This volume deals with corpuscular matter theory that was to emerge as the dominant model in the seventeenth century. By retracing atomist and corpuscularian ideas to a variety of mutually independent medieval and Renaissance sources in natural philosophy, medicine, alchemy, mathematics, and theology, this volume shows the debt of early modern matter theory to previous traditions and thereby explains its bewildering heterogeneity.
The book assembles nineteen carefully selected contributions by some of the most notable historians of medieval and early modern philosophy and science.
All chapters present new research results and will therefore be of interest to historians of philosophy, science, and medicine between 1150 and 1750.
Christoph Lüthy, Ph.D. (1965), Harvard, is a Fellow at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Natural Philosopy at Nijmegen University, The Netherlands. His publications deal with early modern philosophers and scientists (J.C. Scaliger, Bruno, Basson, Sennert), with theories of matter, microscopy, and scientific imagery.
John E. Murdoch is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, where he teaches ancient and medieval science and philosophy. Although he has published in medieval Latin mathematics, most of his articles deal with fourteenth-century natural philosophy.
William R. Newman is Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University. He has written numerous articles on medieval and early modern alchemy and matter theory, and his most recent book is Gehennical Fire: The Lives of Georges Starkey. An American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1994).
Preface
Introduction: Corpuscles, Atoms, particles, and Minima
Christoph Lüthy, John E. Murdoch, Williams R. Newman
Minima in Twelth-Century Medical Texts from Salerno
DanielleJacquart
Roger Bacon's Corpuscular Tendencies (and some of Grosseteste's too)
George Molland
Ramon Lull's Theory of the Continuous and Discrete
Charles Lohr
The Medieval and Renaissance Tradition of Minima Naturalia John E. Murdoch
Void Space, Mathematical realism and Francesco Patrizi da Cherso's Use of Atomistic Arguments
John Henry
Giordano Bruno's Soul-Powered Atoms: From Ancient Sources towards Modern Science
Hilary Gatti
Corpuscular Matter Theory in the Northumberland Circle
Stephen Clucas
Francis Bacon and Atomism: A Reappraisal
Silvia A. Manzo
David Gorlaeus' Atomism, or: The Marriage of Protestant Metaphysics with italian Natural Philosphy
Christoph Lüthy
Experimental Corpuscular Theory in Aristotelian Alchemy: From Geber to Sennert
William R. Newman
Sennert's Sea Change: Atoms and Causes
Emily Michael
Wine and Water: Honoré abri on Mixtures
Dennis Des Chene
Galileo's and Gassendi's Solutions to the Rota Aristotelis Paradox: A Bridge between Matter and Motion Theories
Carla Rita Palmerino
How Mechinal Was the Mechanical Philosophy? Non-Epicurean Aspects of Gassendi's Philosophy of Nature
Margaret J. Osler
Mechanical Philosophies and their Explanations
Alan Gabbey
Gassendi, Charleston and Boyle on Matter and Motion
Antonio Clericuzio
Boyle against Thinking Matter
Peter Anstey
The Uses of Mechanism: Copuscularianism in Drafts A and B of Locke's Essays Lisa Downing
Wilhelm Homberg: Chymical Corpuscularianism and Chrysopoeia in the Early Eighteenth Century
Lawrence M. Principe
Bibliography
Index of Names
List of Contributors
Readers generally interested in the history of medieval, Renaissance, and early modern philosophy, and particularly scholars interested in the history of science and medicine.