Early Modern Intellectual History

The present work explores the idea that concepts present in Nicole Oresme's work, and rooted in the medieval revival of Corpus Aristotelicum, are reflected throughout active areas of research today. Nicole Oresme's volume, titled Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum, approximately written between 1351 and 1355, showcases early mathematical applications that would presently be classified as works in computational biology and applied mathematics. Oresme uses his "doctrine of configurations" to investigate various real-world phenomena, alluding to several examples that align with recent developments in applied mathematics. In our paper, we investigate Oresme's sources, motivations, examples and models, and their correspondences with recent works in the field of mathematical modeling. We focus on two classes of applications: (1) modeling pleasure and imagination, and (2) modeling subjective perceptions such as fear, hope, sorrow, and joy.

Painted in 1576, Jacopo Bassano’s 'The Flood of the Colmeda' commemorates a deluge that swept through the small town of Feltre, in the mountains to the north of Venice, in 1564. Drawing attention to aspects of 'The Flood of the Colmeda' that evoke period speculation about the potential human causes of flooding on the Venetian mainland, a topic of increasing concern during a period of aggressive agricultural and industrial expansion in Venetian territory, this article advances an ecocritical interpretation of the painting and of Bassano’s work, in general.

In his political thought, seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Italy's premier jurist, Gian Vincenzo Gravina, adopted a Hobbesian state of nature, a Hobbesian social contract, and a Hobbesian idea of law as collective will; he fused these ideas with the Roman legal tradition, a tradition that he trained in and later ordered when he wrote his masterpiece, the Three Books on the Origins of the Civil Law. But Gravina was more than a Roman Hobbesian. While he held a Hobbesian view of political legitimacy, he also held an anti-Hobbesian view of human life's true ends. Gravina set out to restore these true endsreason, virtue, and internal tranquilityand to do that he turned to Plato. In synthesizing Hobbes's legal innovations with prior understandings of law, Gravina demonstrates just how far those innovations reached in eighteenth-century Europe.

This paper explores an early modern application of the Stoic principle of 'similitudo temporum' to the study of history in the work of Georg Calixtus (1586-1656). In so doing, it highlights the tension between historiography and antiquarianism, suggesting that the collection of remains - whether material or immaterial - was understood in at least some early modern circles as an integral part of the historiographic process. It also emphasises the evolving meaning of 'history' during this time, drawing attention to the perceived novelty of such antiquarian approaches to the study of the past, and briefly exploring subtle differences between the example at hand and the work and activities of better-known figures such as Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637) and Justus Lipsius (1547-1606). As such, this paper makes a contribution to our evolving understanding of early modern scholarship, and draws attention to the variegated approaches of its practitioners to contemporary issues.

This paper explores the idea of virtual participation through the historical example of the republic of letters in early modern Europe (circa 1500-1800). By reflecting on the construction of virtuality in a historical context, and more specifically in a pre-digital environment, this paper calls attention to accusations of technological determinism in ongoing research concerning the affordances of the Internet and related media of communication. It argues that 'the virtual' is not synonymous with 'the digital' and suggests that, in order to articulate what is novel about modern technologies, we must first understand the social interactions underpinning the relationships which are facilitated through those technologies. By analysing the construction of virtuality in a pre-digital environment, this paper thus offers a baseline from which scholars might consider what is different about the modes of interaction and communication being engaged in via modern media.

NB: A revised version of this paper appears as a chapter in the volume The Long History of New Media: Technology, Historiography, and Contextualizing Newness, edited by David W. Park, Nicholas W. Jankowski, and Steve Jones (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).

This work aims to provide an adequate solution to the problem of the relation between cogito and sum in Descartes' argumentation. To do so, firstly, we tried to highlight the main defects of the solution proposed by Jaako Hintikka, in his renowned article Cogito, Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance?, released in 1962. We evaluated both the logical interpretation of cogito, ergo sum and the interpretation of ego sum as a performative utterance, either in its technical aspects or in comparison with Descartes' texts. Secondly, we offer an interpretation based on the notion of presuppositional inference, inspired by Frege, from which we try to explain in what sense the distinction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics can solve some common confusions that can be found in the literature on cogito.

