Tommaso Campanella

Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639), real name Giovanni Domenico Campanella, Italian philosopher, born in Stilo, and educated in the Order of the Dominicans. Campanella dissented from the teaching of his time, and in 1599 was arrested on charges of heresy and of conspiring against the Spanish government in Naples. He spent the next 27 years in prison in Naples, where he wrote Civitas Solis (City of the Sun, 1623), a description of an ideal society modelled on the Republic of Plato. He was released from prison in 1626, but renewed persecution compelled him to seek refuge in France. Many of the tenets of his philosophy were similar to the views of the French philosopher René Descartes and the later German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Campanella's works, 82 in all, cover many different philosophical subjects. Among his treatises are Theologia (1613-1614) and Metafisica (1638).