliptic vision of the Amercias could be judged as a result of a false cosmology and antropology, a wrong conception of the human relationship with the divinity.

In the first part we`ll present the nefarious effect derrived from a wrong principle, that is, the conquest of the Americas in two aspects. First, how Columbus understood the discovery of the Americas in the apocaliptic scheme of the biblical end of times. Secondly, we`ll present some aspects from the debate held in Europe in the 16th century in Valladollid questioning if the indigenous people should or shouldn`t be enslaved and converted to christianism.

On the second part, we`ll presente the principle of such nefarious effect for Bruno, that is, the natural philosophy and the cosmology of Aristotle in his book De Caelo.

The third and final part, exposes the critique by Giordano Bruno in De Immenso (1592), a cosmological work, where the philosopher argues against the aristotelic cosmology. We`ll focus in how Bruno builds a philosophical argument in wich a wrong cosmological conception of a closed cosmos, hierarchic, ordered from the most dense to the imaterial, results in a violent and unjust ethical system, a moral that idealizes a place literally higher, the celestial abode of the gods, and a place literally lower, the abode of the perenial bodies, abode of the sinners, our abode.