ABSTRACT
Tommaso Campanella's achievement in philosophy is tainted by his nearly three-decade-long ordeal in prison: Having been arrested for political rebellion in Naples in 1599, he was and remained throughout his life under suspicion of heresy. The power of God for salvation and to prevent evil is equally dubitable. Campanella adds three arguments: determinism that allows to do what one likes, the Aristotelian doctrine, including the eternity of the world, the mortality of the soul, and religion as an invention for political aims; finally the Lucretian argument that religion corrupts morals. Also, Campanella added preliminary responses to these arguments so as not to offend pious readers. Consequently science must be knowledge of God's relationship to the world and more importantly of the presence of God's ideas in created things. By way of analogy, these ideas, God's intelligence, must be manifest in things in some spiritual way, which is at least their sense'. Campanella's usage of sense' is therefore dialectical.
