Through the years there have been subtle changes in the evaluations of the work of Tycho Brahe. As one examines the tracts dealing with novae and comets in which reference is made to the nova of 1572 or the comet of 1577, it becomes quite evident that in different parts of Europe and in the Near East and at different periods of time and among men of different religious convictions different values were placed on his work. The extent of his (...) influence should be distinguished from the measure of his achievements. Moreover, his importance cannot be completely separated from that of Kepler and the horde of other writers who furnished more than a mere background for the display of Tycho's brilliance. Here, as always, there is the danger of assigning to one man innovations that were, so to speak, in the air. (shrink)

this book concerns the debates on the functions of "imagination" (phantasia, imaginatio) in the arousal of passions in the Aristotelian and post-Aristotelian traditions till the XVIIth Century. The simple fact that often a mental representation is followed by pleasure or sorrow and that these emotions can cause actions, became progressively part of a wider theory of animal and human behaviour. In the case of human behaviour, the "force of imagination" became a kind of general justification of all kind of anomic (...) and irregular behaviour and beliefs, including true paranormal conditions of the body. The book recapitulates the main evolution of this way of seeing passions - from Aristotle to Avicenna and his Latin followers - till the age of the authors who see the inner work of "imagination" as a constant danger for human reason, and imagination itself as faculty to control with care for its propension to be the "advocate" of the "inferior part of the soul", such as Gianfrancesco Pico, Juan Luis Vivés, Pierre Charron, Blaise Pascal and a large part of the French Augustinian Moral Philosophers. (shrink)

. The subject of this paper is Georg Ernst Stahl's reflections on epilepsy. In the German physician's work, the concept of disease is stratified: it is the morbid idea which causes dysfunctions in the animal economy, as well as irregular motion, overabundance and ultimately an alteration of the corporeal humours. In particular, epilepsy is an affection deriving from an altered functioning of the bodily motions, caused by abnormal blood flow, intestinal worms, anatomical defects, foreign bodies, and the passions of the (...) soul. While a certain medical tradition attributed a nervous origin to epilepsy, Stahl, giving it a humoural genesis, openly shows the theoretical premises on which his physiology rests. So, Stahlian physiology appears to be a non-mechanistic, teleological-inspired, hydraulicism. (shrink)

Interrogations and elections were two branches of Arabic judicial astrology made available in Latin translation to readers in western Europe from the twelfth century. Through an analysis of the theory and practice of interrogations and elections, including the writing of the Jewish astrologer Sahl b. Bishr, this essay considers the extent to which judicial astrology was practiced in the medieval west. Consideration is given to historical examples of interrogations and elections mostly from late medieval English manuscripts. These include the work (...) of John Dunstaple , the musician and astrologer who is known have served at the court of John, duke of Bedford. On the basis of the relatively small number of surviving historical horoscopes, it is argued that the practice of interrogations and elections lagged behind the theory. (shrink)

This article discusses three aspects of the history of astrology in seventeenth-century Peru that are of larger interest for the history of science in Latin America: Creole concerns about indigenous idolatry, the impact of the Inquisition on natural philosophy, and communication between scholars within the Spanish colonies and the transatlantic world. Drawing mainly on the scholars Antonio de la Calancha, Juan de Figueroa, and Ruiz de Lozano, along with several Jesuits, the article analyzes how natural and medical astrology took shape (...) in Peru and how they fostered astronomical investigations of the southern skies. While natural and medical astrology, showing New and Old World influences, oscillated between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and between scholasticism and new science, judicial astrology remained undeveloped. Toward the end of the seventeenth century the discourse about astrology took an unexpected turn, reflecting a newly invigorated moral and Christian reading of the heavens that was in part a response to a deep-rooted dissatisfaction with the failure of the extirpation of idolatry campaigns. Inscribing divine and cardinal virtues, the Virgin Mary, Christian saints, and Greco-Roman allegories into the heavens was considered a way to finally solve the problem of idolatry and to convey Creole greatness. (shrink)

