Campanella, Tommaso

Abstract

Tommaso Campanella was one of the foremost Italian philosophers of the late Renaissance. Known mostly today for his famous utopia, The City of the Sun (La Città del Sole/Civitas Solis), his many writings cover a range of subjects, including natural philosophy, ethics, politics, theology, metaphysics, epistemology, magic, astrology, medicine, education, rhetoric, historiography, and mathematics. Despite its apparent fragmentary structure, his overall project sought to establish an encyclopedia of knowledge that could serve as a basis for the reformof the sciences. This, in turn, was to lay the foundations for his project of universal political and religious reform and reconciliation. He is also known as a philosophical poet and his extant epistolary corpus includes some 170 letters. Most of his works were written during his almost 30-year long imprisonment in Naples and Rome. A self-described but often heterodox Thomist, Campanella was also among the staunchest critics of Aristotelianism and Machiavellism, and one of the most notable defenders of Galileo.