1. Aristotle's quartet: the elements in antiquity

2004 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Philip Ball
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Western World ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Dark Ages ◽  
Modern Chemistry

‘Aristotle's quartet: the elements in antiquity’ outlines how the study of elements progressed from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century. The Aristotelian system of elements claimed that there were four types of matter — earth, wind, fire, and water. After the Dark Ages the medieval Western world held classical science in reverent awe, and differing views were treated as heretical. However, in this system metals were treated as ‘earth’. Alchemy provided a means of investigating metals, concentrating on turning metal into gold. By the end of the seventeenth century Aristotle's ideas were losing traction, and the work of Robert Boyle and John Dalton changed alchemy into chymistry, then into modern chemistry.

The Curious Eye

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Webster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Johannes Kepler ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Moment

The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? Today, in our everyday lives we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, The Curious Eye explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but rather an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.

Philosophy

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-68
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Contents

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.

XXI Jewish Knowledge of the Samaritan Alphabet in the Middle Ages

1913 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 613-626 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Gaster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western World ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Jews have never practically lost sight of the Samaritans, unlike the Christians, who for at least a thousand years had entirely forgotten their existence, as no writer or pilgrim to the Holy Land speaks of them with the solitary exception of Mandeville. It was therefore a great surprise to the Western world when at the beginning of the seventeenth century the darkness began to be lifted, and through Scaliger, Huntingdon, and Della Valle for the first time authentic news about the Samaritans, their language, and their Bible began to reach Europe.

The Analytic Ideal of Chemical Elements: Robert Boyle and the French Didactic Tradition of Chemistry

2001 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mi Gyung Kim
Keyword(s):  
Chemical Elements ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Modern Chemistry ◽  
Privileged Status

ArgumentHistorians have accorded a privileged status to the analytic ideal of elements as a distinctive marker of “modern” chemistry. Boyle’s and Lavoisier’s have been used to characterize their modernity, which has in turn justified their status as the founding fathers of modern chemistry. It has been difficult, however, to establish a viable connection between these two fathers or the genealogy of their definitions. I argue in this paper that French didactic tradition gave rise to the definition Boyle stated in the Sceptical Chymist, or the analytic/philosophical ideal of elements. He did not endorse the definition he gave, but criticized its lack of analytic rigor and philosophical sophistication. His critique served as a negative heuristic, leading to Nicolas Lemery’s analytic ideal of “chemical principles” as distinct from “natural principles.” Lemery’s definition survived in French didactic tradition, as is evidenced in Macquer’s and Guyton’s textbooks which provided direct precedents for Lavoisier’s analytic ideal of “elements or principles.”

Sports and Sexuality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik N. Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Western World ◽  
Sexual Expression ◽  
Black Athlete ◽  
Tennis Players ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jack Johnson ◽  
Headline News ◽  
Heterosexual Behavior

This chapter explores the intersection between athletic practices and sexual expression, primarily in the Western world, beginning with the same-sex eroticism of gymnasia in ancient Greece and the charged atmosphere of gladiatorial contests in Rome. After brief mentions of jousting and the Renaissance celebration of chiseled torsos, the chapter focuses on sports’ nineteenth-century reemergence as a chaste antidote to sexual desire, particularly in the movement known as “muscular Christianity.” Already by the early 1900s, however, athletes had begun to cultivate highly sexualized images. The heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson, in particular, epitomized white fears of the athletically indomitable and sexually insatiable black athlete. Even as heterosexual behavior in sports became headline news in the twentieth century, homosexuality remained hidden in the shadows until the first female tennis players began coming out in the 1980s. The chapter concludes with the rise of the athlete as sex symbol over the past three decades.

Richard Baxter as Philosophical Theologian

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Sytsma
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Rene Descartes ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Pierre Gassendi ◽  
The Way

This chapter argues for Baxter’s importance as a theologian engaged with philosophy. Although Baxter is largely known today as a practical theologian, he also excelled in knowledge of the scholastics and was known in the seventeenth century also for his scholastic theology. He followed philosophical trends closely, was connected with many people involved in mechanical philosophy, and responded directly to the ideas of René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, Thomas Hobbes, and Benedict de Spinoza. As a leading Puritan and nonconformist, his views are especially relevant to the question of the relation of the Puritan tradition to the beginnings of modern science and philosophy. The chapter introduces the way in which “mechanical philosophy” will be used, and concludes with a brief synopsis of the argument of the book.

Robert Boyle and Seventeenth Century Chemistry

1959 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 609
Author(s):  
Richard S. Westfall ◽  
Marie Boas
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Robert Boyle

scholarly journals The Saline Chymistry of Color in Seventeenth-Century English Natural History

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4-6) ◽  
pp. 562-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Color Changes ◽  
Natural Philosophers

Before Newton’s seminal work on the spectrum, seventeenth-century English natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Nehemiah Grew and Robert Plot attributed the phenomenon of color in the natural world to salts and saline chymistry. They rejected Aristotelian ideas that color was related to the object’s hot and cold qualities, positing instead that saline principles governed color and color changes in flora, fauna and minerals. In our study, we also characterize to what extent chymistry was a basic analytical tool for seventeenth-century English natural historians.


The Significance of "Chymical Atomism"

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 248-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Newman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Common Property ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Matter Theory ◽  
The Common ◽  
Historical Treatment ◽  
The Middle Ages

AbstractThe historical treatment of atomism and the mechanical philosophy largely neglects what I call "chymical atomism," namely a type of pre-Daltonian corpuscular matter theory that postulated particles of matter which were operationally indivisible. From the Middle Ages onwards, alchemists influenced by Aristotle's Meteorology, De caelo, and De generatione et corruptione argued for the existence of robust corpuscles of matter that resisted analysis by laboratory means. As I argue in the present paper, this alchemical tradition entered the works of Daniel Sennert and Robert Boyle, and became the common property of seventeenth-century chymists. Through Boyle, G.E. Stahl, and other chymists, the operational atomism of the alchemists was even transmitted to Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, where it became the basis of his claim that elements are simply "the final limit that analysis reaches."

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