Devoir de Philosophie

Cardano, Girolamo

Publié le 22/02/2012

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The Renaissance Italian Girolamo Cardano is famous for his colourful personality, as well as for his work in medicine and mathematics, and indeed in almost all the arts and sciences. He was an eclectic philosopher, and one of the founders of the so-called new philosophy of nature developed in the sixteenth century. He used both the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic traditions as starting points, and following the medical paradigm of organic being, he transformed the traditional Aristotelian universe into an animated universe in which, thanks to their organic functional order, all individual parts strive towards the conservation both of themselves and of the whole universe. As a result, they can be subjected to a functional analysis. In his more casual writings on moral philosophy, Cardano showed his orientation to be basically Stoic.

« the first moves towards the theory of probability.

In mechanics 'Cardano's suspension' is still regarded as a success.

He wrote on music and on dreams, believed in demons, and was regarded as a reliable astrologer, who even cast the horoscope of Jesus Christ. 3 Metaphysics Cardano claimed that Plotinus and Aristotle were his main inspiration in philosophy, and though he argued explicitly against Aristotle, his theory is implicitly based on the Aristotelian tradition.

While he was not a systematic thinker, his work rests on some basic assumptions which allow for a systematic understanding of his main philosophical teaching, and which are themselves of major philosophic interest. His notion of unity is fundamental.

It was developed in a little treatise De uno (On the One) , written around 1560 and published in Basle in 1562.

Cardano himself recommended it as an introduction to his natural philosophy.

In it he argued that everything that exists is one, so that the structure of unity is identical to the structure of reality. Analysis of a given real being, a human being for example, shows that its unity consists both in the single principle behind its various operations and in the organic structure of its corporeal basis, which guarantees that its various parts cooperate in the effort to achieve self-conservation.

Thus every real being can properly be regarded as a system constituted by a certain number of organic parts that cooperate in function.

Every organ, in so far as it is a real being and therefore one, has necessarily to be such a system; and every real being, as part of a greater, more comprehensive, whole, has to function as an organ of this larger unit.

As a result, reality is reduced to a system of functions, in which every individual being is at the same time an organ or subsystem of its supersystem, and the superior unit of its subsystems.

This kind of ordering is also to be found in the sphere of history, which is governed by fate. 4 Physics In Cardano's treatise De natura (On Nature) , written at the same time as De uno (though not published in his lifetime) and like De uno recommended as introductory reading, Cardano developed his concept of nature in accordance with his basic ontological principle of unity.

The single principle which coordinates the various operations of natural beings and causes the organic order of their unity is called the soul.

As a result the whole of the material world is animated, and Aristotle's distinction between organic and non-organic nature is abandoned. Different souls are systematically ordered in the same way as the different natural beings which they animate. Their principal task is to care for the self-preservation of the bodies which correspond to them, so they are endowed with whatever means of cognition are necessary for that task.

They act in accordance with the principles of sympathy and antipathy.

The intellectual soul, being supernatural, is one and the same for all human beings, as Averroes had held ( Ibn Rushd §3 ). Bodies themselves are constituted by the heat of the heavens.

This heat is the active principle that serves the soul,. »

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