ArgumentDuring the two decades before the turning point in Copernicus's personal and scientific development in 1510, he had experience of political activity which has been largely ignored by the existing Copernicus literature but part of which is reconstructed in outline in this paper. Given the close linkage between politics and astrology, Copernicus's likely reaction to astrology is re-examined here. This reconstruction also suggests that the turning point in 1510, when Copernicus left his post as secretary to his uncle Lucas Watzenrode (...) the prince-bishop of Warmia, was not only linked to Copernicus's first version of his heliocentric theory in theCommentariolus, but also to major political setbacks being experienced by Watzenrode during these years, and with the publication of Copernicus's translation of theLettersof Theophylactus Simocatta. Some of these considerations contribute to maintaining the view that Copernicus and his work were in several respects exceptional. (shrink)

Weber’s claim that Calvinism eliminated magic from the world, inserted into The Protestant Ethic in 1920 and arising out of research reported in The Sociology of Religion, entails a sociological but also a theological proposition identified in this article. Weber’s conceptualization of magic permits his examination of the economic ethics of the world religions. Non-European cases, including China, are examined by Weber to confirm his Protestant Ethic argument regarding modern capitalism. He holds that Confucian rationality, associated with bureaucratic order, is (...) compromised by its tolerance of magic. Weber contrasts this with the Calvinist rejection of magic. Weber’s claims regarding Calvinist demagicalization are made without regard to the Reformation Calvinist obsession with satanic witchcraft, in which the efficacy of magic is accepted as real. The distance between Calvinism and Confucianism, essential to Weber’s argument, is thus narrowed. (shrink)

Continental philosophy of science has developed alongside mainstream analytic philosophy of science. But where continental approaches are inclusive, analytic philosophies of science are not–excluding not merely Nietzsche’s philosophy of science but Gödel’s philosophy of physics. As a radicalization of Kant, Nietzsche’s critical philosophy of science puts science in question and Nietzsche’s critique of the methodological foundations of classical philology bears on science, particularly evolution as well as style (in art and science). In addition to the critical (in Mach, Nietzsche, Heidegger (...) but also Husserl just to the extent that continental philosophy of science tends to depart from a reflection on the crisis of foundations), other continental philosophies of science include phenomenology (Husserl, Bachelard, Merleau‐Ponty, etc.) and hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer, Heelan, etc.), especially incorporating history of science (Nietzsche, Mach, Duhem, Butterfield, Feyerabend, etc.). Examples are drawn from the philosophy of sciences (chemistry, geology, and biology) other than physics. (shrink)

ArgumentThe subject of the paper is the shift from an astrology-oriented astronomy towards an allegedly more objective, mathematically grounded approach to astronomy. This shift is illustrated through a close reading of Tycho Brahe's scientific development and the contemporaneous changes in his communicational strategies. Basing the argument on a substantial array of original sources it is claimed that the Danish astronomer developed a new astronomical discourse in pursuit of credibility, giving priority to observational astronomy and natural philosophical questions. The abandonment of (...) astrology in public discourse is primarily explained by Tycho's social position and greater sensibility to controversial issues. Tycho's example suggests that the changes in rhetorical strategies regarding astrology (which happened earlier than changes in astrological belief) should be given more recognition in the history of astronomy. (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...

It has been traditionally held that the idea of a prime matter of metals was abandoned in the eighteenth century, especially after the failure of Hermann Boerhaave to find it in mercury. However, documents tell a different story: the search for the metalliferous principle, in the form of an odd substance known asGur,Guhr,GhurorBur, was very much alive in the 1700s. This was a project that involved Boerhaave himself, as is shown by his correspondence with J.B. Bassand. The first mention of (...) this strange material appears inSarepta, a collection of sermons by the sixteenth-century Bohemian preacher Johannes Mathesius, sometimes mentioned in the specialized literature but rarely studied. This paper discusses the various conceptions of this material held as the prime matter of metals, from Mathesius to the eighteenth century, involving reputed authors such as John Webster, Jan B. van Helmont, Georg E. Stahl and Boerhaave. (shrink)

