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Here we have two of the clearest statements of a tradition that stretches from perhaps as early as Aristotle2 to the present day:3 moral philosophy begins with Socrates.Nevertheless, this tradition should strike us as odd. In this very volume we have seen instances of moral philosophy-or at least a reasonable facsimile of it —predating Socrates. The Pythagoreans appear to be committed to something like a moral philosophy, while many of the so-called ‘natural philosophers’ appear to have moral commitments as only a quick glance at their fragments makes clear. Moreover, a number of philosophers flourishing virtually contemporaneously with Socrates would seem to have an equal claim to fathering moral philosophy. The sophists-Protagoras, Gorgias, et al-certainlyseem to have moral views that rival Socrates’, while the fragments of Democritus exhibit a moral theory.

This essay examines continuities between Franklin’s electrical science and his moralist arguments in order to propose that Franklinist natural philosophy was teleological, calling upon hypothetical purposes in nature, and that this teleology can explain its extraordinary popularity in France.

Using the career of Humphry Davy, the era’s most famous natural philosopher, I examine the Romantic construction of the scientific genius and explore, beyond it, several of the cultures in which en...

The article dissects Grosseteste’s theory of the origin of bodily motion discussed in De motu corporali et luce. The first section examines Grosseteste’s discussion of the metaphysical structure of...

The mathematical investigations of natural phenomena in the seventeenth century led to the inventions of calculus and probability. While we know the works of eminent natural philosophers and mathematicians such as Isaac Newton (1643-1727), we know little about the learned women who made important contributions in the seventeenth century. This article features Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680), whose intellectual ability and curiosity left a unique mark in the history of mathematics. While some of her family members were deeply involved in politics, Elisabeth led an independent, scholarly life, and she was a close correspondent of René Descartes (1596-1650) and Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716).

Recent studies on the functions performed by natural and mathematical sciences in Renaissance courts have shown how closely and extensively the domains of medicine, astrology and politics interacted with each other. The dedicatory letters to Cardinal and Prince-Bishop Bernardo Cles printed in works of medicine, astronomy and natural philosophy by scholars like Marco Antonio Rozoni (1524), Sebastian Münster (1527), Luca Gaurico (1531) Pietro Antonio Mattioli (1533) and Ludovico Nogarola (1536) reveal how much attention Ferdinand I’s Supreme Chancellor, a prelate and politician of unquestioned authority and power, devoted to such influential domains of natural science. In particular, they suggest that Bernardo was not unfavorable to a view of natural knowledge inspired by the anti-astrological skepticism of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. What is more, his intellectual proximity to learned physicians working in the wake of Nicolò Leoniceno’s medical humanism lends credit to the image of a patron, and a ruler, who was oriented to rely preferably on natural knowledge grounded in repeatable sensorial experience.

In early modern European natural philosophy and medicine, scholars encountered the problem of the “formless birth” in their studies into generation, alongside “monstrous” and “perfect” births. Such...

Though Robert Boyle called final causes one of the most important subjects for a natural philosopher to study, his own treatise on the subject, the Disquisition about Final Causes, has received comparatively little scholarly attention. In this paper, I explicate Boyle's complex argument against the use of teleological explanations for inanimate bodies, such as metals. The central object of this argument is a mysterious allusion to a silver plant. I claim that the silver plant is best understood as a reference to alchemical product: the Arbor Dianae, an offshoot of George Starkey's recipe for the Philosophers' Stone. Then, I show how the context of alchemy not only clarifies Boyle's argument but also places it within a wider dialectic about matter and teleology. I then contrast the parallel arguments of Boyle and John Ray on the question of whether metals have divine purposes and show that the difference is explained by Boyle's belief in the transmutation of metals.

