A Multitude of Worlds

Giordano Bruno, Summa terminorum. Zurich: Johannes Wolff, 1595. 4to.

Bruno became best known for his Copernicanism and his death as a heretic in 1600. However, Bruno’s epistemology of memory, his cosmology, and his interest in magic are all convergent with the project of a universal theory of everything that, by definition, purports the unity of thought, existence and objectivity. Bruno probably influenced Baruch Spinoza in his alleged pantheism, if not his atheism. The Summa is a compendium of metaphysical terms, published as a result of lectures he gave in Zürich on the principles of metaphysics. Due to his pantheism (’everything and everyone is divine’) all his books were banned, including his scientific ones.