In the period of emergence of early modern science, ‘monsters’ or individuals with physical congenital anomalies were considered as rare events which required special explanations entailing assumptions about the laws of nature. This concern with monsters was shared by representatives of the new science and Late Scholastic authors of university textbooks. This paper will reconstruct the main theses of the treatment of monsters in Late Scholastic textbooks, by focusing on the question as to how their accounts conceived nature’s regularity and (...) teleology. It shows that they developed a naturalistic teratology in which, in contrast to the naturalistic explanations usually offered by the new science, finality was at central stage. This general point does not impede our noticing that some authors were closer to the views emerging in the Scientific Revolution insofar as they conceived nature as relatively autonomous from God and gave a relevant place to efficient secondary causation. In this connection, this paper suggests that the concept of the laws of nature developed by the new science –as exception-less regularities—transferred to nature’s regularity the ‘strong’ character that Late Scholasticism attributed to finality and that the decline of the Late Scholastic view of finality played as an important concomitant factor permitting the transformation of the concept of laws of nature. (shrink)

The following essay is divided in three parts. First, while sharing in principle Harrison's hypothesis of an affinity between the sixteenth‐century Reformation and early modern science, it questions the connection between the latter and the Weberian “disenchantment of the world.” Second, it suggests a broader group of possible actors than that envisaged by Harrison in referring to virtuoso collectors and their cabinets of curiosities who are rather marginalized in Harrison's narrative. And third, it highlights (in agreement with Harrison) the physico‐theology (...) of the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century and beyond as an important temporary fusion of religion/theology and science at a time when the new science was still striving for social and religious respectability. (shrink)

In the Discours de la méthode, Descartes presents himself as a heroic figure, standing up against the current Aristotelian orthodoxy in philosophy, and offering something new, a mechanist physics and the metaphysics to go along with it. But Descartes was by no means the only challenger to Aristotelian natural philosophy: by Descartes’s day, there were many. Descartes was read as one of this group, generally called the novatores (innovators) in Latin, and often severely criticized for their advocacy of the new. (...) Descartes himself wanted to separate his philosophy from that of the novatores, who were thought to seek novelty rather than truth. But it was not so easy to distance himself. Many contemporary commentators, like Charles Sorel, put Descartes squarely in their camp, but at exactly the moment when novelty and innovation in natural philosophy was changing from being worthy of scorn to being praiseworthy. (shrink)

Narratives about the peaceful and fruitful relationship of religion and science in early-modern times have long since replaced the nineteenth-century vision of the ‘warfare of science with theology...

This article presents evidence that an anonymous publication of 1573, aLetter sent by a gentleman of England [concerning …] the myraculous starre nowe shyning, was written by Thomas Digges, England's first Copernican. It tells the story of how it arose out of research commissioned by Elizabeth I's privy counsellors in response to the conventional argument of Jean Gosselin, librarian to Henri III of France, that the star was a comet which presaged wars. The text is significant because it seems to (...) contain the observations and opinions that Digges held before he completed his other astronomical treatise, the groundbreakingAlae seu scalae mathematicae. It also casts some light on the development of Digges's radical and puritan views about the star, Copernican astronomy, the infinity of the universe and a belief that the ‘latter days’ of the world had arrived. (shrink)

This paper examines the theories of the soul proposed by Girolamo Cardano in his De immortalitate animorum (1545) and his De subtilitate (1550-4), Julius Caesar Scaliger's comprehensive critique of these views in the Exercitationes exotericae de subtilitate of 1557, and Cardano's reply to this critique in his Actio in calumniatorem of 1559. Cardano argues that the passive intellect is individuated and mortal, and that the agent intellect is immortal but subject to constant reincarnation in different human beings. His theory of (...) cognition leads him to claim that at its highest level, the intellect is converted into the object of its perception. In his refutation of the various elements of Cardano's theories, Scaliger uses his knowledge of the Greek text of Aristotle to stress the reflexive faculty of the soul, its ability to conceive of objects greater than itself, and its status as the individuating principle of the hylemorphic human being. In spite of Cardano's pretention to novelty and Scaliger's humanist credentials, both thinkers are shown to conduct their discussions in an inherited scholastic matrix of thought. (shrink)

