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Henry More and Girolamo Cardano

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Early Modern Philosophers and the Renaissance Legacy

Abstract

Henry More’s view of Girolamo Cardano was ambivalent. On the one hand he regarded his philosophy as “false or uncertain” associating him with Vanini and Pomponazzi, yet he also regarded him as “that famous philosopher of his age” worthy of quoting on the title page of his Immortality of the Soul (1659). In my paper I discuss More’s engagement with Cardano in that work, especially his comments on Fazio Cardano’s dream. I argue that, for More, Cardano represents the obverse of the problem of materialism, for although he agreed on the existence of spirits, he filled his cosmos with all sorts of wrongly conceived spirits, making him guilty of heterodoxy and atheism. More sought to expose Cardano’s errors by means of the same strategy used in the case of Hobbes: by using his adversary’s own method of argument. He drew on modern philosophy (Cartesianism) to dispel the obscurantism and misbelief in Cardano, which he links to the atheism of Pomponazzi and Vanini.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Cambridge Platonists were not in fact as deeply indebted to Ficino as is commonly assumed. They did not draw on his Theologia platonica and they used the Stephanus-Serranus edition of Plato, rather than Ficino’s. See Hutton (2013b).

  2. 2.

    i.e. Alessandro Piccolomini, Iacopo Zabarella, Achillinus , Agostino Nifo, Pietro Pomponazzi, Fortunio Liceti , Cesare Cremonini , Michel de Montaigne, Pierre Charon, Francis Bacon. Naudé (1661). For more information on these see Copenhaver (1992).

  3. 3.

    The most well-represented Italian philosopher in Lord Conway’s collection is Fortunio Liceti, with 18 books listed. Also listed is Julius Caesar Scaliger ’s attack on Cardano: Scaliger (1557).

  4. 4.

    Koyré (1957), 125–126.

  5. 5.

    Important recent studies, especially in the history of moral philosophy are Gill (2006); Darwall (1995); Reid (2012); Schneewind (2003).

  6. 6.

    Ward (2000), 17.

  7. 7.

    Quoted in Ward (2000), 18.

  8. 8.

    More graduated BA in 1636 and MA in 1639. For the life of More, see Crocker (2003).

  9. 9.

    See Maclean (1986). A physician by training, Cardano was a polymath, who published on a wide variety of topics, including astrology, mathematics, metaphysics and medicine. His intellectual formation is a complex interweaving of different strands – humanist, Aristotelian and Galenic, but he was a trenchant critic of Aristotle who sought a new methodology for the discovery of new knowledge, to be achieved by collaborative investigation based on experience. See Baldi and Canziani (1999); Giglioni (2013).

  10. 10.

    Maclean (2007); Maclean (2009). Also Maclean (2005).

  11. 11.

    Described by Anthony Grafton as “the most savage book review in the bitter annals of literary invective”, this was a standard work in university reading lists. See Grafton (1999), 4.

  12. 12.

    Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 1.4.10.

  13. 13.

    Lassels (1670), 8; Boyle (1682), 192; Burthogge (1699), 12.

  14. 14.

    More (1642).

  15. 15.

    More, Immortality of the Soul, 2.12.11, 114 (references to Immortality of the Soul are given by book, chapter and section number, followed by the page number from A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (More (1662), abbreviated as CSPW, in which the constituent writings are individually paginated). More, Immortality of the Soul, 7.14.4, 336.

  16. 16.

    Immortality of the Soul, 3.13.9. He also cites Scaliger, Fallopius and even Vanini for evidence of natural occurrences which can be explained in terms of the operation of some kind of spirit in the world, “if those Histories be true, of extemporary Salads sown and gathered not many hours before the meal they are eaten at: and of the sudden ingendring of Frogs upon the fall of rain […].” Ibid., 2.15.6, p. 165, 267.

  17. 17.

    More (1660), 219, 222.

  18. 18.

    More, Antidote against Atheism, 99, 121, in CSPW.

  19. 19.

