The Alfonsine Tables became the main computing tool for astronomers for about 250 years, from their compilation in Toledo ca. 1272 to the edition in 1551 of new tables based on Copernicus's astronomical models. It consisted of a set of astronomical tables which, over time, was presented in many different formats. Giovanni Bianchini (d. after 1469), an astronomer active in Ferrara, Italy, was among the few scholars of that extended period to compile a coherent and insightful set based on the Alfonsine Tables. His tables, described and analyzed here for the first time, played a remarkable role...

Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776-1810) was an influential scientist of the Romantic era, acquainted with the greatest minds of his day. He made significant contributions in the fields of chemistry and galvanism, but also tested the boundaries of the sciences and the arts through a speculative thinking which placed human intellectual activity within far-reaching historical narratives. Until now, Ritter's work has remained largely unknown to an Anglophone audience. For the first time, this bilingual edition offers English translations of Ritter's work and explanatory essays of three texts -...

John Buridan (d. 1361) was one of the most talented and influential philosophers of the late Middle Ages. His fame extended far into the seventeenth century and underwent a revival in the twentieth century, when the French physicist Pierre Duhem rediscovered his manuscripts and wrote studies about them. So far, very few of Buridan's works have been edited. Two different questions commentaries on Aristotle's De generatione et corruptione by Buridan have been preserved. They originated in his classroom. Neither of them has ever been edited. This book presents a critical edition of the...

Taking into account the most important results of the scholarly literature since 1973 and the best Polish scholarship of the past century, this is the first comprehensive study of Copernicus's achievement in English that examines Copernicus's path to heliocentrism from the perspective of late medieval philosophy, the Renaissance recovery of ancient literature and science, and early-modern editions of books that Copernicus used. The principal goals are to explain his commitment to the existence of celestial spheres, and the logical foundations for his views about hypotheses. In doing so, the...

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,...

The cosmology of Johannes Kepler remains a mystery. On the one hand, Kepler's speculations on spiritual faculties are seen as the remnants of Renaissance philosophy. On the other, his comparison of the cosmos to a clock summons the mechanical metaphor that shaped modern science. This book explores the inseparable connections between Kepler's vitalistic views and his more enduring accomplishments in astronomy. The key argument is that Kepler's 'celestial biology' served as a bridge between his revolutionary astronomy and other 'less scientific' interests, particularly astrology. Kepler's...

This first full-length biography of Dr. Martin Lister (1639-1712), vice-president of the Royal Society, Royal Physician, and the first arachnologist and conchologist, provides an unprecedented picture of a seventeenth-century virtuoso. Lister is recognized for his discovery of ballooning spiders and as the father of conchology, but it is less well known that he invented the histogram, provided Newton with alloys, and donated the first significant natural history collections to the Ashmolean Museum. Just as Lister was the first to make a systematic study of spiders and their webs, this...

Psychology and the Other Disciplines looks at how Aristotelian psychology developed from the medieval to the early modern period, by studying its interactions with other philosophical disciplines, medicine, and theology. The book addresses a wide range of topics, such as the place of psychology in the diverse academic curricula, the influence of theology and medicine on psychology and vice versa. Bringing together specialists in various fields, this volume shows that the transformation from the scholastic to more empirical approaches to psychology was a gradual process. Contributors...

Verse and Transmutation: A Corpus of Middle English Alchemical Poetry identifies and investigates a corpus of twenty-one anonymous recipes for the philosophers' stone dating from the fifteenth century. These were circulated and received in association with each other until the mid-seventeenth century, when a number of them appeared in Elias Ashmole's Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. These editions are the first to make this previously unidentified corpus available to researchers. The accompanying studies discover the complex histories of these alchemica, in plain and...

Christoph Rothmann wrote a treatise on the comet of 1585 shortly after it disappeared. Though it was not printed until 1619, Rothman sent a copy of his treatise in 1586 to Tycho Brahe, decisively influencing the latter's rejection of solid celestial spheres two years later. In his treatise, Rothmann joined the elimination of the solid celestial spheres to his concept of air as the substance filling the cosmos. He based his argument on the absence of refraction and the celestial location of the comet. The treatise also contained clear statements reflecting Rothmann's adoption of Copernicanism....