One of the most common problems encountered in present-day research into ancient natural philosophy is the question of when the term kosmos (κόσμος) began to be used not only for order, but also for the meaning of world order. This article attempts to argue that this new interpretation of kosmos is connected with Socratic thought and asserts that the Socratic anthropological turn can only be meaningfully discussed due to changes in the field of natural philosophy. This anthropological turn is best expressed by Roman orator and philosopher Cicero in his well-known work Tusculan Disputations. The article attempts to offer an interpretation based on the belief that the collocation world order presumes a philosophical turn towards a focus on humans and their internal world experiences. For the author’s interpretation, the specific concept of koinonia (κοινωνία) as it is found first in Empedocles’ fragments and later in Plato’s philosophy is important. The article consists of three parts: the first part deals with several traditional meanings of kosmos (Homer, Hesiod, Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Pythagoreans etc.), the second part with meanings that Socratic philosophy (especially Plato, partly Xenophon) assigns to the term, and the final part attempts to argue that it is explicitly Plato who first began using kosmos with the meaning of world or world order.

The article deals with the problems of the Romantics’ attitude to Kantian criticism and dogmatic rationalism. The circumstances that actualized the methodological question of the principles of the separation of “idealism” and “realism” (in the Schellingian sense) are analysed. “Action” was considered by Romantics to be a more important moment of philosophizing than the ultimate goal of this process — conditional “knowledge”. It is proved that the fundamental difference of philosophical systems is due to the importance attached to the “absolute”. It is stated that the shift of emphasis from the object to the subject legitimized the new content of the “real”. It is concluded that romantic natural philosophy (“philosophy of life”) on the eve of the publication of Hegelian dialectics became an alternative to any philosophical dogmatism.

The history of science and mechanics is confronted by two interconnected problems: a critical accumulation and systematization of historical information about the subject of study, and the relationship between events and the laws of their development.The influence of natural philosophy in classical times that led to the development of mechanics and engineering as a science from the 5th century B.C. to the Middle-Ages was investigated in a previous article by the author. The rapid development of mechanics as a science started in the 16th and the 17th century. Machine design as an applied science was heavily relying on mechanics. Since the beginning of the 19th century, mechanics became the theoretical basis of an increasing number of applied technical disciplines directly connected with the development of industry, the elaboration of new technological processes machines, and industrial plants. A brief history of the development of the theory of machines and mechanisms is attempted here, along with the personalities and Academic Institutions that influenced Mechanisms and Machine Theory from Medieval Times to the recent past.

The Galenic account of medicine by Ibn Sīnā (d. 427AH/1037CE) was remarkably significant for natural philosophy and religious thought in the medieval Islamic world. Just as one might split philosophy in the Islamic world into eras before and after Avicenna, so one could periodise medical history into the time before and after Ibn Sīnā’s glorious al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb (Canon of Medicine). This article compares the medical theory in al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb and al-Dhahabī’s (d. 748/1348) al-Ṭibb al-Nabawī to determine if the medieval al-Ṭibb al-Nabawī genre was influenced by the post-Avicennian tradition. To assess this theoretical impact on the writing in the prophetic medicine genre, the article first analyses the introductory part of both writings, as well as the subsequent developments in al-Ṭibb al-Nabawī writings. This will form a comparative view of the medieval anatomical and philosophical positions. Given that traditional prophetic medicine is the focus of the al-Ṭibb al-Nabawī genre, the article turns to the question of medical theory, did al-Dhahabī really observe this topic? What role does medical ḥadīth play in determining how Muslims should approach classical theories of medicine? By comparing these two works, one can see that al-Dhahabī’s al-Ṭibb al-Nabawī developed in interaction with and extension of the al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb, as well as an attempt to bring forth a new form of medicine, that would integrate Ibn Sīnā’s medical theory with Prophetic ḥadīth.

This special issue eruditely demonstrates the deep interconnections between British antiquarianism, natural philosophy and medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These stimulating papers, representing the state of the field, include: analysis of classical antecedents for balneology; Sir Isaac Newton's attempts to restore the prisca sapientia and use of mathematics to reform knowledge of antiquity; editors and autograph collectors who preserved the still extant correspondence (and hence the intellectual geography and networks) of early modern antiquaries; and the re‐enactment of ancient landscapes and relics using geological theory and three‐dimensional museum exhibits. As Susan Pearce pointed out, Jeremiah Milles, in his presidential address to the Society of Antiquaries in 1781, remarked that ‘History, Science and Art may claim an equal share in the Attention and Labour of the Antiquary’.

