Letters on Natural Philosophy and New Science: Camilla Erculiani (Padua 1584) and Margherita Sarrocchi (Rome 1612)

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-80
Author(s):  
Sandra Plastina
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
New Science

Martin Folkes

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
New Science ◽  
Definition Of

In 1750, Martin Folkes became the only individual who was President of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London, and he contributed to efforts to unite both organizations. Although he failed, illness forcing him to resign both offices, this chapter outlines the book’s analysis of the ensuing disciplinary boundaries between the two organizations in the early Georgian era in the context of Folkes’s life and letters. While it is normally assumed that natural philosophy and antiquarianism are disciplines that were fast becoming disconnected in this period, this work will reconsider these assumptions. The Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries were nearly reunited for good reason. Both societies incorporated techniques and affinities from antiquarianism—natural history and landscape—and the ‘new science’—engineering principles, measurement, and empiricism. Using Folkes’s life and letters, this biography will examine the disciplinary boundaries between the humanities and sciences in early Georgian Britain and reassess the extent to which the separation of these ‘two cultures’ developed in this era. It will also consider to what extent Folkes continued the Newtonian programme in mathematics, optics, and astronomy on the Continent. In this manner, the work will refine its definition of Newtonianism and its scope in the early eighteenth century, elucidating and reclaiming the vibrant research programme that Folkes promoted in the period of English science least well understood between the age of Francis Bacon and the present.

“Our Lot is Fallen Into an Age of Wonders”: John Spencer and the Controversy Over Prodigies in the Early Restoration

1995 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Burns
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Newtonian Physics ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
New Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
Traditional Institutions ◽  
Early Restoration ◽  
Specific Challenge

England during the early Restoration is a fascinating case of the cultural fertility of counterrevolution. The problem of the reimposition of authority following the destruction and revival of such traditional institutions as monarchy, bishops, and nobility led to a variety of new expedients, rather than simply the return to old verities that one might expect from the somewhat misleading term “Restoration.” Historians such as Jonathan Scott and Richard Greaves have remarked upon the continuing challenge posed by oppositional ideologies dating back to the Revolution, republican and/or radical Protestant, in the England of the Restoration. Historians such as James Jacob, Margaret Jacob, Patrick Curry, and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, have traced the ways in which the new science and Baconian ideology participated in the effort to find new bases for authority in the still unstable England of the time following the Civil War and Interregnum. John Gascoigne, in his recent history of Cambridge University in the eighteenth century, refers to the nexus of establishment politics, rational religion, and natural philosophy that originated in the Restoration and dominated the eighteenth century in England as the “holy alliance.”This article will examine two important, and largely neglected, documents of the early Restoration, the Discourse Concerning Prodigies (1663) and the Discourse on Vulgar Prophecies (1665), both by the Anglican clergyman and scholar John Spencer. These works, produced in response to a specific challenge to the Restoration state, contributed to the creation of a Baconian scientific ideology in the 1660s, and its “holy alliance” with Latitudinarian religion. This article also examines, in turn, Spencer's political, religious, and natural-philosophical arguments. By demonstrating the connections between them it demonstrates that the “holy alliance” predated the development of Newtonian physics, and that Spencer, neither a natural philosopher nor one of the well known Latitudinarian divines, contributed to it.

Vital Nature and Vital Piety: Johann Arndt and the Evangelical Vitalism of Cotton Mather

2012 ◽  
Vol 81 (4) ◽  
pp. 852-872 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett Malcolm Grainger
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Covenant Theology ◽  
Scientific Thought ◽  
New Science ◽  
Cotton Mather ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Orthodox View

Despite a surfeit of studies recognizing Cotton Mather's support for a range of alchemical and occult practices, historians have yet to integrate these occult activities with Mather's religious and scientific thought as a whole. I argue that we can bring clarity to Mather's engagement with the occult by refracting it through his reverence for Lutheran Pietist Johann Arndt, whose writings, especiallyVier bucher vom wahren Christentum (Four Books of True Christianity), offer a key to Mather's employment of hermetic materials in his major works of natural philosophy. Through analysis ofThe Christian PhilosopherandThe Angel of Bethesda,as well as Mather's private writings, I suggest that Mather's cosmology was vitalistic in ways not previously acknowledged by historians. This view of creation as dynamic, enchanted, and marked by divine signatures—evidenced most clearly in Mather's concept of thenishmath-chajim—helped Mather reconcile the new science, Puritan covenant theology, and alchemical traditions descending from Paracelsus. By positing a divine, dynamic presence in nature, Mather retained an orthodox view of God as sovereign and transcendent while intimately engaged in a process of cosmic redemption, slowly transmuting the base matter of a fallen creation into a new heaven and new earth.

The Change in the Philosophical Situation Brought about by the Reformation: Paracelsus’s New Natural Philosophy and the “No” in Jakob Böhme’s God

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittorio Hösle
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Humoral Pathology ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Philosophical Account ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Scientific Ideas

This chapter examines the thoughts of natural philosopher Theophrastus Bombastus of Hohenheim, called Paracelsus (1493–1541), and Jakob Böhme (1575–1624). Like most of the innovative ideas of the sixteenth century, Paracelsus's philosophical-scientific ideas belong to the time of fermentation between the collapse of Scholastic science and the emergence of the new science in the seventeenth century. The polemic against traditional medicine, especially the humoral pathology that derived from books rather than from direct experience, is conducted in a churlish manner reminiscent of Luther and with bombastic self-praise. Böhme is considered first epoch-making German philosopher of the modern period. He was a cobbler who had had experienced mystical visions and wanted to provide a deeper foundation for his traditional Lutheran piety (inspired by the Bible) through a philosophical account of the development of God, nature, and redemption through Christ.

