Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!FINFUN.BITNET!YLIKOSKI From: YLIKOSKI@FINFUN.BITNET (Antti Ylikoski tel +358 0 457 2704) Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: Giordano Bruno Message-ID: <19880830031823.6.NICK@HOWARD-JOHNSONS.LCS.MIT.EDU> Date: 30 Aug 88 03:18:00 GMT Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 55 Approved: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu Date: Mon, 29 Aug 88 07:03 EDT From: Antti Ylikoski tel +358 0 457 2704 Subject: Giordano Bruno To: AIList@AI.AI.MIT.EDU X-VMS-To: @AILIST1,YLIKOSKI The case of Giordiano Bruno has occurred several times in AIList. I hope that the readers of AIList forgive me that I give some information involving Bruno and his philosophy even if this is outside the real scope of AIList. Giordano Bruno lived from 1548 to 1600. According to him, the space is infinite and contains innumerable solar systems where there can be various kinds of beings, possibly even more developed than humans. The boundless, eternal and immutable universe is the only thing that exists; its soul, the force which has an effect in everything that there is, is the god. Its elementary parts, which can be combined and separated but not come into existence or vanish, are monads, which are simultaneously spiritual and material. Even the human soul is an indestructible monad. Studying the laws of the universe is the most valuable kind of service of the god that there is. It is easy to understand that the contemporaries of Bruno formed the opinion that from the point of view of Christianity, Bruno was a heretic. They believed, and they believed that they had very good reasons to believe, that the soul of a heretic is condemned to the hell, which means eternal torture; which is even worse, a heretic tends to make others to commit heresy. (Bruno taught in universities in France, Germany and Great Britain.) With the abovementioned background in mind, the very strong reaction of those who condemned Bruno might be more understandable. Moreover, I would estimate that very few readers of the AIList would accept Bruno's theories - pantheism and the monad theory are probably not very popular nowadays. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Antti Ylikoski Helsinki University of Technology Digital Systems Laboratory Otakaari 5 A SF-02150 Espoo, Finland tel : +358 0 451 2176 YLIKOSKI@FINFUN (BITNET) OPMVAX::YLIKOSKI (DECnet) mcvax!hutds!ayl (UUCP) This sentence is false with probability 0.5. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------