To contribute to our understanding of the relationship between philosophical ideas and medical and healthcare models. A diachronic analysis is put in place in order to evaluate, from an innovative perspective, the influence over the centuries on medical and healthcare models of two philosophical concepts, particularly relevant for health: how Man perceives his identity and how he relates to Nature. Five epochs are identified—the Archaic Age, Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Modern Age, the ‘Postmodern’ Era—which can be seen, à (...) la Foucault, as ‘fragments between philosophical fractures’. From a historical background perspective, up to the early 1900s progress in medical and healthcare models has moved on a par with the evolution of philosophical debate. Following the Second World War, the Health Service started a series of reforms, provoked by anti-positivistic philosophical transformations. The three main reforms carried out however failed and the medical establishment remained anchored to a mechanical, reductionist approach, perfectly in line with the bureaucratic stance of the administrators. In this context, future scenarios are delineated and an anthropo-ecological model is proposed to re-align philosophy, medicine and health care. (shrink)

Abstract Centuries of both theologians and astronomers have wondered what the Star of Bethlehem (Matt 2:2, 9) actually was, from miracle to planetary conjunction. Here a history of this search is presented, along with the difficulties the various proposals have had. The natural theories of the Star are found to be a recent innovation, and now almost exclusively maintained by scientists rather than theologians. Current problems with various theories are recognized, as well as general problems with the approach. The interactions (...) between the sciences and religion are categorized and explored. (shrink)

The problem analysed in this paper is whether we can gain knowledge by using valid inferences, and how we can explain this process from a model-theoretic perspective. According to the paradox of inference (Cohen & Nagel 1936/1998, 173), it is logically impossible for an inference to be both valid and its conclusion to possess novelty with respect to the premises. I argue in this paper that valid inference has an epistemic significance, i.e., it can be used by an agent to (...) enlarge his knowledge, and this significance can be accounted in model-theoretic terms. I will argue first that the paradox is based on an equivocation, namely, it arises because logical containment, i.e., logical implication, is identified with epistemological containment, i.e., the knowledge of the premises entails the knowledge of the conclusion. Second, I will argue that a truth-conditional theory of meaning has the necessary resources to explain the epistemic significance of valid inferences. I will explain this epistemic significance starting from Carnap’s semantic theory of meaning and Tarski’s notion of satisfaction. In this way I will counter (Prawitz 2012b)’s claim that a truth-conditional theory of meaning is not able to account the legitimacy of valid inferences, i.e., their epistemic significance. (shrink)

Although the University of Leeds has attained something of a reputation for the quality of its scholarship in the history of science, few historians are aware of the impressive collection of early scientific and medical books and manuscripts to be found in the University libraries. In order to make the library resources more widely known, we embarked on a systematic survey of the contents of the main historical collections. We wanted not only to give a general impression of the particular (...) strengths and distinctive features of each collection, but also to mention the interesting or rare copies of individual works to be found in them. We have, therefore, examined every book related to the history of science and medicine in the relevant collections, and in doing so we have uncovered a number of important items. For example, we have identified a book which was once in Newton's library, and a previously unrecorded copy of Joseph Black's chemical lectures. More generally, we had not suspected the true size and range of the Chaston Chapman Collection, which makes it a valuable resource for the history of alchemy and early chemistry; nor were we initially aware of the strength of the Historical Collection of the Medical and Dental Library. The wealth of the legacies to the Brotherton and Special Collections also impressed us. (shrink)

Very early experiments described in ancient literature usually have no detailed explanation of the methods used let alone the explicit Control expected by modern scientists for comparison with Treatments. Athenaeus describes a rarely recorded exception in The Deipnosophistae which has been briefly noted in scientific literature but not sufficiently contextualized. The experiment described has one treatment, a control and Athenaeus cites the desirability of replication, making this passage read like a modern text rather than an ancient one. Because technical processes (...) were invented in ancient times I assume that experiments were also practiced, even though they are not described in ancient literature. This passage in Athenaeus exemplifies, by rare contrast, the general lack of description for ancient scientific methods. This lack may be because the ancient practitioners of technical processes did not have the reason modern scientists use for disclosure of all methods and results. Moderns achieve monetization that is protected by Intellectual Property Law or by acquisition of authority followed by salaried teaching in the academy. Ancient experimenters protected their discoveries by secrecy and maintained monopolies by concealment, an inconvenience for modern scholars. The form of ancient literature is important for this subject: it is not like modern scientific literature. When the ancients mention scientific subjects in writing it is in the form of literary discourse and debate where the aim is cerebral. There is no description of technical details where the aim is to allow replication of the experiment. Comfortable logic not experiment is described and intellectual improvement was usually the aim of ancient literature, rather than practical outcomes. The only reason we have knowledge of ancient practitioners of something similar to modern scientific methods from literature is that their kind of technical antics were briefly mentioned by ancient authors, because of their surprising and amusing nature. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper focuses on several Italian Jewish philosophers in the second half of the sixteenth century and the first third of the seventeenth century. It argues that their writings share a certain theology of nature. Because of it, the interest of Jews in the study of nature was not a proto-scientific but a hermeneutical activity based on the essential correspondence between God, Torah, and Israel. While the theology of nature analyzed in the paper did not prevent Jews from being (...) informed about and selectively endorsing the first phase of the scientific revolution, it did render the Jews marginal to it. So long as Jewish thinkers adhered to this theology of nature, Jews could not adopt the scientific mentality that presupposed a qualitative distinction between the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture. (shrink)

