Christoph Lüthy

Dmitri Levitin's 966-page The Kingdom of Darkness is divided into three parts. In part I, the major theses of the book are presented, whereas parts II and III deal with two key figures, Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton. The present article is a review of part I of Levitin's tome. In keeping with its title, “Giving up Philosophy. The Transformation of a System of Knowledge,” Levitin there argues that by the end of the seventeenth century, the European mind had emancipated itself from the 'enterprise of philosophy,' which had fallen into disrepute. After praising Levitin's scholarship, this article argues that he is certainly correct with respect to what was at the time decried as 'the sterile teaching of the Schools,' and partly also with regard to the growing distrust of metaphysics, Still, philosophy as such neither was nor could be abolished, one principal reason being that there was not yet such a thing as 'science' to take over from it, nor had the figure of the 'intellectual' been born. In fact, the eighteenth century, the siècle des lumières, presented itself very much as a philosophical age.

We are all used to drawing straight lines to represent time, and above them, we plot historical events or physical or economic data. What to us is a self-evident convention, is however of an astonishingly recent date: it emerged only in the second half of the eighteenth century. To us, this late date seems paradoxical and cries out for an explanation. How else did earlier periods measure change, if not as a function of time? it will be argued that since Antiquity, time was taken to measure change, and change to occur in space. ‘Our’ idea of representing time as an independent dimension would have seemed aberrant. But then, a second issue arises. Did not medieval natural philosophers employ timelines, Oresme’s diagram of the mean speed theorem being the most famous case? However, as will be shown, our interpretation of his diagram is probably wrong. This insight, in turn, takes care of a third paradox, namely Galileo’s initial inability to represent the law of free fall correctly. This article will document that the timeline first emerged in the late sixteenth century in works on chronology, made its first appearance in physics in Galileo’s diagrams, and had its general breakthrough in the eighteenth century.

This book explores the dynamics of the commentary and textbook traditions in Aristotelian natural philosophy under the headings of doctrine, method, and scientific and social status. It enquires what the evolution of the Aristotelian commentary tradition can tell us about the character of natural philosophy as a pedagogical tool, as a scientific enterprise, and as a background to modern scientific thought. In a unique attempt to cut old-fashioned historiographic divisions, it brings together scholars of ancient, medieval, Renaissance and seventeenth-century philosophy. The book covers a remarkably broad range of topics: it starts with the first Greek commentators and ends with Leibniz.

Recent scholarship, focusing on the rapid decline of microscopy after the late 1680's, has shown that the limitations of microscopy and the ambivalent meaning of its findings led to a wide-spread sense of frustration with the new instrument. The present article tries to connect this fall from favor with the microscope's equally surprising but hitherto little noticed late rise to prominence. The crucial point is that when the microscope, more than a decade after the telescope, finally managed to arouse the interest of natural philosophers, it did so as a corpuscularian tool, and as such it came to share the difficult fate of seventeenth-century corpuscularianism. The essay ends with the claim that the fall of microscopy was not only due to the failure of microscopy to corroborate corpuscularianism, but also to the changing definition of natural philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and to the separation of the domains of living matter from a physica whose recent mathematical framework excluded the organic world

The Philosophiae naturalis adversus Aristotelem libri XII of 1621 is the first textbook in natural philosophy to combine anti-Aristotelian arguments with explicit corpuscularianism. While its uniqueness resides in the pioneering role it played in the history of the neo-atomist movement, its fateful attraction lies in the almost complete anonymity of its author. No other novator in the history of early modern thought has been as elusive as the man known as Basso, Basson, Bassus, or Bassone. This essay consists of two parts. The first part places the Philosophia naturalis within its time and summarizes its main theories, emphasizing the larger themes and the tensions found between its conflicting accounts of causality. Special attention is drawn to Basson's dual approach to atomism, namely physical and theological, which are not complementary, but contradictory. The fortuna of Basson from his own age down to his current status in the history of science is examined next. In combination with his methodological heterogeneity, Basson's anonymity are found to have led to disparate assessments of his aims. In the current literature, Basson figures as a Neoplatonist, a pre-Cartesian occasionalist, the earliest molecular chemist, a Renaissance studioso, a Stoic philosopher and a Calvinist zealot. The second part of this essay tries to improve this situation. Recently discovered documents show that Basson, after a Jesuit education in the 1590's and subsequent medical studies, became a Protestant. He spent the years 1611 to 1625, to which our documents relate, at the smallest of French Huguenot academies in the mountain town of Die where he taught at the local Collège. An analysis of Die's difficult historical circumstances, of its little academy and its official natural philosophy, and finally of Basson's own uneasy sojourn in the Dauphiné elucidates several aspects of the Philosophia, notably the theological motifs in Basson's atomism, the outdatedness of his astronomical and optical expertise, the argumentative reliance on late scholasticism, its "eloquent" style, and the timing of the publication. Yet it is undeniable that the context cannot account for the Philosophia itself, whose relation to Basson's circumstances remains perplexing. The author's conflict with the Genevan censors demonstrates that an explanation of his views in terms of Calvinist theology alone cannot explain the contents of his book. Our findings point towards the variegated nature of the forces behind the neo-atomism of the early modern period, and they force us to reconsider the coherence of the movement itself and the motifs of its proponents.

This article opens with a distinction between David Hockney's strong and weak theses. According to the strong thesis, in the period 1430-1860, optical tools were used in the production of paintings; according to the weak thesis, mirrors and lenses merely inspired their naturalistic look. It will be argued that while for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there is little evidence in favor of the strong thesis, the case is different for the seventeenth century, for which the use of optical instruments by painters is a documented fact. In this article, an early case is examined. The extant preparatory drawings of Gaspare Vanvitelli suggest that this cityscape painter relied on a camera obscura. But even here, the strong thesis must be tempered. The fact that several stages of artistic transformation separate the camera obscura projection from the finished painting undermines Hockney's analogy between optically assisted painting and 'naturalistic' photography