From Animal Happiness to Human Unhappiness: Cardano, Vanini, Theophrastus Redivivus (1659)

Abstract

The topic of the distinction between man and animal as discussed in Theophrastus redivivus (1659) is a noteworthy example of the engagement with Renaissance sources in the seventeenth century. This essay argues that it displays how conceptual continuities intertwined with significant interpretative shifts. In dealing with the specific question of human and animal happiness, the anonymous author carefully selects and brings together passages from Renaissance philosophers – especially Cardano and Vanini – but inserts them in a completely new frame, ultimately employing the Renaissance roots of this philosophical problem in order to develop his own original view. Thus Cardano’s reflections on the animals’ capability of attaining happiness and Vanini’s doubts about man’s qualitative distinction from animals are woven together in order to point to a conclusion which is in fact a subversion of the sources used to reach it: Theophrastus redivivus shows that man has lost his assigned place in the economy of the universe altogether. The legacy of the Renaissance debate on the animals’ happiness therefore changed form even while it persisted as a crucial point of reference from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century.

All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.