The controversy over teleology raged in the early modern period with particular intensity. In this paper, I will show that Guillaume Lamy represents a current of antifinalism, devoid of weakness, and far from compromise with his adversaries. This antifinalism makes of Lamy not so much a sincere supporter of the unknowability of God in other words, a proto but rather a radical Lucretian materialist, whose aim is to openly distance himself equally from the partial Cartesian rejection of final causes and (...) from the sugar–coated Epicureanism of the Gassendists. (shrink)

Unlike all preceding theorists of cometary tail formation, Newton introduced a mechanism in which a comet's tail was produced by the convection of rarified ethereal particles which carried with them particles from the comet's upper atmosphere, which in turn became heated by reflecting of the sun's rays. The centrality of the action of the ether particles in this theory made it problematic, as a consistent theory of the ether was not then available. As a result, the theory was not wholly (...) accepted even by some of Newton's closest colleagues and disciples. This paper briefly presents Newton's theory of tail formation and examines its reception, primarily in England. I review seven accounts of cometary tail formation that were developed in a Newtonian framework and published between 1696 and 1757 by William Whiston, David Gregory, Henry Pemberton, Voltaire, Colin Maclaurin, J. T. Desaguliers, and Benjamin Martin. Newton's comet theory showed both philosophical and practical defects typical of his better known work, and I identify four major issues that early Newtonians disputed. These disagreements show that we still have much to learn about the way Newton's physics was studied in the 18th century. (shrink)

: Marin Mersenne was central to the new mathematical approach to nature in Paris in the 1630s and 1640s. Intellectually, he was one of the most enthusiastic practitioners of that program, and published a number of influential books in those important decades. But Mersenne started his career in a rather different way. In the early 1620s, Mersenne was known in Paris primarily as a writer on religious topics, and a staunch defender of Aristotle against attacks by those who would replace (...) him by a new philosophy. In this essay, I would like to examine Mersenne's changing attitude toward Galileo. In the early 1620s, Mersenne lists Galileo among the innovators in natural philosophy whose views should be rejected. However, by the early 1630s, less than a decade later, Mersenne has become one of Galileo's most ardent supporters. How, then, did Mersenne learn to love Galileo? (shrink)

. The object is to examine strategies commonly used to heighten a sense of the sacred in nature. It is argued that moves designed to reinforce a concept of Providence have been the very ones to release new opportunities for secular readings. Several case studies reveal this fluidity across a sacred‐secular divide. The irony whereby sacred readings of nature would graduate into the secular is also shown to operate in reverse as anti‐providentialist strategies invited their own refutation. The analysis is (...) used to support the claim that the sciences have put fewer constraints on religious belief than is generally assumed. (shrink)

This article explores the speed and form in which the mechanical philosophy was absorbed into the college curriculum in Louis XIV’s France. It argues that in general a mechanist approach to nature only began to be received sympathetically after 1690. It also emphasizes that it was the Cartesian not Gassendist form of the mechanical philosophy that professors espoused. While admitting that at present it is impossible to explain successfully the history of the reception of the mechanical philosophy in the classroom, (...) the article concludes by attempting to throw light on the French preference for Descartes. This, it is suggested, is linked to the relative familiarity of Cartesian mechanism, the way the philosophy was packaged, and the political and religious environment. (shrink)

In the 17th century not all manuscripts were clandestine because there also existed manuscripts written for public circulation (first and foremost the correspondences that were semi-public, or certain collections of poems that circulated first in manuscript and then in printed form), but it is undeniable that most of the resolutely “heterodox” authors found it useful to entrust their ideas to manuscripts both to protect themselves against the retaliation of the authorities and to circumvent the censorship to which printed books were (...) subject. These philosophical manuscripts were messengers of “full heterodoxy” which we could call “global” and not “local”. The exclusion did not regard one or another context but all (or almost) of the contexts of the Ancien Régime, as they expressed a radical dissent in contrast with all of the orthodoxies of modern Europe. Bodin’s Colloquium, like Theophrastus redivivus and Meslier’s Mémoire, could not have been published either in a Catholic country or in a Protestant one, either in an absolute monarchy or in a republic. The clandestine authors were aware that it would be impossible to spread their ideas outside a circle protected by the manuscript form and most often by anonymity. (shrink)