The development of oral preaching and the genre of sermon in seventeenth-century Russia was primarily brought about by Ruthenian authors influenced by the Latin tradition, e.g., Ioannikiy Galyatovsky, Lazar Baranovych and Simeon Polotsky. These authors incorporated their general knowledge of cosmology, astronomy and astrology into their homilies, which present a valuable insight into the intellectual background of the period through the prism of cosmological elements used mostly as parts of rhetoric constructions. While the functions of the particular elements of natural philosophy varied in different authors, they shared certain concepts common to both scholastic thought and Baroque aesthetics. Despite being considerably distant from seventeenth-century science, the homilies also served educational purposes and may be perceived as a step towards the Westernisation and secularisation of Russian culture.

Readers of Plato since antiquity have generally taken Socrates’ intellectual autobiography in the Phaedo as a signal of his turn away from the study of natural philosophy. They have turned instead to characters such as Timaeus for evidence of Plato’s pursuit of physics. This article argues that Plato’s Socrates himself developed a philosophy of nature in his criticism of Anaxagoras and his subsequent philosophic pursuits. Socrates’ autobiography places the study of nature in a foundational position within the development of his philosophic method. In the Apology, Socrates further elaborated his investigation into nature through his understanding of theology. Finally, in the Phaedrus, Socrates connects the study of nature with the study of rhetoric as tools for virtue. Therefore, Plato’s Socrates does not reject or abandon physics, as has often been suggested, but rather, he incorporates it into his own philosophic project and challenges its practitioners to connect their own inquiries with human affairs.

Studying humankind’s relationship to the earth involves broad and deep questions for students as today’s educators explore changing teaching methods. This article highlights benefits of a multidisciplinary approach to environmental education, drawing upon ancient natural philosophy as a coherent conceptual resource. The Greek philosopher Plotinus is introduced to show the application of ancient natural philosophy across all fields and on all levels of knowledge under a common banner. The significance of ancient natural philosophy is its conception of overall unity. This is the key. Unity is implicit in interrelationships between parts to whole on all levels of existence. From such a perspective, all life forms and other entities in the natural world can be understood as interrelated — just as James Lovelock demonstrated in describing the homeostatic state of natural processes on earth. On a similar reasoning, the diversity in people, societies and places can be appreciated physically and sociologically as belonging to one world. Several studies are cited to explore this overlap between ancient natural philosophy and honouring the connection and dependence of humanity on the fragility of the earth’s ecosystem.

Medieval attempts to understand nocturnal emissions – involuntary bodily excretions during sleep which were identified as morally ambiguous – became extensive explorations of the unique and problem...

Fil: Madrid Casado, Carlos M. Fundación Gustavo Bueno; España. Madrid Casado, C. M. (2019). Pascal. Entre la geometría y la filosofía natural. Metatheoria, 10(1), 27-44. Blaise Pascal nace en 1623 y muere, con 39 años, en 1662. Durante su corta y trágica vida se significó como matemático, científico, polemista, apologista y filósofo. Antes de la quiebra en dos de su vida, como consecuencia de su conversión definitiva, Pascal puede ser descrito como un geómetra y un filósofo natural de primer rango. De una vida orientada a las ciencias pasó en 1654 a una vida consagrada, casi en exclusiva, a la religión. El objetivo del presente artículo es revisar y analizar críticamente, saliendo al paso de algunas interpretaciones que se han convertido en tópicas con el paso del tiempo, las contribuciones científicas del paradójico polímata francés. Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 and died, at age 39, in 1662. During his short and tragic life he was known as mathematician, physicist, inventor, polemicist, apologist and Christian philosopher. Before his Jansenist conversion Pascal can be described as a geometer and natural philosopher of the first-rate. From 1654 he devoted his life almost exclusively to religion. The aim of this paper is to review the scientific contributions of the enigmatic French polymath and to criticize some interpretations that have become topical with the passage of time.

How many scientific demonstrations can a single phenomenon have? This paper argues that, according to Aristotle's theory of scientific knowledge as laid out in the Posterior Analytics, a si...

