Modern Natural Philosophy Research Articles

'Like nets or cobwebs': Kenelm Digby, Isaac Newton and the problem of rarefaction.

This article aims to bring out the problematic nature of condensation and rarefaction for early modern natural philosophers by considering two historically significant attempts to deal with it, first by Sir Kenelm Digby in his Treatise on Body (1644), and subsequently by Isaac Newton, chiefly in manuscript works associated with the Principia (1687). It is argued that Digby tried to sidestep the problem of variation in density and rarity by making it a fundamental starting point for his physics. But he also brought out the difficulties of dealing with condensation and rarefaction within the mechanical philosophy, whether that philosophy was plenist or allowed for void space. The problems became exacerbated after experiments with the air-pump achieved extreme rarefactions. It is argued that these led Newton to first consider a retiform or net-like structure of matter, before adopting the radical innovation of supposing repelling forces operating at a distance between the particles of the rarefied bodies. Eventually, Newton came to believe that extreme rarity was inexplicable 'by any other means than a repulsive Power'.

How ancient wisdom shaped the development of modern science

How ancient wisdom shaped the development of modern science VERITRACE will enhance our understanding of the role of ancient wisdom writings in the development of early modern natural philosophy by employing state-of-the-art digital techniques on a large corpus of early modern texts. The project charts the spread of this discourse from Renaissance Italy to early modern Europe and identifies watershed moments in the reception of these ancient wisdom writings.

A Stylistic Study of Natural Philosophical Considerations in Selected Qur'ānic Verses

This study undertakes a comprehensive examination of selected Qur'ānic verses, employing stylistic and semiotic analysis to uncover and explore the natural philosophical considerations inherent within them. Simultaneously, the researcher develops a significant aspect of this stylistic and philosophical study aiming to substantiate Bruce MacLennan's philosophical theory, Modern Natural Philosophy, which focuses on our/human beings' sensitivity to our environments, bodies and interior states. The study comes up with stating that the selected Qur'ānic verses require our physical and mental abilities to contemplate and establish connections between verses related to human nature and the ecological reality of our environments. The study identifies the modernization of Qur'ānic truths that are connected to our physical and mental realities and the ecological reality of our natural and constructed environments, signifying that the Holy Qur'ān epitomizes essentially continuously the reason and wisdom of the existence of human nature. Key words: Natural Philosophy, Signs, Human Nature, Ecological, Physical, and Spiritual Considerations, Qur'ānic Verses, Wisdom, Semiotics, Stylistics

What is Matter? Differential Dualism in Bergson’s Philosophy

This essay addresses, in the context of modern (17th to 20th centuries) philosophy, the mind-body problem shared by the metaphysics of the mind and the philosophy of physics through the contrast between conflicting theories about the status of matter. To do so, it (i) reconstitutes the changing conceptualization of matter during the break between classical natural philosophy and modern natural philosophy; (ii) indicates the split caused by the prioritization or abandonment of the concept of matter in modern natural philosophy; (iii) shows how, for Henri Bergson’s philosophy of matter, the mind-body problem originates from the Cartesian conception and its unfolding in other philosophies; and (iv) examines Bergson’s critical assumption of a conception of matter familiar from J. Maxwell, J. Thomson and M. Faraday. Finally, a Bergsonian distinction is proposed between two types of “extension” (l’étendue and l’extension), implying a new type of ontological dualism (“differential dualism”) that affirms the irreducibility of mind to matter and illustrates their possible synchronicity.

Pierre Gassendi: Humanism, Science, and the Birth of Modern Philosophy

Pierre Gassendi: Humanism, Science, and the Birth of Modern Philosophy

Pseudo-Paracelsus. Forgery and Early Modern Alchemy, Medicine and Natural Philosophy , by Didier Kahn and Hiro Hirai, eds.

Pseudo-Paracelsus. Forgery and Early Modern Alchemy, Medicine and Natural Philosophy , by Didier Kahn and Hiro Hirai, eds.

Introducing in China the Aristotelian Category of Quantity: From the Coimbra Commentary on the Dialectics (1606) to the Chinese Mingli tan (1636-­1639)

Second Scholasticism greatly developed the medieval theory of continuous quantity as the Aristotelian notion for thematizing spatial extension, paving the way for the idea of space as extension in early modern natural philosophy. The article analyzes the section related to the category of continuous quantity in the Coimbra commentary on the Dialectics (1606), showing that it is indebted to the novel theory of Francisco Suárez on quantity as bestowing extension to a body in a particular sense, something which had been overlooked by previous research. The scholarly debate on quantity was brought to China, and here the Chinese translation is examined of the section on quantity in the fourth volume of the Mingli Tan, published in China in 1636-­1639.

