Enrico Pasini

In the Aristotelian tradition, the relationship with Aristotle’s treatment of infinity has always been ambiguous for reasons connected to theology, creation, and natural philosophy. Scholastic philosophy generally rejects the existence of real infinities in the created world, while recognising potential infinities in the doctrine of the continuum, in line with Aristotle’s views on this matter. According to this view, there is no infinite power or greatness in the world. Nevertheless, notable developments emerge in which this orthodoxy is questioned, and the possibility that God could produce an actual infinity in terms of quantity, number, or intensity becomes widespread among later scholastics – such infinist approaches sometimes drawing on highly interpretative readings of Aristotle’s own thinking. Alongside these examples of internal development, the concept of the natural infinite – the presence of infinity in nature – becomes a source of tension between the new philosophy and Aristotelianism at the beginning of the modern era, even when a general framework or vocabulary of Aristotelian descent is maintained. Such a multifaceted subject could not be exhausted in a few pages, so we will only discuss two emblematic examples: a 16th-century literary celebrity and a 17th-century mathematician and philosopher. Despite being as different as possible, they are both signs of an interesting dependence on Aristotelian concepts and terminology, even while moving away from and fundamentally distorting the framework they were cast in.

In the development of early modern science, Aristotelian-scholastic natural philosophy provided crucial tools for understanding epistemology, logic, and cosmology, including key insights on quantification and mathematics, qualities, force, matter, atomism and corpuscularianism, the material continuum, and infinity. The new natural philosophy drew on philosophical instruments developed by medieval and postmedieval thinkers, often used to conceive of novelties. The technical and scientific vocabulary that condensed around Aristotelianism and its hybridizations with other traditions served as a fundamental vehicle for science in the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early phase of the Scientific Revolution. This special issue of Aristotelica integrates these two aspects by investigating the development and reconceptualization of Aristotelian notions in early modern natural philosophy and emphasizing the role of terminology and its historical shifts. Without claiming to be exhaustive, and by spotlighting a number of relevant case studies from various periods of the Renaissance and early modern natural thought, we attempt to chart some of these overlaps in concepts and vocabulary, focusing particularly on the significant time period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century.

This special issue of Aristotelica simultaneously integrates two aspects and historiographical perspectives. While investigating the development and reconceptualization of Aristotelian notions in early modern natural philosophy, this collection of papers emphasizes, in particular, the role of terminology and its historical shifts. Without claiming completeness – but in the hope of fostering new research in this combined field of studies – we examined a number of relevant case studies from different moments of the Renaissance and early modern natural thought. Through these studies, we attempted to tentatively chart some of these overlaps in concepts and vocabulary, focusing particularly on the significant time period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century.

Leibniz planned to publish the great Treatise on the Dynamica, written during his Italian journey (1689-90). In the end, however, he decided against publication, and the text was not edited until 1860 by Gerhard. The present critical edition is unique in that it brings together all of Leibniz's autograph drafts, the intermediate copies and the final copy intended for publication. It also aims to reconstitute Leibniz’s complete editorial plan, by adding to it the appendices (Miscellanea), articles published in scholarly journals and studies on various subjects of astronomy and natural philosophy, which Leibniz had planned to append to the main work.

Leibniz planned to publish the great Treatise on the Dynamica, written during his Italian journey (1689-90). In the end, however, he decided against publication, and the text was not edited until 1860 by Gerhard. The present critical edition is unique in that it brings together all of Leibniz's autograph drafts, the intermediate copies and the final copy intended for publication. It also aims to reconstitute Leibniz’s complete editorial plan, by adding to it the appendices (Miscellanea), articles published in scholarly journals and studies on various subjects of astronomy and natural philosophy, which Leibniz had planned to append to the main work.

As one of the most logically and analytically oriented among European Leibniz scholars, Heinrich Schepers is a tough candidate for topicalizing the role of history in his approach to the study of Leibniz’s philosophical contributions. Yet, when Leibniz became his main and finally unique concern, Schepers understood his task as that of an editor, plainly, and on top of that, of a historian. There is, in Schepers’ works, a role for genealogy and continuity, as well as a need to delineate, together with the theoretic scaffolding, a proper story of Leibniz’s philosophy as the unfolding of a broad project with a strategic plan. This interest in Leibniz’s history – much less, as it is easy to see, in the role of history in Leibniz’s own intellectual enterprise – brings along some relation to history and historiography. Historicity requires contextualization. But it first and foremost – as Schepers himself once wrote – requires precision. How did this precise historian, then, conceive of historiography as an understanding, organizing, and telling of history?

Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) galt schon den Zeitgenossen als Universalgenie von europäischem Rang. Tatsächlich forschte und publizierte Lambert als Mathematiker und Philosoph, und zwar vor allem zur Logik und Metaphysik, zur Erkenntnis- und Sprachtheorie, als Astronom und Physiker. Seinem Aufklärungsverständnis gemäß wirkte er nicht nur mit einer Vielzahl von Publikationen in die Wissenschaften, sondern als Popularphilosoph darüber hinaus auch in die sich ent- wickelnde Gesellschaft und den Staat der Aufklärung hinein. Dass Lambert vor dem Hintergrund dieses Selbstverständnisses als Aufklärer auch Gedichte verfasste, überrascht dabei nicht. Der Band versammelt erstmals Studien zu allen Werkteilen des Berliner Gelehrten.

The focus of this paper will be, on the one hand, on a prime example of the historical issues and practices related to the teaching of the habits involved in the art of artificial memory: on Lambert Schenckel, a didactic genius, possibly the most important teacher that the tradition of the art of memory ever saw; on Martin Sommer, his follower and betrayer; on the true history of the Gazophylacium artis memoriae. This, on the other hand, will allow us to highlight relevant aspects of the seventeenth-century reshaping of certain habits of the human mind, setting them on a background where the habit-forming practices on which the art of memory is based, and their teaching, can be seen not so much as a merely instrumental component, but rather as a relevant social phenomenon in themselves, that accompanies a seemingly contradictory transformation of individual and social needs.

The scattered and pervasive variability of material objects, being a conspicuous part of the very experience of early-modern and modern science, challenges its purely theoretic character in many ways. Problems of this kind turn out in such different scientific contexts as Galilean physics, chemistry, and physiology. Practical answers are offered on the basis of different approaches, among which, in particular, two can be singled out. One is made out by what is often called an ‘art’ of experiments. From the Renaissance until J. H. Lambert’s writings of the 1750–1760s, we can follow a train of reflections on the art of making experiments that deal precisely with the persistence of contingency in the material objects of pure science. The other is the analysis of contingency in probabilistic terms. They develop subsequently and eventually meet, as it can be seen precisely in Lambert’s work: among the first to pursue this path are Jakob Bernoulli and Leibniz.