Theory of Comets at Paris During the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

There is an important and growing literature on the tenacity and vitality of scholastic Aristotelianism in the seventeenth century, when (according to an older view) Aristotelianism was supposed to have become moribund and degenerative. 1 This literature emphasizes the importance of seeing late scholasticism as a living tradition, reacting to other intellectual movements and trying to come to terms with them.2 However, much work still needs to be done to fill in this suggestive picture. It is one thing to show that the central concepts of Aristotelian philosophy, such as the distinction between matter and form and the metaphysics of substance and accident, survived through the seventeenth century, and another to show that doctrines of natural philosophy, such as the incorruptibility of the heavens and the explanation of comets did so; the latter are thought by most not to have withstood the onslaught of damaging telescopic observations during the 1610s. Thinkers maintaining their allegiance to such doctrines are usually thought to have been impossibly intransigent. I wish to show that Aristotelianism in the seventeenth century was able to deal straightforwardly with the post-1610 celestial novelties. In fact, instead of looking intransigent, the Aristotelians seem, more like some ancient civilizations, able to absorb and assimilate all invaders. On 4 June 161 1 an important event occurred at the Jesuit College of La Fleche-one in which the young Rene Descartes must have participatednamely, the first memorial celebration of the death of Henry IV, the