  Generally speaking, Cardano’s philosophy is heavily influenced by characteristic trends of late scholastic Aristotelianism, with a strong penchant for Averroist interpretations. Cardano shows a great interest in Averroes’ opinion that one intellect would perform intellective functions for all human beings. However, he tends to provide a historicized version of this radical view, in that he looks at the one intellect as the varying amount of learning accumulated by mankind throughout the centuries rather than simply justifying it from a purely epistemological point of view (seen as the one intellective power that actualizes the life and knowledge of the sublunary world as a whole). Cardano’s philosophy also displays clear traces of Platonic influences, absorbed through the reading of Marsilio Ficino’s recent translations and commentaries, especially Plotinus and Iamblichus. Together with his impressive knowledge of astrological and medical literature, both scholasticism and Platonism give a characteristically vitalistic slant to his cosmological views. Cardano’s philosophy has often been described as suggestive and rich in original intuitions, but cluttered and inconsistent as a whole. In fact, his philosophical work is yet another example, common during the Renaissance, of how different philosophical traditions (including not only Aristotelianism and Platonism, but also Epicureanism and Stoicism, and not only Graeco-Roman, but also Christian and Arabic views) could converge into one composite but coherent picture. Throughout his life, from his early endeavours in the 1540s (De animi immortalitate) to the last philosophical attempt (Dialogus Hieronymi Cardani et Facii Cardani and De propria vita), Cardano demonstrated a distinctive commitment to a certain number of philosophical issues: the relationship between oneness and multiplicity, with the notable corollaries dealing with order and disorder, determinism and chance, life and decay; the view of the intellect as the ultimate principle of reality and knowledge; a general theory of celestial heat, described as the main formative agent in nature; the interplay of nature and the soul in the organization of the universe; a general doctrine of the immortality of the soul, seen as the foundation of both cognitive clarity and moral certitude. As a whole, the originality of Cardano’s eclecticism lies in the unique way in which he characterizes the interdependence of life, knowledge and matter, in which a pronounced sense of reality and truth is constantly being questioned and jeopardized by a realistic view of human nature, mercilessly presented as prone to fear, delusion and deceit.