I have sketched the well-known distinction between facts and evidence not to defend or attack it , but rather as a preface to a key episode in the history of the conceptual categories of fact and evidence. My question is neither, “Do neutral facts exist?” nor “How does evidence prove or disprove?” but rather, “How did our current conceptions of neutral facts and enlisted evidence, and the distinction between them, come to be?” How did evidence come to be incompatible with (...) intention, and is it possible to imagine a kind of evidence that is intention-laden?It is my claim that partial answers to these questions lie buried in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature on prodigies and miracles. I shall argue that during this period prodigies briefly became the prototype for a new kind of scientific fact, and that miracles briefly exemplified a form of evidence patent to the senses and crucially dependent on intention. Both conceptions diverge sharply not only from current notions of facts and evidence, but also from medieval views on the nature of prodigies and miracles. Prodigies were originally closely akin to portent, divine signs revealing God’s will and things to come; miracles were more intimately associated with the private experience of grace than with the public evidence of the senses. Prodigies were transformed from signs into nonsignifying facts, and miracles into compelling evidence, as part of more sweeping changes in natural philosophy and theology in the mid-seventeenth century. Lorraine Daston is professor of history of science at the University of Göttingen, Federal Republic of Germany. She is the author of Classical Probability in the Enlightenment and is currently at work on a history of scientific objectivity. (shrink)

Hiro Hirai, Le Concept de semence dans les thories de la matire la Renaissance de Marsile Ficin Pierre Gassendi. De Diversis Artibus, vol. 72. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. 576 pp. [euro]75.90. ISBN 2-5...

This article examines the philosophical teaching of a colorful Oxford alumnus and Roman Catholic convert, Christopher Davenport, also known as Franciscus à Sancta Clara or Francis Coventry. At the peak of Puritan power during the English Interregnum and after five of his Franciscan confrères had perished for their missionary work, our author tried boldly to claim modern cosmology and atomism as the unrecognized fruits of medieval Scotism. His hope was to revive English pride in the golden age of medieval Oxford (...) and to defend English Franciscans as more legitimately patriotic and scientifically progressive than Puritan millenarians. (shrink)

This volume brings together some of the best articles on Descartes published in the last fifty years. Edited by the renowned Descartes specialist John Cottingham, the selection covers the full range of Descartes's thought, including chapters on the central issues in Cartesian metaphysics, the relationship between mind and body, human nature and the passions, and the structure of scientific explanation.

This paper investigates the relationship between some corpuscularian and Aristotelian strands that run through the thought of the sixteenth-century philosopher and physician Julius Caesar Scaliger. Scaliger often uses the concepts of corpuscles, pores, and vacuum. At the same time, he also describes mixture as involving the fusion of particles into a continuous body. The paper explores how Scaliger’s combination of corpuscularian and non-corpuscularian views is shaped, in substantial aspects, by his response to the views on corpuscles and the vacuum in (...) the work of his contemporary, Girolamo Fracastoro. Fracastoro frequently appears in Scaliger’s work as an opponent against whom numerous objections are directed. However, if one follows up Scaliger’s references, it soon becomes clear that Scaliger also shares some of Fracastoro’s views. Like Scaliger, Fracastoro suggests corpuscularian explanations of phenomena such as water rising in lime while at the same time ascribing some non-corpuscularian properties to his natural minima. Like Scaliger, Fracastoro maintains that there is no vacuum devoid of bodies since places cannot exist independently of bodies (although their opinions diverge regarding how exactly the relevant dependency relation might be explicated). Finally, like Scaliger, Fracastoro connects a continuum view of mixture with a theory of natural minima. (shrink)

This paper analyses the place of natural history within Bacon's divisions of the sciences in The Advancement of Learning and the later De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum. It is shown that at various points in Bacon's divisions, natural history converges or overlaps with natural philosophy, and that, for Bacon, natural history and natural philosophy are not discrete disciplines. Furthermore, it is argued that Bacon's distinction between operative and speculative natural philosophy and the place of natural history within this distinction, are (...) discontinuous with the later distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy that emerged in the methodology of the Fellows of the early Royal Society. (shrink)

Epistemology, in the strict sense of the word, is concerned with the nature of knowledge and justified belief. This twofold concern may be divided into five discernable questions: 1. What is knowledge? 2. What is justified belief? 3. How do we acquire knowledge? 4. What makes our beliefs justified? 5. Is the extent of justified belief and knowledge roughly what we take it to be, or are the skeptics right when they claim that it is much smaller than what we (...) would like to think? The first question differs from the third, and the second from the fourth, because we must distinguish between definitional and substantive issues.1 Before we can address the substantive issues raised by questions 3 and 4, we must first settle what we mean when we talk of knowledge and justification. Thus, after a brief historical overview, Part I of this essay focuses on the conceptual issues that arise when we try to answer questions 1 and 2. Here, we encounter issues such as: How can we distinguish between the kind of justification that is relevant to knowledge, and other kinds of justification? Is justification a deontological concept, to be understood in such terms as ‘ought’, ‘permission’, or ‘obligation’? How is justification related to knowledge? Can knowledge be understood as justified true belief? In Part II, turning to issues that arise when we attempt to answer questions 3 and 4, we shall examine two important debates — foundationalism vs. coherentism, and internalism vs. externalism — and review the most important theories on the nature of knowledge and justification, such as evidentialism, reliabilism, the conclusive reasons theory, and the tracking theory. In Part III, our topic will be a new approach — virtue epistemology — that has received much attention during the past two decades and sheds new light on the problems that plague the theories examined in Part II. (shrink)