At the beginning of the 16th century in Germany, religious ends and human art joined forces to produce a sacred rhetoric: a rhetoric that could transform human nature, and explain at the same time how such transformation was possible according to both science and scripture. No longer was it enough to ask in Scholastic fashion ‘What is man?’ - his essence and unique faculties, his special place in God’s world. A new question took on urgency in the wake of religious (...) reformation, namely ‘What could man become?’ But theology alone could not provide a practical response to this question. Rhetoric, in its various adopted forms, could. Consequently rhetoric emerged as architectonic of the human sciences in Reformation Germany, shaping pedagogy as a practical art. Whereas scholars have paid a good deal of attention to the way in which the exact sciences such as mathematics influenced Enlightenment human science, the history of human science as practical art has received little attention. This article contributes to such a history by showing how rhetoric as a practical protreptic art structured human scientific initiatives in the wake of Philipp Melanchthon’s Reformation pedagogy. (shrink)

The present article discusses the concept of synderesis in the late medieval universities of Erfurt and Leipzig and the later developments in Wittenberg. The comparison between Bartholomaeus Arnoldi of Usingen in Erfurt and Johannes Peyligk in Leipzig shows that school traditions played an important role in the exposition of synderesis by the late medieval scholastic natural philosophers. However, Jodocus Trutfetter's example warns against overemphasizing the importance of the school traditions and reminds us of the manifold history of medieval discussions on (...) synderesis, which were more or less familiar to many authors of this period. Finally, the diverse references to synderesis in the texts of Martin Luther, Johannes Bernhardi of Feldkirch and Philip Melanchthon reveal no uniform relationship with late medieval discussions but rather indicate various ways of adopting scholastic ideas and transforming them in the context of humanist and reformation thinking. (shrink)

This article examines a set of letters and observational reports that passed between Ludwig of Württemberg and Wilhelm of Hesse in response to the nova of 1572. Discussing the terminology used in this debate, it demonstrates that the terms “star” and “comet” were not unambiguous for sixteenth-century authors. A consideration of the relationship between accuracy of observation and the accuracy of the conclusions drawn from them, judged in the terms of twentieth-century astronomy, shows that those observers with the best instruments (...) did not always have the best understanding of what they had observed. Finally, the role played by theology in facilitating interpretations that did not accord with Aristotelian physics is highlighted. (shrink)

: This study of the concept of orbit is intended to throw light on the nature of revolutionary concepts in science. We observe that Kepler transformed theoretical astronomy that was understood in terms of orbs [Latin: orbes] (spherical shells to which the planets were attached) and models (called hypotheses at the time), by introducing a single term, orbit [Latin: orbita], that is, the path of a planet in space resulting from the action of physical causes expressed in laws of nature. (...) To demonstrate the claim that orbit is a revolutionary concept we pursue three lines of argument. First we trace the origin of the term; second, we document its development and specify the meaning of the novel term as it was introduced into astronomy by Kepler in his Astronomia nova (1609). Finally, in order to establish in what sense the concept is revolutionary, we pay attention to the enduring impact that the concept has had on the relevant sciences, in this case astronomy and indeed physics. We claim that orbit is an instance of a revolutionary concept whose provenance and use can provide the insights we are seeking. (shrink)

The ArgumentDavid Gans, a German Jew who was educated in Poland and spent his adulthood in Prague, produced over his lifetime a large and unprecedented corpus of Hebrew introductions to various liberal disciplines, chiefly astronomy. Gans believed that the disciplines he described might help to mediate between Christians and Jews, by serving as a shared subject of study. He considered these subjects to be uniquely apt for shared study because they took them to be theologically neutral.Gans's hopes went unfulfilled, and (...) most of his books remained unpublished and ignored. Still, his own firm belief in the plausibility of his project implies that it was not a foregone conclusion near the start of the seventeenth century that astronomy and other liberal disciplines would find no purchase among Central European Jews. It also suggests that the mutual alienation between intellectuals of different confessions that has been emphasized by some historians might have been less pronounced than is often imagined. Further, Gans's belief that these disciplines could encourage interdenominational discourse and respect, and his intimation that such beliefs were shared by Kepler and Brahé, suggest the intriguing possibility that natural philosophy was valued by at least some of its early modern practitioners as an irenic undertaking. (shrink)

: This paper offers my current view of a joint research project, with Bernard R. Goldstein, that examines Kepler's unification of physics and astronomy. As an organizing theme, I describe the extent to which the work of Kepler led to the appearance of the form of Copernicanism that we accept today. In the half century before Kepler's career began, the understanding of Copernicus and his work was significantly different from the modern one. In successive sections I consider the modern conception (...) of Kepler's contribution to Copernicanism, the most influential sixteenth century view of Copernicus's work and its sequel, Kepler's work from the viewpoint of this tradition, and finally the historical origins of the modern view of Copernicanism. (shrink)