Tommaso Campanella Quotes on Knowledge
Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), the Italian Dominican whose long imprisonment by the Spanish viceroyalty of Naples produced an extraordinary philosophical corpus including The City of the Sun (composed 1602, published 1623), the Metaphysics, and the apologetic Atheism Conquered, defended a sensationist epistemology drawn from his teacher Bernardino Telesio: knowledge originates in sensation rather than in the abstractive operations of an Aristotelian intellect, and the corresponding natural philosophy treats the entire cosmos as endowed with its own degree of sentience. The framework couples this naturalism with an explicitly Hermetic-magical and theological cosmology and with the utopian-political vision of the City of the Sun.
Quotes
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Attributed to Tommaso Campanella:
“The City of the Sun is governed by the wise.”
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“The world is the book where the eternal Wisdom wrote its own concepts”
Modo di filosofare". -
“Modo di filosofare".”
The world is the book where the eternal Wisdom wrote its own concepts -
“I learn more from the anatomy of an ant or a blade of grass...than from all the books which have been written since the beginning of time. This is so, since I have begun...to read the book of God...the model according to which I correct the human books which have been copied badly and arbitrarily and without attention to the things that are written in the original book of the Universe.”
Letter of 1607", as cited by Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., 2012, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe , Cambridge University Press, p. 218.