scholarly journals Lives and Afterlives of the Lithophylacii Britannici ichnographia (1699), the First Illustrated Field Guide to English Fossils

Nuncius ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 505-536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos ◽  
Edwin D. Rose
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Field Guide ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract The Lithophylacii Britannicii ichnographia [British figured stones] (1699) by Edward Lhwyd, the second keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, was the first illustrated field guide to English fossils. We analyse this book’s physical creation – the collection of specimens, their engravings and their use and reuse in eighteenth-century editions and collections that were in the transition to binomial taxonomy. With particular concentration on the Lithophylacii’s illustrations of fossils, this paper will first analyse how the specimens were collected. We will then examine the use of these specimens and subsequent editions of Lhwyd’s book, with a focus upon how the relationship between them was drawn on by collectors such as Sir Hans Sloane and Daniel Solander from 1680 to 1760. Finally, we will demonstrate how Ashmolean Keeper William Huddesford repurposed the illustrations for Lhwyd’s book for his eighteenth-century edition of the field guide, incorporating new classificatory schemes. Our analysis will give insight into how a late seventeenth-century book of natural philosophy was used and repurposed by natural historians and collectors before and during the development of Linnaean taxonomy.

Music and the Origins of Ancient Science

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Pesic
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Arithmetic Geometry ◽  
Web Browsers ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Crucial Element ◽  
Ancient Science

Music entered deeply into the making of modern science because it was a crucial element of ancient natural philosophy, through which it thereafter remained active well into the formation of the “new philosophy” during the seventeenth century. The Pythagorean connection between music, numbers, and the sensual world remained potent in the quadrivium, the four-fold study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music that was the centerpiece of higher education until about the eighteenth century. This chapter surveys the ongoing connection between music and its sister sciences in the quadrivium from Plato and the Pythagoreans to Nicomachus and Boethius. The mythical story of Pythagoras in the blacksmith shop arguably represents the earliest recorded experiment, in the later sense of that word. Ancient Greek distinctions between number and magnitude were crucial elements in the unfolding interaction between arithmetic, geometry, and music. Throughout the book where various sound examples are referenced, please see http://mitpress.mit.edu/musicandmodernscience (please note that the sound examples should be viewed in Chrome or Safari Web browsers).

Cultures of collecting

2021 ◽  
pp. 138-164
Author(s):  
David Pearson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Medieval Manuscripts ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Book Collecting ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Material Evidence

Studies of private libraries and their owners invariably talk about ‘book collecting’—is this the right terminology? After summarizing our broadly held understanding of the evolution of bibliophile collecting from the eighteenth century onwards, this chapter considers the extent to which similar behaviours can be detected (or not) in the seventeenth, drawing on the material evidence of bookbindings, wording in wills, and other sources. Do we find subject-based collecting, of the kind we are familiar with today, as a characteristic of early modern book owners? Some distinctions are recognized in ways in which medieval manuscripts (as opposed to printed books) were brought together at this time. The relationship between libraries and museums, and contemporary attitudes to them, is explored. The concluding argument is that ‘collecting’ is a careless word to use in the seventeenth-century context; just as we should talk about users rather than readers, we should use ‘owners’ rather than ‘collectors’ as the default term, unless there is evidence to the contrary.

‘Philosophical’ grammar in John Wilkins’s ‘Essay’

1975 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivian Salmon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Real Character ◽  
Philosophical Language ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
Century Thought ◽  
Insight Into

Recent studies of John Wilkins, author ofAn essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language(1668) have examined aspects of his life and work which illustrate the modernity of his attitudes, both as a theologian, sympathetic to the ecumenical ideals of seventeenth-century reformers like John Amos Comenius (DeMott 1955, 1958), and as an amateur scientist enthusiastically engaged in forwarding the interests of natural philosophy in his involvement with the Royal Society. His linguistic work has, accordingly, been examined for its relevance to seventeenth-century thought and for evidence of its modernity; described by a twentieth-century scientist as “impressive” and as “a prodigious piece of work” (Andrade 1936:6, 7), theEssayhas been highly praised for its classification of reality (Vickery 1953:326, 342) and for its insight into phonetics and semantics (Linsky 1966:60). It has also, incidentally, been examined for the evidence it offers on seventeenth-century pronunciation (Dobson 1968).

I PUNTI DI ZENONE: UNA PREISTORIA VICHIANA

Nuncius ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 378-425
Author(s):  
PAOLO ROSSI
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Strong Line ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
The Continuum

Abstracttitle SUMMARY /title This study considers the reasons for the radical incompatibility between atomist theses and the conclusions reached by the Council of Trent on the sacrament of the Eucharist. The texts of several seventeenth century Jesuits - Suarez, Pereira, Arriaga and Oviedo - are examined here. Present in these texts is an attempt to develop a natural philosophy alternative to the Aristotelian one, capable of retaining its distance from impious atomism, but, nonetheless, adopting certain central aspects concerning belief in discontinuity and indivisibles. A strong line of demarcation between Aristotelians and anti-Aristotelians can be traced through their differing conceptions of the continuum. Zenonism (which regards the continuum as composed of points) was defended on various occasions in the Jesuit context, and was also repressed and condemned a number of times. In the background to these problems, the atomism of Galileo is reconsidered, and the "atomism of points" described theoretically by Boscovich is examined. Even during the seventeenth century, however, mention was frequently made of a particular type of atomists who regarded atoms as without extension. Many Vico scholars regarded his profession of Zenonims (central to his De antiquissima of 1710) as a "philosophical invention of Vico". In reality, however, Vico had a Zenonist Jesuit as his teacher, and his entire discussion of "metaphysical points" is linked to a specific and very little known philosophical tradition. In the whole of Europe between the middle of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth century, Zenonist was a term in common use, and was readly comprehensible, like Scotist, or, in more recent times, Popperian.