    These chapters were republished separately at a later date (1681) as tract against judicial astrology (Tetractys Anti-Astrologica). More was prompted to publish this in response to the attack on him by John Butler whose Hagiastrologia. Or, The most Sacred and Divine Science of Astrology vindicated against the Reverend Dr. More’s Calumnies (1680), attacks More’s treatment of judicial astrology in An Explanation, defending Cardano’s use of it.

  20. 20.

    More (1660), 60–61.

  21. 21.

    See Ernst (2001). Also Grafton (1999), 151–154 and Grafton and Siraisi (2001).

  22. 22.

    See Leech (2013).

  23. 23.

    Ward (2000), 286.

  24. 24.

    Taken from Diogenes Laertius VIII.32, in Richard Ward’s translation which renders genii as demons. Ward (2000), 286.

  25. 25.

    Cardano proposes nine orders of celestial beings and “seven natures”. These latter are “the infinite, or God”, eternal in itself; “the soul of all things or lives”, the soul of the world; first mover (the primum movens); the souls of the various planets; sentient minds (mentes sensiles); the common sentient that presides over all sentient lives (communis sensilis); the “common and vital soul” (anima communis atque vitalis); life or “the soul conceived in matter”. See Giglioni (2013b).

  26. 26.

    Antipsychopannychia, A Confutation of the Sleep of the Soul after Death which was published in Psychodia Platonica. See Hutton (2013a). On More’s metaphysics, see Reid (2012).

  27. 27.

    Immortality of the Soul, 2. 11.1–6, p. 106–107.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 3.1. 2., 159–160.

  29. 29.

    For an account of More’s theory of the vehicle of the soul, see Reid (2012), Chap. 10.

  30. 30.

    The Pythagoreans he says in Conjectura Cabbalistica, “have mingled their own fooleries with it, either out of the wantonnesse of their Fancy, or mistake of Judgement; Such as are the Transmigration of Humane Souls into Brutes”, Defence of the Threefold Cabbala, 43, in CSPW.

  31. 31.

    Cf. An Explanation, 6.5.1, 226: “the Souls as well of the Good as the Bad after Death have an Aereal Body, in which, if Stories be true, they have sometimes appeared after their decease. And that they may act, think and understand in these Aiery vehicles, as well as other Spirits doe, is not at all incredible nor improbable […].” The doctrine of the vehicle of the soul is also used by More to refute deniers of the resurrection of the body, who claim that souls can exist without bodies.

  32. 32.

    Immortality of the Soul, 3.11.1, p. 188.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., 3.11.6, p. 189.

  34. 34.

    Hutton (2013a, b).

  35. 35.

    Immortality of the Soul, 3.3.4, p. 156.

  36. 36.

    Ibid.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 3.3.7, p. 157.

  38. 38.

    Ibid.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 3.11.1, p. 188.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 212–212). See Hutton (2013a).

  41. 41.

    Immortality of the Soul, 3.17.5, p. 218.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., 3.17.10, p. 221. More did apparently accept Cardano’s dream as authoritative about some things: in An Explanation, he cites this passage as evidence that spirits “may be divided in their judgements” (ibid., 6.5.1, 226).

  43. 43.

    On Cardano’s Averroism, see Valverde (2013).

  44. 44.

    Immortality of the Soul, 3.17.10, p. 221.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., 223.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., 3.3.9, p.158.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 3.11.1, 187.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 3.3.11, p. 159.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 3.2.7, p. 153. Later in the argument, More invokes Descartes’ vortical theory and his view that the sun is a star the light of which will eventually be smothered by maculae, in order to explain why the souls of the good have nothing to fear from the “extinction of the sun”. Ibid., 3.19.1, p. 231.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., 2.12.12, p. 114.

  51. 51.

    Grafton (1999), 162.

  52. 52.

    Immortality of the Soul, Preface, section 2, p. 2.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., vi.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of York, York, UK

    Sarah Hutton

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  1. School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom

    Cecilia Muratori

  2. Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Università del Piemonte Orientale (Vercelli), Vercelli, Italy

    Gianni Paganini

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Hutton, S. (2016). Henry More and Girolamo Cardano. In: Muratori, C., Paganini, G. (eds) Early Modern Philosophers and the Renaissance Legacy. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 220. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32604-7_5

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