How induction was understood took a substantial turn during the Renaissance. At the beginning, induction was understood as it had been throughout the medieval period, as a kind of propositional inference that is stronger the more it approximates deduction. During the Renaissance, an older understanding, one prevalent in antiquity, was rediscovered and adopted. By this understanding, induction identifies defining characteristics using a process of comparing and contrasting. Important participants in the change were Jean Buridan, humanists such as Lorenzo Valla and (...) Rudolph Agricola, Paduan Aristotelians such as Agostino Nifo, Jacopo Zabarella, and members of the medical faculty, writers on philosophy of mind such as the Englishman John Case, writers of reasoning handbooks, and Francis Bacon. (shrink)

In my opinion it cannot be denied but that your discourse carries with it much of probability, arguing, as we say, ex suppositione, namely, granting that the Earth moves with the two motions assigned it by Copernicus; but, if one excludes those motions, all that you have said is vain and invalid; and for the exclusion of that hypothesis, it is very manifestly hinted by your discourse itself.

Accounts of Hobbes’s ‘system’ of sciences oscillate between two extremes. On one extreme, the system is portrayed as wholly axiomtic-deductive, with statecraft being deduced in an unbroken chain from the principles of logic and first philosophy. On the other, it is portrayed as rife with conceptual cracks and fissures, with Hobbes’s statements about its deductive structure amounting to mere window-dressing. This paper argues that a middle way is found by conceiving of Hobbes’s _Elements of Philosophy_ on the model of a (...) mixed-mathematical science, not the model provided by Euclid’s _Elements of Geometry_. I suggest that Hobbes is a test case for understanding early-modern system-construction more generally, as inspired by the structure of the applied mathematical sciences. This approach has the additional virtue of bolstering, in a novel way, the thesis that the transformation of philosophy in the long seventeenth century was heavily indebted to mathematics, a thesis that has increasingly come under attack in recent years. (shrink)

The scientific developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have traditionally been associated with the revival of Platonism. The natural philosophers who invented the methods of classical physics have usually been depicted as men who repudiated the principles of Aristotle and embraced conceptions provided by the writings of Plato and his school. The characteristic feature derived from Platonism was the emphasis on mathematics and it is with the application of mathematics to experience, under specially devised conditions, that modern science arose. (...) In this sense, it is the Piatonism of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, which forms the distinctive quality of the scientific revolution that culminates in the work of Newton. (shrink)

Johannes Jessenius became known by his contemporaries mostly as an exponent of the Italian anatomical Renaissance in Central Europe at the end of the sixteenth and at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The image of Jessenius in the twentieth century was also created with respect to his activities in the area of anatomy in Wittenberg and Prague in particular. The aim of this article is to put Jessenius into the context of the development of anatomy in the sixteenth century. (...) An important point in this progression can be seen in the change of the definition of anatomy from the art of dis- secting bodies and a “method” of instructing students to the way of acquiring knowledge of bodies and nature. The crucial role in this process played anatomical writings of the second half of the 16th century and the development seems to be connected with methodological discussions at the University of Padua. Jessenius, in his anatomical writings, primarily followed the Paduan anatomist Andreas Vesalius, whose work De humani corporis fabrica expresses the fundamental change in Renaissance anatomy. In addition, the methodological background of the anatomical Renaissance, which Jessenius became acquainted with during his studies in Padua, also echoes in Jessenius’ works. (shrink)

Giacomo Zabarella es considerado uno de los aristotélicos más prestigiosos y más influyentes del siglo XVI. Su obra lógica, sus escritos sobre física y sus comentarios, publicados póstumamente, tuvieron un enorme impacto especialmente en las primeras décadas del siglo XVII, y sirvieron como verdaderos manuales con los que se formaron muchos universitarios europeos. Este artículo analiza la figura de Zabarella centrándose en su obra sobre física, el De rebus naturalibus libri XXX, editado en 1590, apenas unos días antes de su (...) muerte. (shrink)

Abstract The aim of the paper is to reassess the role of British Aristotelianism within the history of early modern logic between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as a crucial moment of cultural transition from the model of humanistic rhetoric and dialectic to that of facultative logic, that is, a logic which concerns the study of the cognitive powers of the mind. The paper shows that there is a special connection between Paduan Aristotelianism and British empiricism, through the mediation of (...) British Aristotelianism. British Aristotelians took the ideas of the Paduan Aristotelian tradition and carried them to an extreme, gradually removing them from the original Aristotelian context in which they were grounded and developing what would later become the fundamental ideas of British empiricism. (shrink)

E. A. Burtt's The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science has been described by H. Floris Cohen, writing on the historiography of the Scientific Revolution in 1994, as the "individual thought of an individual thinker...beyond philosophical or historical currents or fashion." The book is something of a puzzle within the context of American twentieth-century intellectual history and more specifically, of the philosophy and history of science of North America and Europe.