It has long been noted that towards the end of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church began to use its instruments of censorship – the Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden Books – to prosecute magic with increased vigour. These developments are often deemed to have had important consequences for the development of modern science in Italy, for they delimited areas of legitimate investigation of the natural world. Previous accounts of the censorship of magic have tended to suggest that the (...) Church as an institution was opposed to, and sought to eradicate, the practice of magic. I do not seek to contest the fact that ecclesiastical censors prosecuted various magical and divinatory practices with greater enthusiasm at this time, but I suggest that in order to understand this development more fully it is necessary to offer a more complex picture of the Church. In this article I use the case of the Neapolitan magus Giambattista Della Porta to argue that during the course of the century the acceptable boundaries of magical speculation became increasingly clearly defined. Consequently, many practices and techniques that had previously been of contested orthodoxy were categorically defined as heterodox and therefore liable to prosecution and censorship. I argue, however, that this development was not driven by the Church asserting a ‘traditional’ hostility towards magic, but was instead the result of one particular faction within the Church embedding their conception of orthodox philosophical investigation of the natural world within the machinery of censorship. (shrink)

Simon Bredon was one of a remarkable group of scientists who brought fame to Oxford by their achievements in the sphere of natural science, particularly in astronomy. Though his interests lay chiefly in the field of medicine, as indicated by the large collection of books on this subject which he bequeathed to his friends, he was also a mathematician and astronomer.The manuscripts of his works, still preserved at Oxford, Cambridge and the British Museum, which include an arithmetic, a commentary on (...) the Almagest, a theory of the planets and astronomical calculations, have never been properly examined and some kind of preliminary investigation seems necessary before his true position among the Merton school of scientists can be assessed. (shrink)

The ArgumentOur understanding of the predisposing factors, the nature, and the fate of the Oxford Calculatory tradition can be significantly increased by seeing it in its social and institutional context. For instance, the use of intricate imaginary cases in Calculatory works becomes more understandable if we see the connection of these works to undergraduate logical disputations. Likewise, the demise of the Calculatory tradition is better understood in the light of subsequent efforts at educational reform.Unfortunately, too little evidence remains about the (...) Calculators and their context to enable anything like a full reconstruction of the relation of the Oxford Calculators' work to its context. Nevertheless, seeking out and fitting together the bits of information that do remain can add to our insight. Among the topics worth further research are the relation of training incalculationesto later careers in church or government, and the special features of the Calculatory tradition as a tradition consisting of multiple parallel manifestations closely interconnected with other disciplines, ranging from logic and natural philosophy to theology and medicine. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJacques Rohault is often considered to be one of the most meticulous followers of Descartes. Despite this, Rohault’s natural philosophy lacks much of the metaphysical bulwark that typifies Cartesian treatises of the seventeenth century. Instead, Rohault’s work, as well as his popular weekly meetings, strongly emphasized rigorous observation and experimentation. Traditionally, this emphasis on experiment over metaphysics is seen as a pragmatic omission to avoid the perils associated with censorship and Cartesian metaphysics. However, I find that the lack of explicit (...) metaphysics has real consequences that play out in the role Rohault assigns to experimentation. To show this, I highlight several areas where he adopts a broad experimental methodology even though Descartes explicitly rejects the relevancy of experiment on metaphysical topics. I place special emphasis Rohault’s extensive experiment on the void. In short, Rohault’s experimentation was designed to prove, through experimental mea... (shrink)

