The Colonial Science of Like and Unlike

2020 ◽  
pp. 294-321
Author(s):  
Allison Margaret Bigelow
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Mining Communities ◽  
To Come ◽  
Colonial Science

This chapter concludes the section on silver, and the book as a whole, by applying the translation/mistranslation method developed in earlier chapters to the theories of metallic generation and conversion that informed colonial amalgamation technologies. It begins by reviewing theories of likeness and attraction in classical natural philosophy and early modern European sources, wherein the combination of opposite forces like hot and cold, or male and female, enables matter to come into being or change shape. The chapter next analyzes how colonial miners and metallurgists reinterpreted the lessons of antiquity and made sameness into a source of metallic generation. European writers’ inability to translate these ideas suggests that the ideas that underpinned amalgamation technologies came from Indigenous mining communities.

Liberty of Mind

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Hutton
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
General Trend ◽  
Political Liberty ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Mary Astell ◽  
The Mind

This chapter demonstrates how early modern male and female thinkers alike were concerned not only with ethical, religious, and political liberty, but also with the liberty to philosophize, or libertas philosophandi. It is argued that while men’s interests in this latter kind of liberty tended to lie with the liberty to philosophize differently from their predecessors, women were more concerned with the liberty to philosophize at all. For them, the idea that women should be free to think was foundational. This chapter shows how some women thinkers of the period, such as Damaris Cudworth Masham (1658–1708) and Mary Astell (1666–1731), followed through on the general trend of thinking about liberty in terms of freedom of the mind, to thinking about liberty for women in wider ethical and political terms. To support this point, the chapter explores their views on education, female rationality, and moral philosophy.

A Priority and Application: Philosophy of Mathematics in the Modern Period

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Shabel
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Mathematical Reasoning ◽  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Mathematical Practice ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Pure Mathematics ◽  
Philosophical Account ◽  
Mathematical Ontology ◽  
To Come ◽  
Modern Mathematics

The state of modern mathematical practice called for a modern philosopher of mathematics to answer two interrelated questions. Given that mathematical ontology includes quantifiable empirical objects, how to explain the paradigmatic features of pure mathematical reasoning: universality, certainty, necessity. And, without giving up the special status of pure mathematical reasoning, how to explain the ability of pure mathematics to come into contact with and describe the empirically accessible natural world. The first question comes to a demand for apriority: a viable philosophical account of early modern mathematics must explain the apriority of mathematical reasoning. The second question comes to a demand for applicability: a viable philosophical account of early modern mathematics must explain the applicability of mathematical reasoning. This article begins by providing a brief account of a relevant aspect of early modern mathematical practice, in order to situate philosophers in their historical and mathematical context.

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.

Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Nature And Society

Drawing on a rich array of textual and visual primary sources-including medicine, satire, play script, dictionaries, natural philosophy, and texts on collecting wonders-this book provides a fresh perspective on monstrosity in early modern European culture. The essays explore how exceptional bodies challenged social, religious, sexual and natural structures and hierarchies in the sixteenth-, seventeenth- and early eighteenth centuries and contributed to its knowledge, virtue and emotional repertoire. Prodigious births, maternal imagination, hermaphrodites, collections of extraordinary things, powerful women, disabilities, controversial exercise, shapeshifting phenomena, and hybrids of different kinds are examined in a period before all deviances became normalized, in the sense, close and relative to a homogenous standard. The historicizing of exceptional bodies is central in the volume since it brings out the early modern culture and deepen our knowledge of its specific ways of conceptualizing singularities, rare examples, paradoxes, rules and conventions in nature and society.

Henry More and William Petty: Revisiting an Early Modern Polemic

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 244-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihnea Dobre
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Henry More ◽  
Epistolary Exchange

Abstract This paper explores an overlooked aspect of the brief but intense correspondence between William Petty and Henry More, making use of the Hartlib Papers Online. Traditionally, the brief epistolary exchange between More and Petty has been seen in the light of an opposition between Cartesian rationalism and Baconian empiricism. A look at the original manuscripts, however, shows that the opposition was not originally framed in those terms at all. This article draws attention to the actors’ original categories, and places this exchange in the evolving landscape of seventeenth-century natural philosophy.

Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. ix, 437. $27.95.

2003 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 250-251
Author(s):  
Margaret C. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
Natural Philosophers

The Marxists had it right all along, they just got tripped up by their materialism. Early modern capitalism opened vast new worlds, particularly in the arts and sciences, only the traffic went both ways. Creative agents invented new markets and pushed commerce in directions that favored enterprises immensely cosmopolitan and innovative, often solely for the sake of beauty and display. Commerce offered a context but the nobility, and not an imagined bourgeoisie, had the edge when it came to exploiting the market for objets. Paintings could be traded for property, land, and houses. Princes could sponsor natural philosophers, and the fluidity in values meant that good investors, like good practitioners of the arts and sciences, took an interest in all aspects of learning. The interrelatedness of the representational arts and natural philosophy stands as one of the central themes in this tightly integrated collection of essays. We now have a vast historiography telling us that we should no longer teach early modern science without reference to the art of the time, and vice-versa. The point is beautifully illustrated by an exhibition recently held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (spring 2002) on the art of Pieter Saenredam. Working in Utrecht in the 1630s, he used geometry to regularize and make precise the angles and corners found in the exquisite paintings he made of the city's churches. He knew as much about geometry as he did about chiaroscuro. At precisely the same moment, an hour or two away by barge, Descartes in Leiden put the final touches on his Discourse on Method (1637). In effect he explained to the world why precision and clarity of thought made possible the kind of beauty that Saenredam's paintings would come to embody.

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