Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools

Dear, Peter

doi:10.7591/9781501734007

Cited by 120 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…It was not until the 17th century, with the emergence of mechanist philosophies in the works of René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and others, that a subsequent transformation of the reason/passion dualism appeared (Dear, 1988;Gaukroger, 1995;Schneewind, 1998). Descartes' theory of the passions is in effect a precursor of Ekman's theory (Descartes, 1649;Meyer, 1991).…”

Section: Theoretical Rigidity and Historical Variabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Unavoidable Intentionality of Affect: The History of Emotions and the Neurosciences of the Present Day

Reddy

2020

Emotion Review

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The “problem of emotions,” that is, that many of them are both meaningful and corporeal, has yet to be resolved. Western thinkers, from Augustine to Descartes to Zajonc, have handled this problem by employing various forms of mind–body dualism. Some psychologists and neuroscientists since the 1970s have avoided it by talking about cognitive and emotional “processing,” using a terminology borrowed from computer science that nullifies the meaningful or intentional character of both thought and emotion. Outside the Western-influenced contexts, emotion and thought are not seen as distinct kinds of things. Here a solution of sorts is proposed by thinking of emotional expression as a dynamic activity that declares and stirs emotions at the same time. As such, its dynamism may help historians to understand the dramatic changes and trends they investigate.

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Section: Theoretical Rigidity and Historical Variabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Unavoidable Intentionality of Affect: The History of Emotions and the Neurosciences of the Present Day

Reddy

2020

Emotion Review

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“…35 The need for scholars of the Catholic world to move beyond studying the better-known schools and religious orders is also clear. The Minims, for example, produced the major scholastic figures of Marin Mersenne 36 and Emmanuel Maignan, 37 as well as the experimentalist Jean-François Niceron, author of La perspective curieuse (1638), but the intellectual and institutional culture of the Minim order is little studied. 38 The interest in plural histories of Aristotelianism has produced a range of contextual micro-histories, what might be called 'thick ' descriptions of particular traditions or authors.…”

Section: Imentioning

confidence: 99%

“…75 It involves charting the transition between natural philosophy and what the founders of the Royal Society called 'Physico-Mathematicall-Experimentall learning ' by locating the growing quantification of natural knowledge in the seventeenth century in the context of the relationship between mathematics and natural philosophy in scholastic Aristotelianism. The most substantial statement of this approach is found in the work of Peter Dear, whose Discipline and experience: the mathematical way in the scientific revolution (1995), together with his earlier work on Mersenne, 76 examines the ways in which the study of mathematics transformed scientific knowledge in the seventeenth century. This approach has distinguished counterparts within the history of science.…”

Section: I Imentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Dear acknowledges an intellectual debt to Schmitt, and recognizes the importance of avoiding notions of scholasticism as 'a monolithic, entrenched body of dogma '. 78 However, like Des Chene, in practice he concentrates mostly on the positions of a circumscribed range of Jesuit authors, and is perhaps less interested in the range of Aristotelianisms discussed by later historians such as Leijenhorst. He is also less ready to consider these texts in terms of what Leijenhorst and others have called the 'continuity question ' in seventeenth-century philosophy, arguing instead that 'What is called for is an understanding of the intellectual culture within which new ideas and manners of formulating knowledge made sense in the seventeenth century in ways that they had not before. '…”

Section: I Imentioning

confidence: 99%

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Aristotelianism, Descartes, and Hobbes

Edwards

2007

Hist. J.

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The historiography of early modern Aristotelian philosophy and its relationship with its seventeenth-century critics, such as Hobbes and Descartes, has expanded in recent years. This article explores the dynamics of this project, focusing on a tendency to complicate and divide up the category of Aristotelianism into multiple ‘Aristotelianisms’, and the significance of this move for attempts to write a contextual history of the relationship of Hobbes and Descartes to their Aristotelian contemporaries and predecessors. In particular, it considers recent work on Cartesian and Hobbesian natural philosophy, and the ways in which historians have related the different forms of early modern Aristotelianism to the projects of the novatores.

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“…24 This disciplinary insulation was crucial to the reception of the mixed-mathematical sciences in mid-seventeenth-century Paris. See, e.g.,Dear 1988 andGarber 2002.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Hobbes on the Order of Sciences: A Partial Defense of the Mathematization Thesis

Biener¹

2016

The Southern J of Philosophy

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Accounts of Hobbes's “system” of sciences oscillate between two extremes. On one extreme, the system is portrayed as wholly axiomatic‐deductive, with statecraft being deduced in an unbroken chain from the principles of logic and first philosophy. On the other, it is portrayed as rife with conceptual cracks and fissures, with Hobbes's statements about its deductive structure amounting to mere window‐dressing. This paper argues that a middle way is found by conceiving of Hobbes's Elements of Philosophy on the model of a mixed‐mathematical science, not the model provided by Euclid's Elements of Geometry. I suggest that Hobbes is a test case for understanding early‐modern system construction more generally, as inspired by the structure of the applied mathematical sciences. This approach has the additional virtue of bolstering in a novel way the thesis that the transformation of philosophy in the long seventeenth century was indebted to mathematics, a thesis that has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years.

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Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools

Cited by 120 publications

References 0 publications

The Unavoidable Intentionality of Affect: The History of Emotions and the Neurosciences of the Present Day

The Unavoidable Intentionality of Affect: The History of Emotions and the Neurosciences of the Present Day

Aristotelianism, Descartes, and Hobbes

Hobbes on the Order of Sciences: A Partial Defense of the Mathematization Thesis

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