Keywords: cogito, performative, logic.

The article moves from the idea of monster as a “cultural predicate” referable to a wide linguistic and symbolic repertoire proper to the overall human history. In this perspective, particular attention is paid to the variegated viewpoints on monstrosity that, from the initial teratology of “natural” sign, develops into a teratology of a specifically “social” character. Hence the indication that, from a material standpoint, shows how the transformations of feeling, thinking, and acting related to nowadays work activities, make it possible to associate certain characteristics of monstrosity – clearly not conceivable only in negative terms – to new productive subjects and cooperating singularities.

The history of studying Indian religions is as old as the history of Indology. The interest in them, or even fascination, especially with Vedic religion and Buddhism, made the research into these two traditions one of the early and main domains of Indological research. Vedic studies have remained one of the most popular fields of Indology and for many centuries the Vedic religion used to be perceived as the main culture-shaping element of the Indian civilization. Modern Indology, and I mean here contemporary classical Indology as well, re-considers and re-evaluates this view. In my paper I would like to refer shortly to the issue of how this interest in Indian religions developed and describe some contemporary directions in the research on Hindu religious traditions as well as new concepts of approaching them and evaluating their role in the process of shaping the culture of the whole subcontinent

Grotius’s attempt to find a compromise both between reason and revelation, and between free will and predestination, his philological approach to the reading of Scripture, his refusal to engage in doctrinal disputes, and his insistence on ethics as the core of Christian teaching, were increasingly important in shaping a powerful strand of thinking about the Anglican church from the Great Tew circle to post-Restoration latitudinarianism. The references to Grotius’s apologetic work which appeared in moderate Anglican writing should be understood by setting them in a broader context encompassing the settlement of Anglican Church, its religious doctrine, and its relations with civil authority. In order to recover the complexity of the political and ecclesiological context for the English translations of De veritate, I will divide the period from 1632 to 1686 into three distinct phases: the initial phase goes back to the 1630s, when the members of the Great Tew circle at Oxford facilitat...

La Vie d’Épicure de Du Rondel n’a pas la prétention des Animadversiones de Pierre Gassendi. Pourtant son ouvrage n’a pas été négligé. Pierre Bayle le cite, Deslandes l’utilise.
L’appréciation de l’épicurisme sous-jacente est conforme à la tradition du libertinage érudit après Gassendi : la personne, la vie, la morale d’Épicure ne sont pas scandaleuses, comme les ont diffamées les ennemis de sa philosophie dès l’Antiquité.  Elles sont même défendables et louables.
Mais elle est conforme aussi à ce que tous les intellectuels repoussent :
son refus d’une providence divine ;
son invention d’une déviation des atomes, serait-ce pour sauver le libre-arbitre.

Girolamo Della Volpaia (1530-1614), member of one of the most important families of instrument and clock makers based in Florence during the Renaissance, made many instruments now disseminated in public and private collections around the world. There are sundials of different kinds, nocturlabes, horary quadrants and armillary spheres, all made with great skill, both technical and artistic. He has also been one of the few makers of a specific category of instruments, the models of the orbs of the planets, or orbaria, a representation in three dimensions of the geocentric universe proposed by Ptolemy and revised by Georg Puerbach in the XV century. In the Department of physics and geology of the University of Perugia the model of the orb of Mercury made by Della Volpaia is preserved while another model for the same planet is extant in the historical collections of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. In this paper I will consider the origin of these models and the peculiar characteristics of these two instruments.