1. At least since W.F. Edwards’ pioneering articles on medieval and renaissance interpretations of the prologue to Galen's Art of Medicine,1 it has often been maintained that Latin scholastics inte...

The paper is devoted to an overview of Cassirer’s work both as historian of philosophy and historian of science. Indeed, the “intelletcual cooperation” between history of philosophy and history of science represents an essential feature of Cassirer’s style of philosophizing: while the roots of a wide exploration stretching from Renaissance thought to modern physics go back to the Neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School, the results of a similar cross-fertilization of research fields have deeply contributed to shaping new standards of inquiry. (...) Cassirer’s relationship with the Warburg milieu in Hamburg and late in his life with the American intellectual scenario are surely worthy of closer investigation. Distinguished scholars such as Meyerson, Brunschvicg, Burtt, Koyré, Metzger, Lovejoy, Kristeller, have disussed, appreciated, critizised Cassirer’s still today fascinating studies devoted to Pico della Mirandola, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, to mention but a few. To explore some of these aspects focusing both on affinities and differences within a cosmpolitian intellectual community can provide a better understanding of philosophy and history of science in the first half of 20th century. Cassirer’s legacy requires, therefore, a new assessment. (shrink)

The aspects of Erhard Weigel's Analysis Aristotelica ex Euclide restituta that foreshadowed and helped form some characteristics of symbolic logic are highlighted: first, the idea of a pure form of a logical syllogism or of a mathematical proof and, second, a tentative arithmetisation of some aspects of logic. Also, Weigel's emphasis on the role of symbols and figures in the process of mathematical proof is discussed.

This paper defends a version of J. H. Randall’s thesis that modern empiricism is rooted in the Scholastic regressus method epitomized by Jacopo Zabarella in De Regressu (1578). Randall’s critics note that the empirical practice of Galileo and his contemporaries does not follow Zabarella. However, Zabarella’s account of the regressus is imprecise, which permitted an interpretation introducing empirical hypothesis testing into the framework. The discourse surrounding Galileo’s lunar observations in Sidereus Nuncius (1610) suggests that both Galileo and his interlocutors amended (...) the regressus method in this way, such that a developmental narrative links Scholastic logic to Galilean science. (shrink)

Throughout the sixteenth century, learned physicians across Europe performed a diverse array of “trials” of phenomena and published reports about them. This essay traces the phrase “periculum facere” (“to make a trial”) and related terms through natural history investigations, drug testing, chymical analysis, and anatomical discoveries. Physicians used ancient precedents, their learned expertise, and pedagogical authority to anchor the epistemic status of their trials and incorporated the historical narratives of their trial-making within arguments to factual and causal knowledge, even philosophical (...) scientia. Developed from engagement with things, ancient texts, other healers, and students, this lively tradition of contrived, first-person empirical trials flourished in some academic institutions, especially the University of Padua. The frequency and visibility of sixteenth-century medical trials, especially in the education of hundreds of students annually, is essential evidence for understanding how experimentation came to be widespread in early modern Europe. (shrink)

A number of authors have drawn attention to the contributions to geology of Robert Hooke, and it has been pointed out that in several ways his ideas were more advanced than those of Steno, who is sometimes taken to be the founder of geology as a scientific discipline. Moreover, it has been argued that in a number of instances Hooke should receive the credit for ideas which are usually believed to have originated in the work of James Hutton. This recognition (...) of the significance of Hooke's work is regarded by the present writer as being well founded. But, by contrast, the relationship between Hooke's geological ideas and his views on the proper methods for conducting scientific enquiries has been largely overlooked, and his views on the methodology of science, as revealed in his Posthumous works, have received little discussion. Moreover, on one of the few occasions on which they were discussed, by William Whewell, they were belittled. Whewell regarded Hooke's methodological contribution as merely ‘an attempt to adapt the Novum organon to the age which succeeded its publication’, 5 and he implied that the ‘same imperfections’ were to be found in the writings of both Hooke and Bacon. The influence of Bacon is, to be sure, most obvious in Hooke's general philosophy. Nevertheless, it will be argued that Hooke had a much clearer idea than did Bacon of the importance of so-called ‘hypothetico-deductive’ methods in science, and that in many ways his methodological views represent a significant advance on those of Bacon. (shrink)

Peter Anstey has suggested that in our analyses of early modern natural philosophy we should abandon a frequently used distinction: that between rationalism and empiricism. He argues that we should replace it with another distinction, that between experimental and speculative natural philosophy. The second distinction, he argues, was not only widely used at the time, but has a greater explanatory range. It follows, he suggests, that it is a better way of “carving up” the writings of that period.It is clear (...) that a distinction between experimental and speculative natural philosophy did become common in the late seventeenth-century. But I am less convinced that it is a useful one. This.. (shrink)