Secularized Wisdom: Girolamo Cardano on Human Nature without God

Abstract

Girolamo Cardano wrote, besides his better-known treatises on natural philosophy and his autobiographies, some treatises (Hymnus seu canticum ad Deum, De uno, De sapientia) that define wisdom as a human skill of orientation in the world, specifically as a feature of human nature, as ethical and political means, and as the capability of dominating things and humans. The effect is that human wisdom, although apparently a divine virtue, is reduced to the capability and task of humans to secure their position, to make sense, and to make conjectures about the principles of human agency. This eventually regards religion and God: everything is a hypothesis and a tool for human secular felicity.