Much has been written about Percy Bysshe Shelley’s engagement with different aspects of natural philosophy in his poetry and prose. But Shelley’s interest in plants and botany has yet to receive sustained attention. This chapter focusses on the representation of wildness in what it defines as Shelley’s botanical poetry: poems which not only have a plant as their ostensible subject, or which develop extended plant imagery, but which also engage, either explicitly or implicitly, with contemporary botanical discourses and practices. The chapter focusses, in particular, on the role of wild plants in the poems that Shelley wrote for Jane Williams, or with her in mind, during the last six months of his life, including comparatively little-known works like “The Zucca” and the so-called “Unfinished Drama.” These poems, the chapter suggests, take up and transform the tropes of contemporary botanical discourse in order to forge links between different kinds and modes of wildness, between the wildness of nature and the wildness of human emotions. The anthropomorphic analogies at their core set these poems apart, the chapter concludes, from Shelley’s more familiar writing about nature, which tends conversely to emphasize the ontological distinctness of the natural world. (Less)

In the 21st century, knowledge economy has been growing rapidly. In order to strengthen knowledge competitiveness and face the international competition of the new century, Taiwan should achieve the educational goal of lifelong learning, widely build up learning organizations, tend citizens who can learn through lives, and positively give impetus to whole people reading program. To meet the coming of learning society, knowledge management has become the key to tap the treasury of library-using education. Knowledge can be fully developed only by close sharing and intellectual interchange. Thus, it can diffuse effectively. Reading and pursuing knowledge are the motive power of working out one’s potentialities and inciting creative thinking. “Knowledge is power” is a wise saying of Francis Bacon, a British philosopher. He also stated, “Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.” This statement brings out very profound meanings. It verifies that reading can not only absorb the essence of books, but broaden one’s general knowledge. The Btitish Education Secretary, David Blunkett, said, “Turning the pages of a book is to open a window on the world. Books are the foundation on which other learning can be built.” The saying well indicates that reading is the communication between mind and mind. It is also a valuable secret of being vigorous and keeping away from loneliness.

Experiments were conceived as a way of understanding nature and exploring its properties through research: “In the beginning, natural philosophers tried to understand the world around them, trying to do that, they hit upon the great idea of contriving artificially simple situations in which the number of factors involved is reduced to a minimum; divide and conquer! Experimental science was born. But experiment is a tool, the aims remains: to understand the world.”

Girolamo Cardano makes a number of surprising, even shocking claims about the soul in his De subtilitate, one of the most widely read works of natural philosophy in the sixteenth century. When he was finally investigated by the Roman Inquisition and the Index, these claims did not go unnoticed. This study will narrow in on three passages marked as heretical by the first Holy Office censor of De subtilitate. It will consider the Inquisition’s priorities and ask about materialism, determinism, and conceptual inconsistency in Cardano’s views on the soul. The study will give special attention to the claim made by Cardano that souls can be reduced to celestial heat. In addition to De subtilitate, several of Cardano’s other works will be considered for added perspective, especially Contradicentium medicorum libri duodecim.

This chapter aims to examine Theophrastus’ relation to other thinkers, including those of his own school. However, Theophrastus’ relation to the Peripatos is very different from that with other schools or individual thinkers: in a very real sense, Theophrastus was the Peripatos. Cicero has preserved a list of Peripatetics in which the founders, Aristotle and Theophrastus, are contrasted with their successors, from Strati to Critolaus and his pupils, none of whom are said to have measured up to them. Theophrastus’ relationship to Eudemus is more interesting. He was the only Peripatetic of Theophrastus’ generation to write systematic treatises on logic and natural philosophy, and he also compiled a great History of geometry which has often been taken to have been a counterpart of Theophrastus’ Phusikon Doxai. Genuine philosophical innovations must be looked for in those areas about which both Aristotle and Theophrastus wrote pragmateiai, chiefly in logic and natural philosophy.

