Exploring Renaissance humanists’ debates on matter, life and the soul, this volume addresses the contribution of humanist culture to the evolution of early modern natural philosophy so as to shed light on the medical context of the Scientific Revolution.

This volume presents an innovative look at early modern medicine and natural philosophy as historically interrelated developments. The individual chapters chart this interrelation in a variety of contexts, from the Humanists who drew on Hippocrates, Galen, and Aristotle to answer philosophical and medical questions, to medical debates on the limits and power of mechanism, and on to eighteenth-century controversies over medical materialism and 'atheism.' The work presented here broadens our understanding of both philosophy and medicine in this period by illustrating the ways these disciplines were in deep theoretical and methodological dialogue and by demonstrating the importance of this dialogue for understanding their history. Taken together, these papers argue that to overlook the medical context of natural philosophy and the philosophical context of medicine is to overlook fundamentally important aspects of these intellectual endeavors.

Inspired by the ideas contained in the newly recovered ancient sources, Renaissance humanists questioned the traditional teachings of universities. Humanistically trained physicians, called “medical humanists,” were particularly active in the field of natural philosophy, where alternative approaches were launched and tested. Their intellectual outcome contributed to the reorientation of philosophy toward natural questions, which were to become crucial in the seventeenth century. This volume explores six medical humanists of diverse geographical and confessional origins (Leoniceno, Fernel, Schegk, Gemma, Liceti and Sennert) and their debates on matter, life and the soul. The study of these debates sheds new light on the contributions of humanist culture to the evolution of early modern natural philosophy

The close relationship between religion, medicine and natural philosophy in the post-Reformation period has been documented and explored in a body of research since the 1990s; however, the direct and continued impact of Melanchthonian natural philosophy within the individual Lutheran principalities of northern Europe in general and Scandinavia in particular still has to be fully investigated and understood. This volume provides insight into how and why medicine and natural philosophy in a 'liberal' and Melanchthonian form could continue to blossom in Scandinavia despite a growing Lutheran uniformity promoted by the State. Inspired by research emanating from the Cambridge Unit for the History of Medicine, here a number of young scholars such as Adam Mosley, Morten Fink-Jensen, Signe Nipper Nielsen and Martin Kjellgren are joined with more established scholars such as Andrew Cunningham, Jens Glebe-Møller, Terhi Kiiskinen and Ole Peter Grell to create a volume which deals with not only the major issues but also the leading personalities of the period.

This volume emphasizes the diversity and fruitfulness of early modern mechanism as a program, as a concept, as a model. Mechanistic study of the living body but also of the mind and mental processes are examined in careful historical focus, dealing with figures ranging from the first-rank (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Cudworth, Gassendi, Locke, Leibniz, Kant) to less well-known individuals (Scaliger, Martini) or prominent natural philosophers who have been neglected in recent years (Willis, Steno, etc.). The volume moves from early modern medicine and physiology to late Enlightenment and even early 19th-century psychology, always maintaining a conceptual focus. It is a contribution to a newly active field in the history and philosophy of early modern life science. It is of interest to scholars studying the history of medicine and the development of mechanistic theories.

Recovering the forgotten discipline of Natural Philosophy for the modern world This book argues for the retrieval of 'natural philosophy', a concept that faded into comparative obscurity as individual scientific disciplines became established and institutionalized. Natural philosophy was understood in the early modern period as a way of exploring the human relationship with the natural world, encompassing what would now be seen as the distinct disciplines of the natural sciences, mathematics, music, philosophy, and theology. The first part of the work represents a critical conversation with the tradition, identifying the essential characteristics of natural philosophy, particularly its emphasis on both learning about and learning from nature. After noting the factors which led to the disintegration of natural philosophy during the nineteenth century, the second part of the work sets out the reasons why natural philosophy should be retrieved, and a creative and innovative proposal for how this might be done. This draws on Karl Popper's 'Three Worlds' and Mary Midgley's notion of using multiple maps in bringing together the many aspects of the human encounter with the natural world. Such a retrieved or 're-imagined' natural philosophy is able to encourage both human attentiveness and respectfulness towards Nature, while enfolding both the desire to understand the natural world, and the need to preserve the affective, imaginative, and aesthetic aspects of the human response to nature.

This book explores René Descartes’s attempts to describe particular bodies, such as rocks, minerals, metals, plants, and animals, within the mechanistic interpretation of nature of his philosophical program. Despite his early rationalistic epistemology, Descartes’s increasing attention to collections, histories, lists of qualities, and particular bodies results in a puzzling ‘short history of all natural phenomena’ contained in the Principles of philosophy (1644). The present book outlines the role of Descartes's observations and experimentation as he aimed to construct a universal science of nature, ultimately revealing the mechanization of nature in detail, and for curious bodies such as the Bologna Stone or the sensitive herb. What results is a theoretical natural history consistent with the mechanical principles of his philosophy, ultimately shedding new light on his attempt to produce a complete philosophy of nature.

Recently the history of science in early modern Europe has been both invigorated and obscured by divisions between scholars of different schools. One school tends to claim that rigorous textual analysis provides the key to the development of science, whereas others tend to focus on the social and cultural contexts within which disciplines grew. This volume challenges such divisions, suggesting that multiple historical approaches are both legitimate and mutually complementary."--

A groundbreaking, revisionist account of the importance of the history of philosophy to intellectual change - scientific, philosophical and religious - in seventeenth-century England.

Peter Adamson explores the rich intellectual history of the Byzantine Empire and the Italian Renaissance. Peter Adamson presents an engaging and wide-ranging introduction to the thinkers and movements of two great intellectual cultures: Byzantium and the Italian Renaissance. First he traces the development of philosophy in the Eastern Christian world, from such early figures as John of Damascus in the eighth century to the late Byzantine scholars of the fifteenth century. He introduces major figures like Michael Psellos, Anna Komnene, and Gregory Palamas, and examines the philosophical significance of such cultural phenomena as iconoclasm and conceptions of gender. We discover the little-known traditions of philosophy in Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian. These chapters also explore the scientific, political, and historical literature of Byzantium. There is a close connection to the second half of the book, since thinkers of the Greek East helped to spark the humanist movement in Italy. Adamson tells the story of the rebirth of philosophy in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We encounter such famous names as Christine de Pizan, Niccolò Machiavelli, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo, but as always in this book series such major figures are read alongside contemporaries who are not so well known, including such fascinating figures as Lorenzo Valla, Girolamo Savonarola, and Bernardino Telesio. Major historical themes include the humanist engagement with ancient literature, the emergence of women humanists, the flowering of Republican government in Renaissance Italy, the continuation of Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy alongside humanism, and breakthroughs in science. All areas of philosophy, from theories of economics and aesthetics to accounts of the human mind, are featured. This is the sixth volume of Adamson's History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, taking us to the threshold of the early modern era.