ABSTRACT
In his writings Giordano Bruno fought against the principle of authority, which he saw as an expression of a power which lacked true validity and thus could only reply with a violent imposition of its own will. The acceptance of the principle of authority seems to involve giving up the commandment of human reason which urges to think with our heads and our eyes. For Giordano Bruno the difference between the idea of imitation, laid down by the principle of authority, and the idea of invention involves two different conceptions of the world that are mutually incompatible. Imitation and invention — on the one hand there is the idea of a principle that points to something absolute, something which, fixed in time, becomes a paradigm. Bruno's English experience turned out to be an extraordinary laboratory for perfecting the portrait of a philosopher opposed to the authority principle.