The emerging contemporary natural philosophy provides a common ground for the integrative view of the natural, the artificial, and the human-social knowledge and practices. Learning process is central for acquiring, maintaining, and managing knowledge, both theoretical and practical. This paper explores the relationships between the present advances in understanding of learning in the sciences of the artificial (deep learning, robotics), natural sciences (neuroscience, cognitive science, biology), and philosophy (philosophy of computing, philosophy of mind, natural philosophy). The question is, what at this stage of the development the inspiration from nature, specifically its computational models such as info-computation through morphological computing, can contribute to machine learning and artificial intelligence, and how much on the other hand models and experiments in machine learning and robotics can motivate, justify, and inform research in computational cognitive science, neurosciences, and computing nature. We propose that one contribution can be understanding of the mechanisms of &lsquo, learning to learn&rsquo, as a step towards deep learning with symbolic layer of computation/information processing in a framework linking connectionism with symbolism. As all natural systems possessing intelligence are cognitive systems, we describe the evolutionary arguments for the necessity of learning to learn for a system to reach human-level intelligence through evolution and development. The paper thus presents a contribution to the epistemology of the contemporary philosophy of nature.

Emilie Du Châtelet (b. 1706–d. 1749) was a French philosopher, author, and translator who worked primarily in natural philosophy, but also wrote on language, produced Biblical criticism, tackled questions surrounding virtue and happiness, and grappled with the nature of liberty given her understanding of the physical world and of God. She wrote and published, in her lifetime, on fire (having conducted a range of experiments on the topic at her family’s estate at Cirey), on natural philosophy more generally, and on the vis viva controversy. Much of her work was published posthumously, including work on optics, happiness, the Bible, language, and Newtonian philosophy. She was an avid translator, often developing her own original positions in her liberal changes made to texts in translation. This is especially true of her translation of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. Her translation of Newton’s Principia was the first translation into French of that work and remains the standard translation to this day. Having received training from many top mathematicians of her day, Du Châtelet’s own mathematical skills were notable, contributing to her facility in translating and discussing Newton’s work. She had a notable impact on European intellectual life during her lifetime, and in the form of several articles in the Encyclopédie, drawn often verbatim from her oeuvres. After falling largely into obscurity for the better part of two centuries, her thought has been revived across the globe, and 21st-century attention paid to this remarkable thinker has been especially robust. Her masterwork, The Foundations of Physics, addressed questions of method; metaphysics (for example, the nature of substance and body, and God’s existence and nature); and physics. She engaged especially with the works of Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff, and Newton, carving out original philosophical positions on a range of topics in natural philosophy. Her arguments for the nature and existence of God are also attuned to the contributions of Locke. In this text, as well as others, she engaged with Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan—then Secretary of the Académie Royale des Sciences—in a heated debate about vis viva, with Mairan taking the Cartesian position, and Du Châtelet arguing for the Leibnizian side. This extended exchange allowed Du Châtelet to engage with one of the most powerful men in science in mid-18th-century France, a significant feat given her exclusion from the Académie due to her gender. She collaborated or conversed with Voltaire, Francesco Algarotti, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, and Alexis-Claude Clairaut, among others, and her correspondents included Maupertuis, Algarotti, and Johann Bernoulli.

J. Baird Callicott, John Van Buren, and Keith Wayne Brown, Greek Natural Philosophy:The Presocratics and their Importance for Environmental Philosophy (San Diego: CognellaAcademic Publishing, 2017), 386 pp., $93.95 (pbk), ISBN: 978-1516528561.

Part of the Renaissance Lives series, this book is an elegant introduction to Isaac Newton, his works, and the wide field of Newtonian historiography. The first chapter draws a map of the main imag...

