LA MUSICA NELLA FILOSOFIA NATURALE DEL SEICENTO IN ITALIA

Nuncius ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-47
Author(s):  
PAOLO GOZZA
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
Present Description ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Recurrent Theme

Abstract<title> SUMMARY </title>The leit-motiv of the present description of the relationship between music and natural philosophy in Italy in the seventeenth century is a recurrent theme: the mathematical or « Pythagorean » approach to music as opposed to the experimental or « Aristoxenian » approach. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this opposition, rendered pertinent by the cultural transformations that accompanied the consolidation of modern science, gained in complexity and took on original forms and meanings. The present paper, in the first instance, outlines the major traditions of classical musical thought and its medieval heritage. Secondly, it provides a survey of the more significant attempts at renewing musical theory that were carried out during the second half of the Cinquecento in the light of the Italian renaissance of mathematics of the XV and XVI centuries. It continues with an examination of the musical ideas of Galileo and offers a primary documentation of the interest displayed by representatives of the Galilean school in the science of sound during the first half of the Seicento.Finally it discusses, for the first time, the theories of sound of F. M. Grimaldi and D. Bartoli and the musical doctrines of P. Mengoli within the framework of the principal philosophical elements of Italian culture between 1660 and 1680.

Theological Foundations for Modern Science?

Dialogue ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 597-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
Theology And Science ◽  
Theological Foundations ◽  
Recent Collection ◽  
Scientific Imagination

It is often said that philosophy in the seventeenth century returned from a Christian otherworldliness to a pagan engagement, theoretically and practically, with material nature. This process is often described as one of secularization, and the splitting off of science from natural philosophy and metaphysics is a traditional figure in accounts of the emergence of the modern. At the same time, the historiographical assumption that early modern science had religious and philosophical foundations has informed such classics as E. A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1932), Gerd Buchdahl's Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (1969), and Amos Funkenstein's Theology and the Scientific Imagination (1986). A recent collection testifies to continuing interest in the theme of a positive relationship between theology and science.

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).

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.

scholarly journals Was there a Scientific Revolution?

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER HARRISON
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Western History ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Major Discipline

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Scientific Revolution came to be understood as a key period in Western history. Recently, historians have cast doubt upon this category, questioning whether the relevant institutions and practices of the seventeenth century are similar enough to modern science to warrant the label ‘scientific’. A central focus of their criticisms has been the identity of natural philosophy – the major discipline concerned with the study of nature in the early modern period – and its differences from modern science. This paper explores natural philosophy and its relation to philosophy more generally. It concludes that a significant philosophical revolution took place in the seventeenth century, and that this was important for the subsequent emergence of modern science.

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.

The 2003 Wilkins Lecture: Dr Wilkins's boy wonders

2004 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Jardine
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Technical Application ◽  
Philosophy Today

In the second half of the seventeenth century in England, a procession of great figures emerged to become the founding figures of modern science (what was then called natural philosophy). Today it is the originality of these ‘men of genius‘ that we are inclined to celebrate. Yet the most innovative aspect of the period's scientific activities was a whole series of collaborative intellectual enterprises, which were unlike any that came before them in their capacity to mobilize and organize original ideas and their technical application.

The Rise of Modern Science: When and Why?

1987 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Hooykaas
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
High Middle Ages

When did modern science arise? This is a question which has received divergent answers. Some would say that it started in the High Middle Ages (1277), or that it began with th ‘via moderna’ of the fourteenth century. More widespread is the idea that the Italian Renaissance was also the re-birth of the sciences. In general, Copernicus is then singled out as the great revolutionary, and the ‘scientific revolution’ is said to have taken place during the period from Copernicus to Newton. Others would hold that the scientific revolution started in the seventeenth century and that it covered the period from Galileo to Newton. Sometimes a second scientific revolution is said to have occurred in the first quarter of the twentieth century (Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, etc.), a revolution which should be considered as great as the first one.

“Such Masculine Strokes”: Aphra Behn as Translator ofA Discovery of New Worlds

1996 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Goodfellow
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Aphra Behn ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Female Audience ◽  
The Relationship

Aphra Behn (1640–89) stands simultaneously at the center and on the edge of Restoration literature. As one of its most prolific writers, her success as a playwright was rivaled only by Dryden; however, as a woman, she defied and challenged contemporary ideas about sex, gender, and authorship. Behn was remarkably aware of the ambiguity of her position; a widow, a writer, and a professional, she inhabited and personified the grey areas of seventeenth-century gender roles. For these reasons, her work provides an interesting window through which to view the relationship between gender and literature in the late seventeenth century.The subject of several book-length studies and many more articles, Behn has experienced a renaissance in the academic community during the last ten to fifteen years and has been installed in the seventeenth-century literary canon. Two related aspects of her career however have been overlooked. The first is her interest in natural philosophy, including her criticism of philosophers for not sharing their knowledge. The second aspect is her work as a translator, especially as a translator of scientific texts. Perhaps the enduring perception of translation as an essentially derivative activity has led scholars to dismiss Behn's translations as uninteresting or unoriginal. In so far as natural philosophy was a “masculine” discipline, however, Behn's translations demonstrated her ability to participate in and translate between elite natural philosophy, often written in Latin (the most “masculine” language), and a general or female audience.

Reductionist Medicine and Its Cultural Authority

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph E. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Holistic Approaches ◽  
The World ◽  
General Explanation

This chapter considers why, despite important reasons to adopt more integrative approaches, medicine continue on a reductionist course. Davis frames a general explanation by considering the powerful appeal of two enduring legacies. First are the implications of seventeenth-century natural philosophy for the commitments of modern science and medicine. Second are the nineteenth-century changes that joined medicine with the physical and life sciences and gave birth to a particular constellation of ideal-types—the “biomedical model”—that have structured thinking about disease and treatment ever since. As Davis shows, the problem for integrative, holistic approaches arises from these two legacies together. As interwoven with central contemporary values, these legacies have given reductionist medicine a distinct cultural authority: the authority to “name the world.”

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