Daniel Garber

Estudos sobre Marin Mersenne enfatizam freqüentemente o serviço prestado por ele à ciência européia, por ajudar na circulação das idéias, tanto pela correspondência como por suas publicações. Mas o próprio Mersenne foi uma figura importante na Revolução Científica com seu próprio programa intelectual. O propósito do artigo é discutir o papel que o contato epistolar com a Itália exerceu no seu próprio desenvolvimento intelectual. Quero discutir também que a transmissão da ciência italiana para a França feita por Mersenne, no final do anos 1620 e início dos anos 1630, precisamente no momento em que Galileu estava em dificuldades em Roma, foi crucial para a derradeira transformação da ciência e filosofia européias. Minha tese é que por causa de seus contatos com a Italia Mersenne continua, de certo modo, a tradição jesuítica das matemáticas mistas que, em virtude da condenação de Galileu em 1633, não poderia por muito tempo ser praticada na Itália, uma tradição que conduzirá a Descartes, Gassendi, e à filosofia mecânica que dominará o restante do século

In recent years philosophers of science have turned away from positivist programs for explicating scientific rationality through detailed accounts of scientific procedure and turned toward large-scale accounts of scientific change. One important motivation for this was better fit with the history of science. Paying particular attention to the large-scale theories of Lakatos and Laudan I argue that the history of science is no better accommodated by the new large-scale theories than it was by the earlier positivist philosophies of science; both are, in their different ways, parochial to our conception of rationality. I further argue that the goal of scientific methodology is not explaining the past but promoting good scientific practice, and on this the large-scale methodologies have no obvious a priori advantages over the positivist methodologies they have tried to replace.

: Marin Mersenne was central to the new mathematical approach to nature in Paris in the 1630s and 1640s. Intellectually, he was one of the most enthusiastic practitioners of that program, and published a number of influential books in those important decades. But Mersenne started his career in a rather different way. In the early 1620s, Mersenne was known in Paris primarily as a writer on religious topics, and a staunch defender of Aristotle against attacks by those who would replace him by a new philosophy. In this essay, I would like to examine Mersenne's changing attitude toward Galileo. In the early 1620s, Mersenne lists Galileo among the innovators in natural philosophy whose views should be rejected. However, by the early 1630s, less than a decade later, Mersenne has become one of Galileo's most ardent supporters. How, then, did Mersenne learn to love Galileo?

The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy offers a uniquely comprehensive and authoritative overview of early-modern philosophy written by an international team of specialists. As with previous Cambridge Histories of Philosophy the subject is treated by topic and theme, and since history does not come packaged in neat bundles, the subject is also treated with great temporal flexibility, incorporating frequent reference to medieval and Renaissance ideas. The basic structure of the volumes corresponds to the way an educated seventeenth-century European might have organised the domain of philosophy. Thus, the history of science, religious doctrine, and politics feature very prominently.

Daniel Garber - Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 400-401 Book Review Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century Antonio Clericuzio. Elements, Principles, and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000. Pp. xi + 223. Cloth, $89.00. Over the last few decades, historians of early-modern philosophy have tried to relate the main figures in the canon to contemporary developments in the sciences. Chief among these scientific developments has been the rise of the mechanical/corpuscular philosophy. On that view, everything in the physical world can be explained in terms of the size, shape, and motion of the tiny..