Given that Lucretius offers a systematic and cohesive explanation of the workings of nature, we should not expect inconsistencies in his poem. The explanation presented by Lucretius emphatically rejects any interventionist divine machinery of the cosmos, offering in its place the eminently regular dynamics of atomic configuration and dissolution, which can explain everything that pertains to natural philosophy without necessitating the activity of any divinity. The reader who understands the basics of Lucretius’ philosophy, therefore, should be surprised that theDRNbegins with an anthropomorphic description of the goddess Venus, whom the poet petitions to intervene actively in human affairs. Lucretius gradually refines this initial presentation of the goddess’ essence throughout the poem, suggesting that the Venus who inaugurates the poem must be nuanced once one has learned the basic principles of Epicurean philosophy. At the end ofDRN4, Venus is presented not as a divine being but as nothing more than the sexual drive shared by all creatures in nature (haec Venus est nobis, 4.1058). Historically scholars have been keen to ‘correct’ perceived inconsistencies such as this, either by arguing that such imperfections derive from later interpolators or by appealing to the incomplete nature of the text as we possess it. Of course, no one has suggested that Lucretius would have changed or removed the proem, so the Venus problem remains an issue. One major aim of this article is to show that the process we witness with Lucretius’ Venus is not inconsistent but programmatic, a point grasped by many with regard to Venus herself but not in respect to theDRNas a whole. In other words, this article extends this insight about Lucretius’ Venus, whose providential attributes are only provisionally attached to her at the outset of the poem and, in due course, are completely removed. In fact, I will argue that the technique of gradually redefining initial propositions—a process I will refer to as provisional argumentation—fundamentally informs Lucretius’ famous metaphor of the honeyed cup, and I will suggest that we ought to recognize this technique as a major aspect of Lucretius’ discursive method throughout theDRN.

George Henrik Werndly’s work in Malay grammar, literature, and Bible translation can be understood and explained in the context of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century natural philosophy, especially natural philosophy in the spirit of Newton. The Dutch natural philosopher Lambert ten Kate, who was deeply influenced by Isaac Newton, is one of the main channels through which the ideas of the natural philosophy tradition reached Werndly. Ten Kate had applied the methodologies of natural philosophy to linguistics in ways that inspired Werndly to follow the same approach in his grammar of Malay.

This essay is about atmosphere in Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813). Engaged with debates in natural philosophy, particularly concerning ether, Queen Mab develops an ethereal poetics that su...

Most research into history of eighteenth-century experimentation has focused on the instrument-based traditions of natural philosophers and chemists. This article explores an alternate, but related, tradition: the experiments carried out by agricultural improvers. While authors interested in improving farming were aware of natural philosophical practices, they self-consciously devised different strategies in their own forms of experimentation. Experiments in the chemical and physical sciences generally sought to find universal laws operative everywhere; agricultural experimentation often explored the particular possibilities of a given place. The cost and likely economic success of an experiment was also worked explicitly into its design.

This article deals with Martin Opitz’s didactic poem Vesuvius (1633) and tries to elucidate its fundamental poetical and epistemological issues. In his Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey (1624), Opitz establishes a set of rules for the genre of carmen heroicum that comprises both didactic poetry and narrative epics. Especially didactic resp. scientific poetry plays a decisive role in Opitz’s overall concept of poetry as it denies being fiction (‘Erdichtung’) and claims strict factuality. Thus it is not surprising that Vesuvius becomes the opening piece of the posthumous collection of Opitz’s Teutsche Poemata (1644). Vesuvius reveals itself not only as an imitation / translation of De Aetna (a didactic poem included in the Appendix Vergiliana), but also as an attempt to connect literary tradition, natural philosophy and religious knowledge: The purely scientific parts of the poem (on earthquakes and volcanism) are functioning to reveal the natural order of creation (the aspect of theodicy avant la lettre). The Vesuv-catastrophe is interpreted as God’s clear hint for mankind towards the ending of moral deprivation and civil war. The poet’s role as poeta vates resp. poeta theologus is thus to be the mediator / translator / interpreter between god and mankind, a mediation which actually takes the form of philological interpretation and commentary. The text of the 1633 print reflects this constellation by interweaving text and paratext (commentary) to a unique ensemble. With its particular textual arrangement and discoursive complexity, Vesuvius is symptomatic for premodern negotiations between natural sciences, religious knowledge, and literature.

Francisco Lopez de Villalobos (1473–1549) shared an interest in translation with fellow humanist physicians like Andres Laguna or Francois Rabelais. His Spanish rendering of Plautus’s Amphitryon was first published in 1517 (Alcala: Brocar) and then printed again as part of Los problemas de Villalobos (Zamora: Musetti, 1543). Alongside Plautus’s comedy, the reader could find in this new volume moral and political treatises, essays on natural philosophy, dialogues peppered with comic stories, autobiographical sketches, and passages that verged on the picaresque. Its tragicomic satura of serious and humorous matter, its combination of poetry, dialogue, narrative episodes and essayistic prose turns Los problemas into a fascinating text that defies categorization. This article aims to explore how this singular admixture responded to a growing demand from an increasing readership that sought to be both enlightened and amused, and how it also pointed to the development of prose fiction as a protean genre.