Franz Anton Mesmer’s 1766 thesis on the influence of the planets on the human body, in which he first publicly presented his account of the harmonic forces at work in the microcosm, was substantially copied from the London physician Richard Mead’s early eighteenth-century tract on solar and lunar effects on the body. The relation between the two texts poses intriguing problems for the historiography of medical astrology: Mesmer’s use of Mead has been taken as a sign of the Vienna physician’s (...) enlightened modernity while Mead’s use of astro meteorology has been seen as evidence of the survival of antiquated astral medicine in the eighteenth century. Two aspects of this problem are discussed. First, French critics of mesmerism in the 1780s found precedents for animal magnetism in the work of Paracelsus, Fludd and other early modern writers; in so doing, they began to develop a sophisticated history for astrology and astrometeorology. Second, the close relations between astrometeorology and Mead’s project illustrate how the environmental medical programmes emerged. The making of a history for astrology accompanied the construction of various models of the relation between occult knowledge and its contexts in the enlightenment. (shrink)

Summary The enthusiasm of Renaissance humanists for classical learning greatly influenced the development of botany in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Humanist scholars restored the treatises of Theophrastus, Pliny, Galen and Dioscorides on botany and materia medica to general circulation and argued for their use as textbooks in Renaissance universities. Renaissance botanists' respect for classical precepts and models of the proper methods for studying plants temporarily discouraged the use of naturalistic botanical illustration, but encouraged other techniques for collecting and (...) communicating new observations: herbaria, botanical gardens and field trips. (shrink)

In the early modern age, two causal models are clearly identifiable: action at a distance—a typical Renaissance paradigm, widespread among thinkers involved in natural magic and seventeenth-century Neoplatonists—and action by contact, on which both the Aristotelians and the Cartesians agreed. Pierre Gassendi too seems to endorse the motto: ‘Nihil agit in distans nisi prius agit in medium’ [Nothing acts at a distance unless it acts through a medium]. In this essay, it will be shown that a third causal model exists, (...) according to which material bodies are surrounded by ‘atmospheres’ of effluvia or qualities, which spread within a circumscribed ‘sphere of activity’, whose extension is peculiar to each body. In particular, it will be shown: what the third causal model was like, from an ontological point of view, that is, how it centred on the concepts of effluvium and spiritus, or qualitas; what this model was like, from a gnoseological point of view; how it was theorized by... (shrink)

The last decade has witnessed a widespread resurgence of interest in Galen of Pergamum that is without parallel since the early seventeenth century. New studies of Galen's concepts of psychology and medicine have examined afresh his position in the development of scientific thought, and historians have begun to realize the wealth of material for the social history of the Antonine Age that he provides. But, despite the earlier labours of Ilberg and Bardong to restore a chronological order to the many (...) tracts that flowed readily from his pen, many of the events of his life still lack the precise dates that would enable even more valuable information to be extracted, especially upon the careers of his friends. (shrink)

The last decade has witnessed a widespread resurgence of interest in Galen of Pergamum that is without parallel since the early seventeenth century. New studies of Galen's concepts of psychology and medicine have examined afresh his position in the development of scientific thought, and historians have begun to realize the wealth of material for the social history of the Antonine Age that he provides. But, despite the earlier labours of Ilberg and Bardong to restore a chronological order to the many (...) tracts that flowed readily from his pen, many of the events of his life still lack the precise dates that would enable even more valuable information to be extracted, especially upon the careers of his friends. (shrink)