Playing with the Ancients: The Cosmology of Gilles Personne de Roberval

Abstract This contribution explores Gilles Personne de Roberval’s 1644 Aristarchi Samii de mundi systemate, partibus, & motibus eiusdem, libellus. I focus on the complex circumstances of publication, the intellectual context of the polemics of Copernicanism within the scientific community, as well as the natural philosophy of the treatise. Roberval’s strategy of publication provides a very sophisticated example of authorship in early modern natural philosophy. The strategy lies at the conflux of certain specific motivations. I contextualize these motivations by accounting for the delicate debates around the motion of the Earth in mid-seventeenth century Europe, the institutional communities of the Collège Royal and Mersenne’s circle, and the disciplinary bounds of Roberval’s professional authority. Weighing in all the elements, I argue that Roberval’s publication is an interesting intellectual game, playing with the notion of ancient authority and humanistic recovery. By this somewhat libertine attitude, Roberval takes a stance in a complicated debate around heliocentrism and the status of hypothetical cosmology. Roberval’s position is supported by his natural philosophical speculations, which I situate in the contemporary debates of the community. Roberval borrows from many philosophers, but he aims at achieving a highly systematic speculative cosmology. One of the functions of this system is to confirm Copernicanism, while maintaining a very pessimistic attitude on the prospects of precise astronomical knowledge and, among others, prognostication issues.

Aristoteles und Demokrit in der Gelehrtenrepublik

Abstract This article examines Leibniz’s correspondence of the 1660s and 1670s, focusing on the reception of antiquity. The selected letters discuss contemporary natural philosophy. The article argues that Leibniz does not simply refer affirmatively to the ancient philosophers he values (especially Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus), but positions them in the erudite communication of correspondence. In this way, the correspondence projects a synchronicity of ancient and modern natural philosophy, and even depicts a transhistorical res publica lit[t]eraria, in which Aristotle and Democritus are well present.

Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes: The Strange Tale of How the Conflict of Science and Christianity Was Written into History

Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes: The Strange Tale of How the Conflict of Science and Christianity Was Written into History

Mapping the evolution of early modern natural philosophy: corpus collection and authority acknowledgement

ABSTRACT Although natural philosophy underwent dramatic transformations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, studying its evolution as a whole remains problematic. In this paper, we present a method that integrates traditional reading and computational tools in order to distil from different resources (the four existing Dictionaries of early modern philosophers and WorldCat) a representative corpus (consisting of 2,535 titles published in Latin, French, English, and German) for mapping the evolution of natural philosophy. In particular, we focus on gathering authors and works that were (directly or indirectly) engaged with the teaching of natural philosophy in the early modern academic milieu. We offer a preliminary assessment of the relevance of our corpus by investigating one aspect of this evolution, namely the trends in the acknowledgments of authorities linked with different and competing approaches to natural philosophy (scholastic, Cartesian, and Newtonian). The results not only corroborate existing knowledge, but they also show distinctive features and differences within these trends that were not observed previously, thus illustrating the heuristic potential of our computational method for corpus collection.

Early Modern utopian islands: restoring a damaged Garden.

Interest in islands grew rapidly during the Early Modern period as many explorers, merchants, monarchs and political commentators perceived islands as earthly paradises or magical loci of extreme riches. This paper presents an alternative strand of the period's ‘islomania’, where the newly discovered islands were imagined as loci of wilderness: empty lands that human ingenuity and hard work could be ‘improved’ into a utopia. Triumphal narratives of conquering nature were based on the newfound optimism inspired by fifteenth century humanism and the tenets of Early Modern natural philosophy. However, processes of ‘improvement’ cannot be thought of as apolitical or dislocated as they are often embedded in the colonialist narratives of the time. By examining a series of imaginary ‘utopian’ islands of the Early Modern period, including Utopia, New Atlantis, The Isle of Pines and the island of Robinson Crusoe, this paper dismantles binary conceptions of Early Modern mythical islands as paradise/hell, utopia/dystopia to a more nuanced understanding of how these writers utilised and depicted ‘utopia’ to reflect political, religious and social mores of the time.

Animism, Aristotelianism, and the Legacy of William Gilbert’sDe Magnete

AbstractWilliam Gilbert’s 1600 book, De magnete, greatly influenced early modern natural philosophy. The book describes an impressive array of physical experiments, but it also advances a metaphysical view at odds with the soon to emerge mechanical philosophy. That view was animism. I distinguish two kinds of animism – Aristotelian and Platonic – and argue that Gilbert was an Aristotelian animist. Taking Robert Boyle as an example, I then show that early modern arguments against animism were often effective only against Platonic animism. In fact, unacknowledged traces of Aristotelian animism can be found in Boyle’s mechanical account of nature. This was Gilbert’s legacy.

