Pardies and the Cartesian Beast-Machine

PMLA ◽  
1937 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 763-772
Author(s):  
Leonora Cohen Rosenfield
Keyword(s):  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Mechanistic View

The Jesuit father Ignace-Gaston Pardies, mathematician and physicist of some renown in his time, published in 1672 a Discours de la Connoissance des Bestes, famous then, but little known today. Amidst the mass of material on the general controversy of the souls of beasts, this work is outstanding for its brilliance, literary charm, and degree of originality. It is well worth examination, for its own merits and its bearings on the dispute in which it proved an influential contribution, and because of the curious fate to which the book was destined. For the Discourse, which went through numerous editions and caused considerable stir in the Republic of Letters was, although purporting to be a refutation of the Cartesian mechanistic view, reputed to be intended as a defense of that system. From Pardies' own day to the present age, uncertainty has existed as to how the treatise is to be classified.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Oosterhoff
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Approach To Learning ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Moment

The moment unfolded in this book unravelled in the following decades, partly because its students moved on, partly because Lefèvre took up a controversial role in the French Reformation. But his circle’s books continued to cultivate a particular approach to learning, and especially to the cultural place of mathematics, through the sixteenth century. This epilogue picks out a specialist strand of this influence in Lefèvre’s edition of Euclid, often reprinted and used in the republic of letters. A second strand is discernible in the pragmatic stance towards the utility of mathematics held by their heirs, Oronce Fine and Peter Ramus, which came to define European culture.

Experimentalists in the Republic of Letters

2003 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 89-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Otto Sibum
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Experimental Knowledge ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Structural Problems ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Academic Recognition ◽  
Electro Magnetic

ArgumentWithin the Republic of Letters the art of experiment led to immense reorientation and an extensive redrawing of the enlightened map of natural knowledge. This paper will investigate the formative period of the exact sciences from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century when the persona of the experimentalist as a scientific expert was shaped. The paper focuses on Moritz Hermann Jacobi’s experimental knowledge derived from his modeling of an electro-magnetic self-acting machine and the social and epistemological problems of its integration into traditional academic life. His struggle to achieve academic recognition and credibility for his experimental work reflects not just his individual quandary, but important structural problems of the historical development of experimental knowledge traditions and science in what has been called the “second scientific revolution.”

Louis Bourguet, John Toland, and the Republic of Letters

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 288-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Natural Scientist ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Republic ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
Theology And Philosophy ◽  
Manuscript Copy

Louis Bourguet (1678–1743) was a Huguenot natural scientist from Nîmes who, after studying in Switzerland and Italy, became professor of philosophy and mathematics in Neuchâtel and founded two learned journals. This article, based on his archive in Neuchâtel, looks first at his erudite, scientific, philosophical and religious interests as expressed in his extensive learned correspondence, which also reveals a mixture of curiosity about, and opposition, to irreligious writings, some of which he may, however, have helped to circulate. We then study a document found among his papers, consisting of a commentary written in French in the margins of a manuscript copy of the last two of John Toland’s Letters to Serena (1704). Bourguet combines criticism of Toland’s view of matter, identified with Spinozism, with a defence of Leibniz’s philosophy, presented as the only one capable of demonstrating the need for a god. This manuscript throws new light on interest in Toland’s philosophical works in the years following his death, and the posthumous continuation of his debate with Leibniz. More generally, Bourguet’s learned interests and networks underline the difficulty of classifying scholars of this period into neat categories and the complex relationship between science, theology and philosophy, and between religious orthodoxies and heterodoxies.

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