The article places The Cosmographical Glasse (1559), William Cuningham’s magnum opus, in its English and European context. The Cosmographical Glasse appeared during the early modern revolution in mathematics that turned mathematics to practical use by applying it to geography for a better conceptualisation of the globe and universe. Despite the work’s encyclopaedic scope and its author’s pioneering attempt to help readers retrieve the growing body of data that was being amassed by scholars and explorers, the article argues that this first book in English to deal with navigation in relation to astronomy and cosmography stood at a crossroads between the old and new epistemologies as geography both resorted to and confirmed traditional sources of knowledge while challenging them. Limited and flawed as it may be, The Cosmographical Glasse nevertheless added another building block in the construction of a modern sense of cosmography.

Die Notwendigkeit der Gewaltenteilung. Montesquieu und die Formen des Staates - Lecture held at the Volkshochschule Meidling, Vienna within the Programme UMP-University Meets Public, 7th December 2011. Der Vortrag wird sich mit Aspekten des Werkes von Montesquieu befassen. "Die Persischen Briefe", "Die Betrachtungen über die Ursachen der Größe der Römer und ihren Niedergangs" und "Der Geist der Gesetze" werden uns helfen, die außerordentliche Persönlichkeit von Montesquieu zu rekonstruieren.

The “direct problem” of the inverse-square law is examined, by retracing the derivations of Propositions X-XVI in Newton’s Principia. It is found that transfers of constants of proportionality are inconsistent between the propositions, leading to errors in the derived relations for multiple orbits. Proposition X has to be corrected for the relations of time period to the force law by including the area constants for conic sections. Propositions XI-XIII assume the expression 2h^2/L to be constant, that in turn implicitly assume a modified version of Kepler’s third law, while Propositions XIV-XVI apply this to multiple orbits leading to further “size” inconsistencies with the original form of Kepler’s third law. It has been shown how this relevance of “size” has been missed in the Newtonian literature, leading to a necessity of revising the existence of an exact inverse-square law.

This chapter surveys resources for approaching The Tempest – resources to assist the student or scholar in interpreting the play, and resources to aid the instructor in presenting it. I begin with an account of the various editions of Shakespeare’s text, assessing the contexts in which each would be most useful, before proceeding to an overview of resources available online. Next, this chapter details a number of lenses that might lend focus to classroom discussion or written analysis of The Tempest: social hierarchies and politics; travel, geography, and colonialism; gender, sexuality, and marriage; music and masque; and magic and education. In elaborating each of these lenses, I highlight relevant works of criticism, as well as specific late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts that will help students to explore and teachers to present the variety of early modern discourses that shaped The Tempest and were shaped by it. The chapter concludes with an annotated bibliography structured to complement the preceding discussion of critical and pedagogical approaches to the play.

This chapter discusses Javelli's concept of Christian philosophy (philosophia Christiana), a project that has been completely neglected by modern scholarship. In fact, Javelli should be credited as one of the few Renaissance thinkers who attempted to build a systematic and consistent project of Christian philosophy, encompassing all three traditional branches of practical philosophy: ethics, economics and politics. He develops this conception in three interrelated treatises entitled, respectively, Philosophia moralis Christiana, Oeconomica Christiana, and Philosophia civilis sive politica Christiana, all published together for the first time in Venice in 1540. In this chapter, I will focus in particular on the first, preliminary step of Javelli's project, that is, the 'dismantling' of classical ethics, embodied first and foremost by Plato and Aristotle. By intermingling references to the Scriptures with discussions of the works by these two thinkers, Javelli offers a point-by-point refutation of the main tenets of classical ethics, concluding that both Platonism and Aristotelianism are equally useless for the development of a genuinely Christian philosophy. In his philosophically grounded confutation of classical ethics, not only does Javelli echo arguments and motives already presented by Erasmus in his writings, but he also makes use of well-known allegations derived from fifteenth-and sixteenth-century comparationes of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. 10.1 Introduction Javelli was a very prolific writer. He composed commentaries on nearly the entirety of the Aristotelian corpus, with many works being the object of both epitomes and sets of quaestiones (Tavuzzi 1991, 109-111). Many of Javelli's commentaries All translations from Javelli's works are mine.