Mapping the evolution of early modern natural philosophy: corpus collection and authority acknowledgement

Each book its own Babel

“…The single and unified upshot of the dissertation is that semantic influence and conceptual development run parallel to broad tendencies that have been identified in the literature (Blair 2006;Sangiacomo et al 2022b). Newtonian, Cartesian and scholastic authors are traceable schools that show themselves via their semantic profiles, as we will see in Chapter 2.…”

“…Here, I introduce multilayer key-word-based networks as they have been developed in the context of the ERC-project. (Sangiacomo et al 2022c;Sangiacomo and Tanasescu 2022).…”

“…In this section, I detail the construction and final shape of the corpus used throughout this dissertation (see Sangiacomo et al 2022b for a complete overview). Firstly, I detail how the inventory was constructed from both expert bibliographical dictionaries of early modern philosophy and Worldcat.org.…”

“…A simplified story might go as follows: Cartesians argue against and eventually replace the scholastics; later, Newtonians argue against and eventually replace Cartesians. Yet, recent scholarship has also pointed out that the borders between the schools are not as rigid as was once thought (Des Chene 1996;Ducheyne 2005;Schmaltz 2008) and that they co-existed for significant periods of time (Sangiacomo et al 2022b). The degree to which they are similar or dissimilar and how they differentiate themselves from one another remains a problematic issue.…”

“…In section four, I introduce the corpus that will be studied throughout the dissertation. The full rationale and the composition of the whole corpus have been accounted for in several collective contributions (Sangiacomo et al 2021a;2021b;2022b). The corpus is made up of early modern works on natural philosophy, often textbooks or textbook-like.…”