Early Science and Medicine最新文献

This article examines the transformation of the “heart of the world” concept and its influence on the understanding of what causes planetary motion. It begins with Aristotle’s conception of the sphere of the fixed stars and that of commentators such as Simplicius, Averroes, and Aquinas. The focus then shifts to the notion of a mobile Sun positioned between the upper and lower planets in the geocentric tradition of Macrobius, medieval, and Renaissance thinkers. We then examine the transition to the Copernican Sun, which is both stationary in terms of its central geometric position but also perceived as the “natural” or vital center of the universe. These ideas are then traced from Copernicus and Rheticus to Kepler and Galileo. We will conclude with some considerations concerning Giordano Bruno and William Harvey, and the intriguing connection between the circulation of the blood and the Sun’s role as the heart of the world.

From 1643 onwards – almost until the ends of their lives –, the philosopher and astronomer Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) and the mathematician and astrologer Jean-Baptiste Morin (1583–1656) were engaged in a bitter polemic. Scholars in the history of early modern science consider this polemic crucial both for understanding the debate over Galileanism and Copernicanism in France, and for understanding the decline of astrology within scholarly communities. This conflict began with the publication of Gassendi’s De motu impresso a motore translato (1642) and Morin’s subsequent critique of the author’s Galileanism and Copernican stance. As the polemic evolved, it came to include other members of Gassendi’s network, who retaliated with criticism of Morin’s astrological practices – a process that culminated in what Robert Alan Hatch interpreted in 2017 as a significant moment in the exclusion of astrology from French academic discourse. In this paper, I present evidence that two of the texts in this polemical series, the Anatomia ridiculi muris (1651) and the Favilla ridiculi muris (1653), which have traditionally been attributed to Gassendi’s pupil François Bernier (1620–1688), were in fact authored by Gassendi himself. This re-attribution casts Gassendi’s influence on the decline of astrology in early modern France in a different light, while also offering a deeper insight into his intellectual biography and into the composition of his Opera omnia.

According to the standard view, Borelli was a strict mechanist who sought to explain organic processes by resorting to invisible mechanisms. This paper aims to show that his outlook on living organisms as contained in De motu animalium was far more nuanced than historians have maintained. Borelli resorted to vis motiva as the source of activity of corpuscles, a notion that was at odds with strict mechanism. He identified motive force with spirits, namely with self-moving particles of matter. Borelli combined anatomy and mechanism and integrated the latter with chemical experiments and analogies. Like most late–seventeenth century physiologists, Borelli resorted to fermentation to account for several physiological processes such as digestion, generation, and muscular motion. He distinguished two kinds of fermentative processes: a slow one, as in the case of digestion, and a quick one, as in the case of the presumed effervescence of the blood which he maintained was the cause of muscular movement.

Luca Pacioli (ca. 1447–1517) is widely considered a central figure in the Italian Renaissance, particularly in the history of practical mathematics. The perspectival representations of geometrical bodies that Leonardo da Vinci drew for Pacioli’s Compendium de divina proportione are, in turn, often singled out to illustrate the relationships between the visual arts and mathematics in the late fifteenth century. Yet despite increasing scholarly attention, the philosophical framework of Pacioli’s works deserves to be further explored. This paper discusses how Pacioli ably developed his arguments on regular geometrical bodies by relying on a predominantly Aristotelian philosophical framework. In this way, Pacioli established correlations among the quantitative, material, and formal properties of regular geometrical bodies, concluding with the visualisation of their (geometrically defined) form at the level of the intellect.