Interest Of Natural Philosophers Research Articles

Richard Waller and the Fusion of Visual and Scientific Practice in the Early Royal Society

Richard Waller, Fellow and Secretary of the Royal Society, is probably best remembered for editing Robert Hooke’s posthumously published works. Yet, Waller also created numerous drawings, paintings, and engravings for his own work and the Society’s publications. From precisely observed grasses to allegorical frontispieces, Waller’s images not only contained a diverse range of content, they are some of the most beautiful, colorful, and striking from the Society’s early years. This article argues that Waller played a distinctly important role in shaping the visual program of the Royal Society by virtue of his multiple functions as reliable administrator and translator, competent natural philosopher, and skilled image-maker. It analyzes Waller’s visual works in the context of his graphic training—in part influenced by his mother Mary More—and situates them within the context of English image-making traditions and Waller’s own natural philosophical interests. Examined as a functional whole, Waller’s career as a Fellow of the Royal Society emerges as an important case study in the fusion of visual and scientific practices in early-modern England.

Peter Anstey on Locke's Natural Philosophy


 
 
 Peter Anstey’s book John Locke on Natural Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) (henceforth JLNP), presented an interpretation of Locke’s work on science and medicine, and how this shaped his philosophical views. It was wide-ranging in scope and often impressively detailed. It raised a number of questions about Locke’s relationship to the work of J. B. van Helmont, his collaboration with Thomas Sydenham, and the overall chronology and trajectory of his natural philosophical interests. It also occasioned a number of questions about methodology in the history of philosophy and how we should construct an interpretation of a thinker like Locke from the published, manuscript and historical records available. Some of these questions were posed explicitly in a ‘Review Article’ in these pages.
 
 

Matching in Mind the Sea Beast’s Complexion. On the Pragmatics of Plutarch′s Hypomnemata and Scientific Innovation: The Case of Q. N. 19 (916 BF)

Abstract This article is devoted to Plutarch’s natural-philosophical interests and aspirations, as expressed more precisely in his collection of Quaestiones Naturales, which has been generally underestimated by scholars. In order to speculate about the actual position of this collection in the Corpus Plutarcheum, I present a case study of one particular problem, viz. Q.N. 19 (916BF). In the first part of the article, the scope is primarily confined to the traditional sources on which Plutarch relies, but I also take into account Plutarch’s conception of scientific innovation, as it is formulated in Quaestiones convivales. In the second part, I deal with the problematic degree of moral dynamics and literary stylistics, which are, in the main, absent from Quaestiones Naturales. I analyse a cluster of parallel passages (De soll. an. 978EF; De am. mult. 96F–97A; De ad. et am. 51D–53D; Alc. 23, 4–5) by way of contrast to Q.N. 19. This yields insight into Plutarch’s argumentative tactics and his process of writing and rewriting, with a particular focus on his use of ὑπομνήματα. On chronological grounds, I argue that at a certain point Plutarch bears the hypomnematic material of Q.N. 19 in his topical mind, but also that there are certain indications that Q.N. 19 itself is based on other ὑπομνήματα, which in turn provides new material for speculating about the true nature of Quaestiones Naturales as a “collection of notes” and about what the actual range of this label might be.

Natural philosophizing inside the late seventeenth-century Tuscan court

The Accademia del Cimento in seventeenth-century Florence has traditionally been seen as the first European organization to employ an experimental programme, thus becoming a major participant in the so-called ‘birth of modern experimental science’. Such traditional accounts have also detailed the cultural, political and religious environment of the period that contributed to the Accademia's use of a supposedly atheoretical experimental method. However, despite the merits of such cultural histories, these stories do not portray the full details behind the Accademia's intellectual workings – how knowledge claims were constructed, interpreted and presented by the academicians according to their natural philosophical concerns. It is argued here that such an analysis will provide a more accurate account of the Accademia's activities than existing stories about the birth of an experimental programme or method. By looking past the experimental rhetoric produced by the academicians in their only publication, Saggi di naturali esperienze, we begin to see at play one of the major issues which made up the Accademia's knowledge-making process: the natural philosophical interests of this institution's participants, particularly Borelli, Viviani, Rinaldini and Marsili. Those interests are represented in the Accademia's experiments, including their work concerned with air pressure and the void.