A characteristic hallmark of medieval astronomy is the replacement of Ptolemy’s linear precession with so-called models of trepidation, which were deemed necessary to account for divergences between parameters and data transmitted by Ptolemy and those found by later astronomers. Trepidation is commonly thought to have dominated European astronomy from the twelfth century to the Copernican Revolution, meeting its demise only in the last quarter of the sixteenth century thanks to the observational work of Tycho Brahe. The present article seeks to (...) challenge this picture by surveying the extent to which Latin astronomers of the late Middle Ages expressed criticisms of trepidation models or rejected their validity in favour of linear precession. It argues that a readiness to abandon trepidation was more widespread prior to Brahe than hitherto realized and that it frequently came as the result of empirical considerations. This critical attitude towards trepidation reached an early culmination point with the work of Agostino Ricci, who demonstrated the theory’s redundancy with a penetrating analysis of the role of observational error in Ptolemy’s Almagest. (shrink)

In this article, we publish the critical edition of Andalò di Negro’s De compositione astrolabii, with English translation and commentary. The mathematician and astronomer Andalò di Negro presumably redacted this treatise on the astrolabe in the 1330s, while residing at the court of King Robert of Naples. The present edition has three purposes: first, to make available a text missing from the previous compilations of works by Andalò di Negro; second, to revise a privately circulated edition of the text; and (...) third, to help disseminating one of the rare Latin texts presenting the principles of the stereographic projection which underlie the construction of the astrolabe. (shrink)

In Italy the physical sciences had several decades of prosperity during the first half of the seventeenth century, largely because of the genius of Galileo Galilei and the efforts of a small constellation of his talented followers. But Galileo died in 1642, and before the end of the 1640s three of the most gifted of his disciples, Castelli, Renieri, and Torricelli, had also gone to a better life, to use the favourite euphemism of the time. Thereafter Tommaso Cornelio at Naples, (...) Giovanni Alfonso Borelli at Messina and later at Pisa, as well as some lesser men, carried on the new science, and in 1657 the scientific enthusiasm of the Grand Duke Ferdinand II of Tuscany and his talented brother Leopold led to the short-lived Accademia del Cimento (1657–67), whose clear-cut and totally empirical programme of experimentation, reported on in 1667 but carried out mainly before 1662, was the last Tuscan flame to rise from the Galilean embers. Physiology and anatomy continued to develop, and north of the Apennines there was activity in astronomy and in optics, but the last was an isolated spark in the general gloom. (shrink)

There are three principal philosophical-scientific encyclopaedias written in Hebrew during the Middle Ages: Yehudah ha-Cohen's Midrash ha-okmah, rather than such texts as pseudo-Aristotle 's De lapidibus and Nicolaus Damascenus' De plantis. In particular, Falaquera's encyclopaedia represents the most convincing effort to provide a truly scientific discussion of mineralogy and botany, comparable to that of his contemporary Albert the Great, and based upon the Brethren, Avicenna and, maybe, some lost works by Averroes.

. Once constituted, scientific facts have a way of roaming about on their own in the world, much divorced from the circumstances of their original constitution. An important part of Latour and Woolgar's discussion in Laboratory Life was to draw attention to how facts are used once they are at the final stage of their constitution. What I propose to do here is to go one step further, and to follow a single fact around in the wild—to tag it, as (...) it were, much as a biologist might tag an animal with a radio collar—and then look to see where it turns up. The fact I have chosen is especially taggable, simply because it happens to be fantastic: I refer to the fact that magnets will lose their power of attraction if they are rubbed with garlic. This fact is also useful because it shows up in authors spanning fifteen centuries, from Plutarch through Rabelais and beyond, and over this time it shows some interesting behaviors. Of course, in the end, the garlic-magnet antipathy was disproved, and so changed its epistemological status, moving from one extreme to the other: from the obviously true to the obviously ridiculous. What struck Rabe-. (shrink)

In the first paper of this pair, I argued the importance of theories of the imagination in debates on divination [Vermeir, K. . The ‘physical prophet’ and the powers of the imagination. Part I: A case-study on prophecy, vapours and the imagination . Studies in History and Philosophy of Science C, 35, 561–591]. In the present article, I will rely on these results in order to unearth the role of the imagination in a discussion on dowsing. References to the imagination (...) were often implicit because of its negative associations, but I show in detail how the imagination was used to negotiate between the material and the spiritual, and between the natural, the supernatural and the moral. Natural philosophers, theologians and moralists all struggled for authority over divinatory phenomena. The debate evolved around the questions whether moral states could be naturalised and whether subtle material vapours could have moral qualities. (shrink)