ジョルダーノ・ブルーノの自然哲学 : カッシーラー『認識の問題』の所説を中心にして

In Das Erkenntnisproblem, E. Cassirer has defined Giordano Bruno as the last of the Renaissance natural philosophers. Cassirer has argued that the Renaissance-characteristics which permeated Bruno\u27s philosophy differed from the "exact sciense" which interpreted and represented phenomena uniformaly upon universal and mathematical laws, and that Bruno had not reached the latter stage. With Cassirer\u27s argument in mind, I will in this essey analyze Bruno\u27s philosophy, particularly his understanding of nature. "Universalization", or the theory of infinitude, constitutes a center of Bruno\u27s thought. In his times, idea of infinitude had a potential of undermining the medieval, fixed views of the universe. By applying his aesthetic intuition, Bruno tried to comprehend synthetically infinite-oriented universality as well as individual beings. Cassirer has judged this effort by Bruno as failure. He has ascribed the failure to the fact, although Bruno had the idea of atoms as singular entities, he did not comprehend the scheme of differential calculus. In other words, Bruno based his philosophy upon separate quantity, and not upon continuous quantity. Even though Cassrier\u27s point is correct, it is also true that Bruno\u27s theory of individual beings was thoroughly permeated by the approach always to understand objects in their entirety. Bruno could not conceive natural laws, both qualitative as well as quantative, which ruled individual beings. Instead, he found in insanity a state of total comprehension of individual beings. From the point of view of the total development of man, Bruno\u27s approach might be regarded as a limitation of a Renaissance man