THREAT · Girolamo Cardano: Philosopher of Threat
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-09-01 → 2022-08-31
- EU contribution
- €183,473
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Girolamo Cardano: Philosopher of Threat
Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) was one of the major intellectuals of the sixteenth century, producing important works in natural philosophy, moral philosophy, medicine, astrology, mathematics, and divination. This project is constituted of one central insight and one key question. The insight is that despite the daunting variety of Cardano’s output, a unifying concern runs through much of it: his scholarly efforts were devoted to understanding and managing the many dangers of life—familial, political, bodily, professional, emotional, intellectual. Indeed, his work reveals the extent to which the Republic of Letters, along with urban and court cultures, operated as risk societies wherein experts sold their expertise by identifying and managing risk. If we wish to understand the early constitution of modern risk thinking, Cardano is a central character. The question asked by this project, then, is how Cardano structures his ontology and epistemology, that is, his view of the universe and of how it can be known, such that he can affirm his expertise. Thus, the project has carefully examined aspects of his thought—particularly his natural philosophy—as a risk management enterprise. In addition, Cardano’s trial by the Roman Inquisition, and his subsequent censorship by the Congregation of the Index, were studied in order to ask what his reception by Catholic authorities might reveal about the possible secularization of risk management in early modernity. Given how risk thinking dominates modernity—from the operation of governments and major corporations, to the daily lives of individuals—it is essential that we understand its history. This project has been a first step in tracing that history to early modernity, when Western society underwent major political, religious and scientific transformations. The project was structured according to three main objectives: Objective 1: to establish an anatomy of threat in Cardano’s work. What kinds of disasters and catastrophes can occur? In which domains of life and at which scales, from the astrologically determined rise and fall of empires to the daily worries of professional life? What boundaries are presumed to exist between these threat agents and their victims? An important element of this first objective was to use digital-humanities tools to create an accurate and searchable version of Cardano’s ten volume Opera omnia. Objective 2: to consider how natural philosophy acts as a response to threats. Here natural philosophy encompasses the celestial (astrology and mediation of celestial forces), the terrestrial (terrestrial matter), the human (medicine and even ethical or moral philosophy considered as a kind of proto-psychology), and the mathematical (the application of mathematics to the study of chance). Objective 3: to examine how the Roman Inquisition’s response to Cardano represents a criticism of more secular expert approaches to threat.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Throughout Europe and the Americas, we find the expert knowledge of traditional state and scientific institutions—the expert management of risk and otherness—doubted and undermined by groups questioning its hidden motives and meanings. The current project addresses the deep history at play in our conceptions of threat and individual agency in managing threat. It will examine the works of Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), as well as his Roman Inquisition documents, in order to chart an early-modern transformation of great significance: the shift in the management of threat from spiritual expertise to secular expertise. Girolamo Cardano was the most widely-read natural philosopher of the latter sixteenth century. His literary output and fame stretched across numerous disciplines—medicine, astrology, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, mathematics—and his ideas continued to exert major influence well into the seventeenth century. As diverse as his projects and interests were, a common theme unites them: the individual, by Cardano’s reckoning, lives in a network of danger, from bodily illness and accident, to chance events, to faults of intellect and memory, to the vagaries of human passion. In a recent study of his Inquisition trial, I have examined the place of Catholic doctrine in his astrology and celestial physics, and the key points of criticism leveled at Cardano by the Holy Office. This project would build from that foundation, significantly expanding and deepening its results. Assisted by tools from the digital-humanities, it will establish an anatomy of threat in Cardano’s work, analyze his views of natural philosophy as a response to threat, and examine how his censorship by the Roman Inquisition represented a criticism of secular expert approaches to threat.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA · VeneziaCoordinatorItaly
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union