Girolamo Cardano: Philosopher of Threat

Project Information

THREAT

Grant agreement ID: 893982

DOI

10.3030/893982

Project closed

EC signature date 20 April 2020

Start date 1 September 2020

End date 31 August 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 183 473,28

EU contribution

€ 183 473,28

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - THREAT (Girolamo Cardano: Philosopher of Threat)

Reporting period: 2020-09-01 to 2022-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

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.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Deliverables (results and dissemination)

• Two project-specific, peer-reviewed articles:
1) “Shadows of the Thrown Spear: Girolamo Cardano on Anxiety, Dreams, and the Divine in Nature,” accepted and forthcoming 2023 in Early Science and Medicine.
2) “A Hot Mess: Girolamo Cardano, the Inquisition and the Soul,” HOPOS 11 (2021): 547-563.

• One project-related, peer-reviewed article:
1) “Ficino on the Exalted and Suffering Body: Comparing the Platonic Theology and On the Christian Religion,” Bruniana & Campanelliana 26 (2020): 421-435.

• One special issue:
1) “Individuality, self-care, and self-preservation in late medieval and early modern science,” accepted pending minor revisions and forthcoming 2023 in Early Science and Medicine.

• Two project-related chapters:
1) “Johannes Kepler and the Pythagoreans,” in Plato’s Timaeus and the Foundations of Medieval and Renaissance Thought: Philosophy, Science and Art, eds. Jacomien Prins and Edmund Thomas (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).
2) with Pietro Daniel Omodeo, “Celestial Physics,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Dana Jalobeanu and David Marshall Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 238-253.

• Monograph: Roughly half of the monograph on Girolamo Cardano is complete in draft form. Draft chapters have been presented in workshops and conferences.

• Two international conferences, including a 2-day conference on Girolamo Cardano:
1) Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576). New Perspectives on a Master of Intellectual Variety (co-organizer), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, 24-25/05/2022.
2) Creating digital text corpora from archival materials (co-organizer), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, 14/12/2020.

• Four panels at international conferences:
1) Catastrophes in Early Modern Natural Philosophy and Medicine (co-organizer), Panel at 2022 Conference of the International Society for Intellectual History, Venice, 12-15/09/2022.
2) Censoring Science in the Early Modern Mediterranean (co-organizer), Panel at History of Science Society (HSS) Annual Meeting, New Orleans, 11/2021.
3) Risk in Early Modern Philosophy and Science, Panel of Princeton-Bucharest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, 11/2021.
4) The Spectre of Heresy in Early Modern Cosmologies (co-organizer), Panel at 9th Annual Scientiae Conference, Amsterdam, 06/2021.

• Source Publication: I generated a highly accurate, searchable edition of Cardano’s Opera omnia (1663) based on PDFs from the University of Milan’s Cardano project. These updated PDFs are now publicly available at https://cardano.unimi.it/opera-omnia/. Transcription was performed via Transkribus, an AI engine for transcription of historical documents developed by the Horizon 2020 EU project READ. The General Model (GM 5) for Latin printed materials was used, developed by the ERC-funded NOSCEMUS project. The PDFs used were those of the Girolamo Cardano Initiative at the University of Milan.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This project consolidated a number of themes in Cardano studies, showing how risk and risk management serve as a unifying preoccupation of the corpus. Hence, the project has offered a new interpretation of one of early modernity’s signature philosophers. In doing so, the project has also taken steps toward introducing the question of risk in early modern science and philosophy, along with proposing a viable methodology for exploring it. The project is therefore a promising introduction to a wider study of how conceptions of risk and risk management fed into movements like humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the political developments that greatly enhanced the powers of early modern states.

Portrait from Cardano's posthumous Opera omnia (1663).