Translating the Concept of Experiment in the Late Eighteenth Century

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-97
Author(s):  
Eirini Goudarouli ◽  
Dimitris Petakos
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Basic Concepts ◽  
Different Cultures

The Philosophical Grammar: Being a View of the Present State of Experimented Physiology, or Natural Philosophy, In Four Parts (1735) by Benjamin Martin was translated into Greek by Anthimos Gazis in 1799. According to the history of concepts, no political, social, or intellectual activity can occur without the establishment of a common vocabulary of basic concepts. By interfering in the linguistic structure, the act of translation may affect crucially the encounter of different cultures. By bringing together the history of science and the history of concepts, this article treats the transfer of the concept of experiment from the seventeenth-century British philosophical context to the eighteenth-century Greek-speaking intellectual context. The article focuses mainly on the different ways Gazis’s translation contributed to the construction of a particular conceptual framework for the appropriation of new knowledge.

ARISTOTELIANISM, DESCARTES, AND HOBBES

2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL EDWARDS
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The historiography of early modern Aristotelian philosophy and its relationship with its seventeenth-century critics, such as Hobbes and Descartes, has expanded in recent years. This article explores the dynamics of this project, focusing on a tendency to complicate and divide up the category of Aristotelianism into multiple ‘Aristotelianisms’, and the significance of this move for attempts to write a contextual history of the relationship of Hobbes and Descartes to their Aristotelian contemporaries and predecessors. In particular, it considers recent work on Cartesian and Hobbesian natural philosophy, and the ways in which historians have related the different forms of early modern Aristotelianism to the projects of the novatores.

Foundations of Religious Reform (Islah) and Cultural Revival (Nahda)

2020 ◽  
pp. 38-67
Author(s):  
Dyala Hamzah
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Islamic Reform ◽  
The Press ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the foundations of hegemonic reform and cultural revival discourses in the Arabic-speaking lands of the modern Middle East from the perspective of the most recent forays in scholarly fields such as Islamic and Ottoman studies. Teasing out periodization and geographies, it grounds the thought and practice of canonical and less canonical actors in the historical public sphere in which they operated, questioning the relationship between the Nahda and the Tanzimat, the Nahda and eighteenth-century revivalism, the Nahda and the seventeenth-century Arab-Islamic florescence, as well as the special status accorded “Islamic” reform within the Nahda. Finally, it probes the larger questions of modernity, subjectivity, and citizenship between the onset of the protectorates and the termination of the mandates, as these became encrypted within the major ideologies (pan-Islam, pan-Arabism, territorial nationalisms) and enacted through the most significant technologies mobilized by the actors (the press, the associations, the parties, and the schools).

John Birchensha and the Early Royal Society: Grand Scales and Scientific Composition

1990 ◽  
Vol 115 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leta E. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
String Vibrations ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

The concept of music as science, still a vital part of the natural philosophy of the seventeenth century, found a strong advocate in the early Royal Society, whose agenda frequently embraced musical topics. From the organization's inception in 1660 to the early eighteenth century the Society's minutes recount acoustical experiments performed at meetings and describe papers on topics ranging from string vibrations to music's medicinal powers.

Exhuming the Nahualli: Shapeshifting, Idolatry, and Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico

2021 ◽  
Vol 78 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-228
Author(s):  
Anderson Hagler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Central Valley ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
At Will

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between ritual specialists, nanahualtin or nahualistas (pl.) and nahualli or nahual (sing.), and healing practices, adding context to the social roles they fulfilled and the range of feats they performed. The cases examined here reveal that nanahualtin operated as intellectuals in their communities because of their ability to control animals, prognosticate, and heal or harm individuals at will. Some nanahualtin shapeshifted from humans to animals while others possessed animal companions. The elevated status of nanahualtin led commoners to seek their advice, which conflicted with the established orthodoxy of the Catholic Church. Because clergymen championed the sacraments as the best way to access the divine, non-orthodox rituals performed in mountains, rivers, and caves were derided as idolatrous devil worship.The 11 criminal and Mexican Inquisition cases examined here range from 1599 to 1801. Two seventeenth-century cases (1678 and 1685) and one eighteenth-century case (1701) contain Nahuatl phrases and testimonies from Chiapas and Tlaxcala, respectively. The cases from Chiapas demonstrate the use of Nahuatl as a vehicular language outside the central valley of Mexico. This article examines the gender of the animals into which ritual specialists transformed as an emergent category from trial records, which provides insight into Catholic officials’ understanding of the nahualli. Last, this study notes social divisions between rural and urban clergy regarding the power of nanahualtin and the efficacy of their magic.

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