The following pages make a case for the important role played by Aristotle’s Metaphysics α 2 982b11–21 in Renaissance poetics and especially in that of Girolamo Fracastoro. As this passage, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics in general, have traditionally been denied a major role in the poetics of the Renaissance, I have been obliged to develop my argument in three sections. [1.] The first focuses on Thomas Aquinas’s roundbreaking reading of the quotation in psychological and epistemological terms, and on how he and his contemporaries were able to harmonize it both with the corpus Aristotelicum and with the development of a place for poetry in the system of the arts. [2.] The second section illustrates how the first humanists used Aristotle’s authority to invert the meaning of the passage, transforming it into an argument in defense of the primacy of poetry over the rest of the arts. This appropriation had two undesiderable effects: either depriving the passage of its theoretical implications or, worse, assimilating Aristotle’s words into a Platonizing vision of poetry. Only with the recovery of the Greek text of Aristotle’s Poetics in the late fifteenth century did the passage escape its new status as a commonplace in humanist defense of poetry, and was briefly again considered as a point of departure for the analysis of concepts such as fabula (fiction) and admiratio (wonder), based on philosophical, poetic, and medical premises. [3] The last section introduces Galeotto Marzio’s and Giovanni Pontano’s pioneering works on these two concepts—fabula and admiratio—, as an introduction to the subsequent synthesis done by Girolamo Fracastoro, who, from the positions held by Marzio and Pontano as well as Aquinas’s original intuition, was able to harmonize natural philosophy and poetry by means of their psychological implications. This is what I have called here the ‘medical poetics of wonder’ or, more simply, mythotherapy.

The article explores several texts written in al-Andalus between the twelfth and the early fourteenth centuries that mention Ibn al-Zarqālluh (al-Zarqālī) or the “Toledan astronomers.” These texts, contained in the works of physicians and philosophers, express scholarly reactions to the contributions of the circle of astronomers of eleventh-century Toledo, sponsored by the judge Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī. The textual evidence reveals attitudes ranging from a somewhat naïve admiration to harsh criticism. The article deals with the idealised image of the Toledan circle, due to a great extent to the significance of their work but also to external factors such as the innovative instruments and devices that these astronomers made. The texts suggest that some of the contributions of the Toledan circle were debated during the twelfth century, and that the echoes of this debate were felt in the following centuries. The discussion centred on the instrumentalism of Toledan astronomy, which was criticised by scholars who discussed the compatibility of Ptolemy’s mathematical astronomy and Aristotle’s natural philosophy. The “revolt against Ptolemy” that characterises this debate is reconsidered in the light of both the texts under study and the findings of recent research.

Between 1623 and 1640, Jesuits in China published nine Aristotelian works in the domains of logics, natural philosophy and ethics. Some forty years later, under the Qing dynasty, Ferdinand Verbiest integrated those previous works into a unified and comprehensive philosophical handbook, which he presented to the Kangxi emperor. We shall present here the philosophical background of this translation project, analyze the main features of those Aristotelian works and reflect on their degree of compatibility with Chinese culture.

Palingenesis, or regeneration from decay, is variously invoked by eighteenth- to early-nineteenth-century natural philosophy, psychology, mythography, and literature. Its currency derives from the Swiss scientist Charles Bonnet’s Palingenesie philosophique (1769), which conceives of natural history as repeated renewal after epochal catastrophes. Johann Gottfried Herder’s Uber die seelenwanderung (1782) develops an idea of “natural palingenesis” as the internal “rebirth” of selfhood within memory despite physiological decay. Pierre-Simon Ballanche’s fragmentary magnum opus Essais de palingenesie sociale (1827–29) turned to political upheaval, locating the French Revolution within a process by which expiatory suffering gives birth to a new social order. Other writers looked back to alchemical experiments, which Robert Southey reviewed in Omniana (1812) under the heading “Spectral Flowers,” and still other writers explored the palingenetic properties of resurrected bodies and ghosts. In the light of ...