The Body of Light in Renaissance England

This chapter engages with the first Anglophone attestations of the term “subtle body.” It appears first in the contentious correspondence between Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes between whom there was some disagreement over who plagiarized the idea from whom. Most of the chapter is taken up with the Cambridge Platonists who came in their wake, who formulated complex philosophical and mythological views of the Neoplatonic vehicles of the soul, now under the English name “subtle body.” It ends with Lady Anne Conway, who fuses the Platonism of the Cambridge group with Kabbalah to create a new form of spiritual monism. This chapter is significantly about how the subtle body concept was employed by Renaissance Platonists arguing against the reductive materialism of Cartesian mechanical philosophy.

Applying mechanical philosophy to web science: The case of social machines

Social machines are a prominent focus of attention for those who work in the field of Web and Internet science. Although a number of online systems have been described as social machines (examples include the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Reddit, and Galaxy Zoo), there is, as yet, little consensus as to the precise meaning of the term “social machine.” This presents a problem for the scientific study of social machines, especially when it comes to the provision of a theoretical framework that directs, informs, and explicates the scientific and engineering activities of the social machine community. The present paper outlines an approach to understanding social machines that draws on recent work in the philosophy of science, especially work in so-called mechanical philosophy. This is what might be called a mechanistic view of social machines. According to this view, social machines are systems whose phenomena (i.e., events, states, and processes) are explained via an appeal to (online) socio-technical mechanisms. We show how this account is able to accommodate a number of existing attempts to define the social machine concept, thereby yielding an important opportunity for theoretical integration.

Animism, Aristotelianism, and the Legacy of William Gilbert’s De Magnete

William Gilbert’s 1600 book, De magnete, greatly influenced early modern natural philosophy. The book describes an impressive array of physical experiments, but it also advances a metaphysical view at odds with the soon to emerge mechanical philosophy. That view was animism. I distinguish two kinds of animism – Aristotelian and Platonic – and argue that Gilbert was an Aristotelian animist. Taking Robert Boyle as an example, I then show that early modern arguments against animism were often effective only against Platonic animism. In fact, unacknowledged traces of Aristotelian animism can be found in Boyle’s mechanical account of nature. This was Gilbert’s legacy.

What Did Hooke Want from the Microscope? Magnification, Matter Theory and Mechanism

This article discusses Hooke’s microscopy in the context of the nature of his explanations of natural phenomena. It illustrates that while Hooke’s particular conception of microscopy certainly cohered with his general framework of mechanical philosophy, he thought of his microscope as an artisanal tool that could help him examine unknown natural machinery. It seems, however, that he never used magnifying lenses with the hope of confirming mechanism by glimpsing fundamental particles. Indeed, through a consideration of sources spanning from his 1665 Micrographia to a lecture delivered in the 1690s, it seems Hooke did not believe such particles existed and thought microscopic and macroscopic bodies arose through the same natural processes, though could have very different properties from one another.

The Reformation of Common Learning

Howard Hotson’s previous contribution to this series, Commonplace Learning, explored how a fragmented political and confessional landscape turned the northwestern corner of the Holy Roman Empire into the pedagogical laboratory of post-Reformation Protestant Europe. This sequel traces the further evolution of that tradition after that region’s leading educational institutions were destroyed by the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) and their students and teachers scattered in all directions. Transplanted to the Dutch Republic, the post-Ramist tradition provided ideas, values, and methods which helped to formulate the mechanical philosophy of Descartes and institutionalize it within a network of thriving universities. Within the international diaspora of Protestant intellectuals documented in the archive of Samuel Hartlib, post-Ramist encyclopaedism provided much of the framework for the pansophic programme of Comenius, which assisted the initial spread of Baconianism and related aspirations both in England and abroad. In post-war central Europe, another branch of the tradition helped inspire Leibniz’s life-long vision of a revised combinatorial encyclopaedia as the centrepiece of a wide-ranging reform programme. But as the underlying political, confessional, educational, and intellectual context shifted after 1648, the ancient conception of the encyclopaedia as a cycle of disciplines to be mastered by every scholar exploded into a potentially infinite number of discrete topics organized alphabetically within a mere work of reference. This book weaves together many new lines of inquiry against a huge geographical and thematic canvas to contribute fresh perspectives on the fraught middle years of the seventeenth century in particular and the shape of modern knowledge more generally.