Kenelm Digby was among the first authors in England to embrace Cartesianism. Yet Digby’s approach to the mind–body problem was irenic: in his massive Two treatises (Paris, 1644), the author advocates a corpuscular philosophy that is applied to physical bodies, whereas the intellectual capacities of human beings remain inexplicable through the powers of matter. The aim of the present article is to highlight the (rather reticent) relationship of Digby’s corpuscularism with doctrines of spirits in connection with the Renaissance Neoplatonic tradition. (...) Not uncommon in seventeenth-century natural philosophies, such “spirits” are notoriously evasive entities: half spirit, half matter acting as mediators between the realms of bodies and souls. This article suggests that Digby sought to preserve the inveterate ideas of a universal spiritus and a world soul and, in particular, that Kenelm Digby translated (rather than “overcame”) Marsilio Ficino’s (1433–1499) spiritus doctrines into the language of seventeenth-century corpuscularism. (shrink)

According to Girolamo Fracastoro in his book De contagione, et eorum et contagiosis morbis curatione (1546), contagious diseases are caused by the analogies between the seminaria contagionum (seedlets of contagion) and organisms affected by them. Such analogies are governed by the laws of sympathy and antipathy that regulate the universal order of things, according to the Neo-Platonic philosophy of the Renaissance, whose influence was decisive in the discourse of the physician of the Verona. The purpose of this paper is to (...) investigate the sources and possible reasons that led Fracastoro to support an idea that, due to its apparent qualitative nature, would contradict its rejection to the hidden qualities in explaining the etiology of contagion. (shrink)