Modelling the history of early modern natural philosophy: the fate of the art-nature distinction in the Dutch universities

Abstract

The 'model approach' facilitates a quantitative-oriented study of conceptual changes in large corpora. This paper implements the 'model approach' to investigate the erosion of the traditional art-nature distinction in early modern natural philosophy. I argue that a condition for this transformation has to be located in the late scholastic conception of final causation. I design a conceptual model to capture the art-nature distinction and formulate a working hypothesis about its early modern fate. I test my hypothesis on a selected corpus of 25 works published in the Dutch academic milieu between 1607 and 1748. I analyse the corpus through a procedure based on concordancing of keywords associated with the model. I argue that the results obtained constitute a successful pilot study for the implementation of the model approach on larger scale research.

Artistic Modelling of History in the Literature and Non-Fiction of a Post-Totalitarian Society

“…Fantastic versions of the past and hypothetical future continue to appear in the creative imagination of artists, and therefore leave space and perspective for theorizing. ( Sangiacomo, 2019) Fiction and speculation in a postmodern literary work allow the writer to compensate for an undocumented reality in an artistic image, sometimes to ignore its leading tendencies for secondary, but important in historical perspective. Without fiction and speculation there are no historical novels, short stories, dramas, poems, science fiction works (Radevych-Vynnytskyi, 2018).…”

Divide et Impera: Modeling the Relationship between Canonical and Noncanonical Authors in the Early Modern Natural Philosophy Network

“…From a methodological point of view, the article aims to present a feasible and potentially exportable way in which quantitative and qualitative approaches can be integrated and adapted to study different facets of early modern philosophy and science. Today almost no scholarship in this field attempts to use quantitative approaches (exceptions are Valleriani [2017] and Sangiacomo [2019]). Unlike a few decades ago, relevant corpora have become more available and ready for quantitative investigations.…”

“…In this sense, a model is both a descriptive and a heuristic device used to capture a certain feature observed in the data and support further exploration and interpretation of it. The use of the model approach in the field of history of philosophy and ideas has so far been limited to implementations in which the researcher designs the model before analyzing the data and then uses it as a heuristic tool to study a given corpus and investigate a given research question (De Jong and Betti 2010;van den Berg 2014, 2016;Betti et al 2019;Sangiacomo 2019). In this article, we experiment with the opposite approach by distilling from the structural aspects revealed by network analysis those features that seem more promising in profiling different kinds of authors and pointing to a general pattern or trend at work in the network itself.…”

A Vitalist Shoal in the Mechanist Tide: Art, Nature, and 17th-Century Science

“…1 But erosion is a gradual process, 2 and the vitalist Cavendish resists the tide of mechanism in an interesting way. 3 Second, while Cavendish is usually slotted into debates among canonical early modern figures, 4 her theory of artifacts can be interestingly illuminated by reading her through Scholastic conceptual schemes. 5 Scholarly understandings of Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza have been advanced by placing them in the context of late Scholasticism.…”