This thesis examines the evolution of cosmology in the first half of the seventeenth century through a case study of the erudite Alessandro Tassoni and his Pensieri diversi, an encylopedia covering scientific, literary, historical, and philosophical topics. Highly successful during the seventeenth century, read even by Galileo Galilei, the Pensieri diversi has received little scholarly attention. However, it offers a significant contribution to our understanding of the evolution of early modern cosmology because it was published during the early seventeenth century (...) when profound changes in representations of the structure of the cosmos were occurring. Specifically, it sheds light on scientific debates in the decades immediately preceding Galileo’s Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo. With his Pensieri diversi, Tassoni facilitated the dissemination of scientific disputes across a wider public of erudite non-specialists by using an easy-to-read question and answer format. Yet, he did not simply reproduce opinions from late medieval thought and contemporaneous cosmological debates but instead offered his own critique. I analyse three key themes from the Pensieri diversi. These topics open up more nuanced understanding of those complex issues that, over time, led to epistemological changes in the field of the history of science. In order to point out Tassoni’s contribution to the science of early seventeenth century, I set his scientific and philosophical speculations in their historical and sociological context, and I also provide close textual and theoretical analysis of Tassoni’s cosmological ideas. Thus, I address, more generally, the relationship between scientific and scholarly culture at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution. (shrink)

Special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Studies (4.1., Spring 2005) Guest Editor: Lucian Petrescu. -/- .

In his 1681 Discours sur l’histoire universelle, Bossuet declared that Christianity provided the organizing thread of history, and anything that was not guided by it was irrelevant. Nine years later, in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, travel reports provided the primary source of information, above all in their demonstration of the extent of moral diversity. During the Enlightenment, reports of thoroughly “alien” worlds, notably the New World and China, began to be treated as offering wholly unprecedented perspectives on the world (...) and our place in it. The paper surveys how interpretation of the reports changed radically between their original appearance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and when subjected to new templates of understanding in the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Traditional natural philosophy with its bookish methods and basic indebtedness to Aristotle harbored innovations of many different kinds in the late Renaissance. I compare the modes of innovation and of adherence to tradition in the Universae naturae theatrum of Jean Bodin, who worked outside the university although his work was cited by German professors, and in the university teaching of Jean-Cecile Frey. I argue that authorial self-presentation and ideas about the proper relation of philosophy and religion played crucial roles in (...) making innovations palatable or not in different university contexts. (shrink)

This study examines the manifestations of French humanism in sixteenth-century intellectual culture, through an analysis, for the first time, of the entirety of the works of Pierre Boaistuau. An eminent French humanist writer, on whose life little information exists, Boaistuau emerges far more prolific than any previous study has hitherto recognised. Thus, on a first level, his case offers the opportunity for an exploration of the developments of French print culture at the time. In addition, careful examination of the contents (...) of his widely circulated works sheds new light on the ways humanist themes and values were incorporated into contemporary literary production, and were used for different purposes which surpassed the mere celebration of ancient learning. Boaistuau employed seven genres in order to compile seven books of different natures, all of them however grafted onto a humanist framework. Associated with narrative fiction, Renaissance philosophy, political theory, the study of history, and natural philosophy, his works demonstrate how the classical past and the humanist values of virtue, erudition, and self-discipline were used in a variety of ways in mid sixteenth-century France: for promotion of a moralising message, praise of the French monarchy, bolstering the Catholic faith, and enhancing the understanding of the natural world. (shrink)

Summary The article discusses the decline of Aristotelian physics at the University of Paris in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A course of physics remained essentially Aristotelian until the final decade of the seventeenth century, when it came under the influence of Descartes. But the history of physics teaching over this period cannot be properly appreciated if it is simply seen in terms of the replacement of one physical philosophy by another. Long before the 1690s, the traditional Aristotelianism of (...) the Schools had been forced to come to terms with the New Science to some degree, while the Cartesianism of the early eighteenth century was always alive to the challenges to Descartes's particular physical theories. Except in the early seventeenth century the physics course at Paris was always in a state of change. The replacement of Aristotelian by Cartesian physics too involved the development of a novel epistemology. Although both Aristotelian and Cartesian professors believed that natural philosophy was a science of causes based upon a priori principles, the latter had a far more probabilist conception of physics. (shrink)

General discussions of the appropriate relations between history and philosophy of science must be complemented by examinations of particular studies involving both fields. Martin Curd's attempt to illuminate the rationality of theory change through analysis of the Copernican Revolution is such a study; his work is undercut by serious flaws and actually displays an ahistorical approach. The result misleads both about the Copernican Revolution and the general problem of theory change in science. The study does illustrate several types of failing (...) that can vitiate efforts to bring historical considerations into philosophical discussion, namely, pitfalls in the characterization of theories, arguments, range of choices, and criteria. (shrink)