Wind eggs and false conceptions: thinking with formless births in seventeenth-century European natural philosophy

ABSTRACT In early modern European natural philosophy and medicine, scholars encountered the problem of the “formless birth” in their studies into generation, alongside “monstrous” and “perfect” births. Such formless births included the hen’s egg, the unformed bear cub, and the human false conception – said to be shapeless lumps of moving flesh – and these types of conceptions influenced how natural philosophers, like William Harvey and Jan Baptiste van Lamzweerde, approached experiments on, or explanations of, generation. This article suggests that the history of these unformed births provides fresh insights into how early modern scholars “thought” with formlessness. That is, early modern scholars drew on a longstanding discourse of shapeless conceptions to address the mechanisms of formless generation, “true” generation, as well as to understand other unformed or interstitial creatures in nature. The article argues that this history of thinking with formless births contributes to our picture of the significant role that unnatural births, such as “monsters”, played in early modern natural philosophy.

Shakespeare’s “Monstrous State”: Divination, Typology, and the Book of Nature in Julius Caesar

Divination shapes the central political concerns of Julius Caesar in ways that scholars have not appreciated while drawing on some of the epistemological dissonance of early modern natural philosophy. Divination also contributes to a typological structure in which the fall of Julius Caesar gives rise to the Roman Empire under Octavius “Augustus” Caesar, whose peaceful rule in turn establishes the conditions in which Christianity emerges. In subjecting signs of divination to theatrical representation—to embodied movement, dialogue, and musical performance—Shakespeare transforms the cognitive dissonance of early modern natural philosophy, especially in efforts to discern the Book of Nature, into aesthetic signs that can be received and interpreted by playgoers. Shakespeare’s tragedy attempts to realize the inexpressible through performance while depending on an ambiguous system of signs in which human action and thought remain both unfathomable and unknown.

Expanding the Corpus of Early Modern Natural Philosophy

Expanding the Corpus of Early Modern Natural Philosophy

The “Physica Mosaica” of Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638)

Some early modern scholars believed that Scripture provided more certain knowledge than all secular authorities – even Aristotle – or investigating nature as such. In this paper, I analyse one such attempt to establish the most reliable knowledge of nature: the so-called Mosaic physics proposed by the Reformed encyclopaedist Johann Heinrich Alsted. Although in his early works on Physica Mosaica Alsted declares that his primary aim is proving the harmony that exists between various traditions of natural philosophy, namely between the Mosaic and the Peripatetic approaches, and despite the fact that his biblical encyclopaedia of 1625 was intended to be based on a literal reading of the Bible, he never truly abandoned the Aristotelian framework of physics. What is more, in his mature encyclopaedia of 1630, he eventually openly preferred Aristotle to other natural-philosophical traditions. I argue, therefore, that Alsted’s bold vision of Mosaic physics remained unfulfilled and should be assessed as an unsuccessful project of early modern natural philosophy.

Divide et Impera: Modeling the Relationship between Canonical and Noncanonical Authors in the Early Modern Natural Philosophy Network

This article aims to study the relationship between today’s canonical and noncanonical authors in the domain of early modern natural philosophy through the lens of social network analysis. By studying a massive corpus of letters (Electronic Enlightenment project), we examine the structural relationship between several of today’s canonical authors in natural philosophy and noncanonical women philosophers operating in the same network. We demonstrate the structure of this network and its effects on noncanonical authors. By modeling the case of women philosophers, we show that our model can be used to identify further noncanonical authors who had similar profiles.

Planting dwelling thinking. Natural history and philosophy in sixteenth-century European dried gardens

Abstract European dried gardens from the 16th century have been traditionally associated with the emergence of early modern botany and its relation to the traditional genre of pharmacopeias. This study reviews a sample of the 37 known exemplars of these bound collections and argues that the design and development of these herbaria or dried gardens (orti sicci), as they were also known, reveal a broader set of questions on nature and about the relationships of humans with the natural world than the ones with which they have been linked. Based on the evidence of a diverse corpus of dried gardens—some richly bound, others composed over recycled paper, some with copious annotations, others with a seemingly random layout and distribution of plants—, this paper argues for a comparative reading of these books as a corpus that contributed significantly to early modern natural history and philosophy.

Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO)

Previous articleNext article No AccessWebsite ReviewEarly Modern Letters Online (EMLO)Tianna Helena UchaczTianna Helena Uchacz Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 110, Number 3September 2019 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/704722 Views: 150Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref © 2019 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2020, Isis 111, no.S1S1 (Jan 2021): 1–317.https://doi.org/10.1086/713361Andrea Sangiacomo and Daan Beers Divide et Impera: Modeling the Relationship between Canonical and Noncanonical Authors in the Early Modern Natural Philosophy Network, HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 10, no.22 (Oct 2020): 365–413.https://doi.org/10.1086/710178