Metaphysical Terms (Translated‪)‬

This edition includes:
• New English translation
• Critical introduction

Fifty-two words, each given its full weight, and behind them a quiet reordering of what it means for anything to exist at all. Giordano Bruno spent his life lecturing across Europe — Geneva, Paris, Oxford, Wittenberg, Zurich — and in this book he does something rare: he takes the technical vocabulary of metaphysics and shows, entry by entry, what those old words can be made to say.

The subject is the vocabulary itself. Being, substance, essence, cause, principle, element, matter, quantity, quality, potency and act, order, time, truth, unity, the good: each term is defined, its senses divided and distinguished, with Aristotle, Plato and the schools never far away. The second half turns to what Bruno calls the descent of being — a compressed metaphysical theology in which God is universal substance, closer to each thing than its own form or nature, while everything that exists descends through degrees of participation, and the infinite and the finite, the greatest and the least, meet in the same point. There is even a ladder of knowing, running from the senses up through reason, intellect and mind.

This is a working philosopher's book, and it reads like one: exact, patient, and full of small arguments that widen as you go.

The translation is made to be read now: natural and alive in contemporary English, faithful to Bruno's substance, his voice, his tone and his images. The volume opens with a critical introduction, placed before Bruno's text, that sets out the lectures behind the book and the vocabulary it puts to work.

Add it to your library — and keep it within reach, because these are terms you will want to look up more than once.