CARDANO, GIROLAMO. - Physician and philosopher, b. at Pavia on 24 Sept. 1501, d. at Rome on 21 Sept. 1576. A typical representative of the versatility and curiosity of the Italian spirit of the sixteenth century. He occupied himself with mathematics, astrology, astronomy, physics, medicine, music, politics, philosophy, often divining new truths, often also bordering on charlatanry or skirting heterodoxy, particularly Averroism, which he had encountered at Padua. Noteworthy are his algebraic contributions and his philosophical-political conceptions. To him, in fact, is partly due the formula for solving cubic equations that even today bears his name, and the method of numerical solution of equations. His essentially scientific training affects and is reflected in his philosophical system, intermediate between Aristotelianism and naturalism. His effort, however, to explain phenomena by means of natural causality, is vitiated by frequent recourse to astrology. This experimentalism C. strives to apply also in political doctrine. He wants every utopian and a priori ordering of society banished: man must be studied in himself, in his nature, in his historical evolution peculiar to individual peoples; and according to the different characteristics the forms of the state must be established and laws promulgated. In psychology, his theory of pleasure is original: the pleasant is savored the more, the more unpleasant is what precedes it, and vice versa; thus harmony is felt more after dissonance, the sweet after the bitter. One must therefore seek out as far as possible the causes of suffering in order to taste, upon their cessation, a more refined pleasure. If credence is given to his autobiographical confessions, C. would have practiced this new form of Epicureanism.
Works: Hieronymi Cardani Mediolanensis philosophi et medici celeberrimi opera omnia cura C. Sponii (10 vols., Lyon 1663); principal among them: Ars magna seu de regulis algebraicis (Nuremberg 1545); De subtilitate (Basel 1547); De vita propria (ibid. 1542; Italian trans. V. Mantovani, repr. Milan 1922).
Bibliography6 works
Felicissimo Tinivella