Hasdai Crescas, Gianfrancesco Pico, Giordano Bruno: On Infinite Space and Time

Abstract

This article examines the conception of infinite space and time in Hasdai Crescas, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno. If Crescas’ presence is explicit in Gianfrancesco Pico’s Examen vanitatis (1520), the reception by Bruno, who never mentions him, was postulated by Harry A. Wolfson in 1929. More recently, David Harari and Mauro Zonta posited the intermediary role of an unknown Jewish author. However, a comparison of the critique of Aristotle by Crescas and Bruno shows that, apart from two points, Bruno was able to reach his positions, independently of Crescas, from his own critical reading of Aristotle and from his knowledge of the developments in medieval scholasticism and the Neoplatonic concept of time. Significantly, Crescas qualifies space and time as attributes of God in a purely metaphorical sense, a question that Pico leaves aside, while Bruno conceives of infinite space and duration, together with matter, as real attributes of God, who, as an indifferent unity of opposites, is both mind and intellect as well as space and matter.