‘Charting’ a Personal and Institutional Life

2021 ◽  
pp. 333-352
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
New Science

In 1750, Folkes became president of the Society of Antiquaries, in addition to that of the Royal Society and contributed to efforts to unite both organisations. Although he failed, illness forcing him to resign both offices, chapter nine analyses the ensuing disciplinary boundaries between the two organisations in the early Georgian era. While natural philosophy and antiquarianism were disciplines that we normally assume were fast becoming disconnected in this period, our work will reconsider these assumptions. The Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries were nearly reunited for good reason. Both societies incorporated techniques and affinities from antiquarianism—natural history and landscape—and the ‘new science’—engineering principles, measurement, and empiricism. We will conclude with Folkes’s final years, the circumstances of his memorial at Westminster Abbey, and an assessment of his life and letters, particularly with regard to his relationship with Voltaire.

scholarly journals Axiomatic Natural Philosophy and the Emergence of Biology as a Science

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-422
Author(s):  
Hein van den Berg ◽  
Boris Demarest
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Special Science ◽  
Ernst Mayr ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
New Science ◽  
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling ◽  
The Mathematical Model ◽  
The Ideal

Abstract Ernst Mayr argued that the emergence of biology as a special science in the early nineteenth century was possible due to the demise of the mathematical model of science and its insistence on demonstrative knowledge. More recently, John Zammito has claimed that the rise of biology as a special science was due to a distinctive experimental, anti-metaphysical, anti-mathematical, and anti-rationalist strand of thought coming from outside of Germany. In this paper we argue that this narrative neglects the important role played by the mathematical and axiomatic model of science in the emergence of biology as a special science. We show that several major actors involved in the emergence of biology as a science in Germany were working with an axiomatic conception of science that goes back at least to Aristotle and was popular in mid-eighteenth-century German academic circles due to its endorsement by Christian Wolff. More specifically, we show that at least two major contributors to the emergence of biology in Germany—Caspar Friedrich Wolff and Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus—sought to provide a conception of the new science of life that satisfies the criteria of a traditional axiomatic ideal of science. Both C.F. Wolff and Treviranus took over strong commitments to the axiomatic model of science from major philosophers of their time, Christian Wolff and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, respectively. The ideal of biology as an axiomatic science with specific biological fundamental concepts and principles thus played a role in the emergence of biology as a special science.

scholarly journals Reforma y Contrarreforma. El debate teológico en el umbral de la nueva ciencia

2017 ◽  
pp. 117-128
Author(s):  
Alejandra Velázquez Zaragoza
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Epistemic Status ◽  
New Science ◽  
Correct Reading ◽  
Theological Debate ◽  
Moral Certainty ◽  
The One ◽  
Problem Of The Criterion

The theological debate that gave rise to the religious Reformation undertaken by Luther, extended to the epistemological problematic of the new science. The controversy between Reformers and Counter-reformers in the search for the correct reading of the Holy Scriptures -either from the sources or from the doctrine-, led to the rethinking of the problem of the criterion or norm of truth to establish the correct reading and the method of interpretation to reach the revealed truth of the sacred scriptures. The problem of the criterion not only had an impact on the religious sphere, when transferred to the field of natural philosophy, forced the impostors of the new science to take positions around its epistemic status: approximate truths (moral certainty) or absolute truths (metaphysical certainty). Here the above-mentioned panorama is exposed, to make clear the correlation between the theological and the epistemological querella that, in one of its main angles, can be stated as the opposition to authority, whether to the papal —like Luther— or to the tradition scholastic, in the manner of Galileo. In both cases it is required to go to the source: the sacred book or the one of nature.

Vernadskii, Vladimir Ivanovich (1863–1945)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall A. Poole
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Russian Scientist ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Science Philosophy ◽  
Liberal Philosophy ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Andrei Sakharov

Vladimir Vernadskii was an earth scientist with broad scientific and philosophical interests. He made important contributions to mineralogy and crystallography, distinguished himself as one of the founders of modern geochemistry, and pioneered the new science of biogeochemistry. His key concepts of ‘living matter’, the ‘biosphere’, and the ‘noosphere’ reflect his holistic search for a natural philosophy that would integrate life, including humanity and its culture, into a unified picture of earth and cosmos. Vernadskii was the first Russian scientist to appreciate the immense implications of the discovery of radioactivity. He helped mobilize his country’s efforts to acquire atomic energy, while urging full awareness (especially among scientists) of the dangers atomic power posed for mankind. Since the 1960s, his work has been an inspiration for the environmentalist movement and ecology in the Soviet Union and its successor states. Vernadskii was also an influential historian and philosopher of science. His liberal philosophy of science is an ardent defence of the principle of freedom of thought, based on a keen appreciation of the intricate connection among science, philosophy, religion, and other forms of human culture. In his broad scientific humanism, commitment to liberal democracy and faith in human perfectibility, Vernadskii has often been compared to Andrei Sakharov.

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