and when i raised my eyes a little higher i saw the master...

Sc. Rev. Reader ('02/02/01) 00-General Introduction

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And when I raised my eyes a little higher

I saw the master sage of those who know,

sitting with his philosophic family.

- Dante, The Divine Comedy, Canto IV

General Introduction: A Philosophic Family in Limbo

Part of what makes the transitions in early modern science seem so

‘revolutionary’ is that what purportedly fell by the wayside was not simply the sci-

ence of the Renaissance but that of the medieval and ancient periods as well.

The Renaissance understanding of the natural world was largely inherited from

Greek antiquity via medieval Latin and Arabic avenues. Beginning in the eighth

century of the Christian era—and the first of the Islamic, Moslem scholars, writing

mostly in Arabic but also later in Persian, had recovered and preserved much of

the ancient Greek scientific corpus at a time when Christian Europe had lost al-

most all contact with that intellectual tradition. From the eighth century until

about the fourteenth, Moslem scholars translated surviving Greek manuscripts

into their script, developed the scientific ideas contained therein, and embellished

every field—especially the mathematical disciplines—with their own contribu-

tions. Beginning in the eleventh century and increasing dramatically in the

twelfth, Christian scholars traveled to Moslem lands—Spain and southern Italy in

particular—to translate scientific texts from the Arabic and, occasionally, from the

Greek into Latin. In the overwhelming number of cases, this was the first time

that Greek scientific treatises had appeared in the Latin language. (Ancient Ro-

man scholars, despite their admiration for the Greek intellectual legacy, had

largely stayed away from these most difficult and technical works). By the begin-

ning of the thirteenth century, most of the major surviving works of ancient Greek

philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy had been translated into


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Latin. By the middle of the century, many of these classical texts—along with

extensive glosses from Moslem commentators—had become part of the univer-

sity curriculum and were beginning to be studied throughout Christian Europe.

The influx of difficult, sophisticated texts previously unknown to Latin

Christian scholars provided a tremendous stimulus to the intellectual life of the

universities. Indeed, it can be argued that the faculties of philosophy arose in

large part to meet the challenge of assimilating Aristotelian philosophy into the

medieval Christian world view. Aristotelian texts became such a central part of

the ‘learning of the schools’, that ‘medieval scholasticism’ is virtually synonymous

with Christian Aristotelianism. Aristotelian natural philosophy was manifestly the

product of a pagan Greek thinker. Having died in 324 B.C.E., Aristotle of course

lived well before the rise of Christianity. Nor did he have any contact with, or

knowledge of, the ancient Hebrew tradition. Nevertheless, medieval Christian

thinkers saw—or though they saw—deep resonance between his philosophy and

their theology. Two of the most prominent figures in this process of assimilation-

cum-modification were Albertus Magnus (1206-1280) and his pupil Thomas

Aquinas (1225-1274). Their appropriation of philosophical terms from Aristotle

for the purposes of bolstering Christian doctrine sometimes did violence to Aris-

totle’s intended meaning. Conversely, the attempt to explicate Christian doctrine

in terms of a pagan philosophy resulted in an admixture of ideas that some

church authorities deemed unacceptable.1 Despite such tensions, by the fou r-

teenth century one can speak of Christian Aristotelianism as a robust and dy-

namic body of writings, expounded in universities throughout Christian Europe

and enjoying a degree of intellectual authority nearly rivaling the authority of the

patristic writings of the early Church Fathers. Thus, within the span of 150 years,

from roughly 1200 to 1350—a period, by the way, which coincides with the con-

1 In 1277, for example, the Bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier formally condemned 219Aristotelian propositions as contrary to the Christian faith. See Tempier, “Condemnationof 1277,” A Source Book in Medieval Science, Edward Grant, ed. Cambridge, MA: Har-vard University Press, 1974. Pp. 45-50.


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struction of the greatest Gothic cathedrals—we witness the unlikely but highly

stimulating amalgamation of two unrelated traditions. To add to the irony, the re-

sulting pagan-Christian amalgam owed as much to a third tradition—medieval

Islam—as it did to the Greek and early Christian traditions.

Because of the concern for orthodoxy within the medieval university,

scholastics—professors and their students—devoted most of their energies to

questions residing on the boundary between Aristotelian philosophy and Chris-

tian theology. This is not to say, however, that others disciplines within the

Greco-Arabic scientific corpus were neglected or ignored by acquisitive Gothic

mind. The geometry of Euclid, the astronomy and astrology of Ptolemy, and the

medical works of Galen all found their place in Christian universities. As in the

case of Aristotle’s writings on natural philosophy, the ancient Greek traditions in

the mathematical and medical sciences came to the Latin west via Arabic

sources. And, as in the case of Aristotle, the Greek treatises were accompanied

by translations from the Arabic of commentaries, glosses, and indeed of original

works by Moslem scholars. To take but one example, the early eleventh-century

Persian philosopher-physician, Avicenna (Arabic Ibn Sina) produced a compen-

dium of Galen’s medical writings. Translated into Latin, his Canon of Medicine

served as the main textbook in medical schools throughout Europe for more than

four hundred years. Thus, by the early fourteenth century, virtually the whole of

the surviving the Greek scientific corpus, ancient in origin but richly developed by

medieval Moslem commentators, had become an integral part of the standard

university curriculum throughout Christian Europe.

The story of the preservation of and elaboration upon the Greek scientific

corpus by two distinct civilizations located on either side of the Mediterranean

says a great deal about the power of Greek scientific ideas to be appropriated

and assimilated across spatially distinct cultural boundaries. And the ability of

the Greek scientific corpus to remain at the core of scientific discussion for more

than a thousand years after the decline of ancient Greek culture says a great

deal about the fruitfulness of ideas contained in that corpus. Consider the fol-


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lowing hypothetical situations: setting aside the not-inconsiderable differences of

language and religion, if students from third-century Alexandria (Greek-speaking

and pagan), ninth-century Baghdad (Arabic-speaking and Moslem), and four-

teenth-century Paris (Latin-speaking and Christian) could have gathered together

in one time and place they could have discussed among themselves the basic

elements of the natural philosophy of Aristotle, the geometry of Euclid, the as-

tronomy and astrology of Ptolemy, the medicine of Galen, and the natural history

of Pliny.

Moreover, students from Copernicus’ generation could have joined in the

conversation with little trouble. In the two centuries that followed Aquinas’ death,

scholarly fascination with classical learning only intensified and ancient literary

texts became an even more important part of European textual world. If the

scholastics of the thirteenth century developed an appetite for the philosophical

works of Aristotle and the translations of Arabic glosses on medicine and

mathematics, the humanists of the fifteenth were voraciously omnivorous in their

hunger for classical authors. For although the studia humanitatis, the course of

studies from which the humanists took the name of their movement, focused on

the disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy, the

work of recovering the lost ‘wisdom of the Ancients’ extended across all fields.2

Throughout the fifteenth century and well into the sixteenth, scholars recovered,

translated, and annotated a number of important scientific works. In fact, be-

cause of their concern for the purity of the classical forms of Greek and Latin,

humanists were eager to recover and restore ‘uncorrupted’ texts, which often

meant passing over texts translated from the Arabic in favor of Greek and Latin

originals. If humanists were dismissive of the earlier scholastic translations, it

was less because of the content (natural philosophy, astronomy, medicine, etc.)

than it was because of the ‘barbarous’ Latin of the translations and the distorting

2 The division of learning (especially collegiate learning) into “the sciences” and “the hu-manities” is a phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such adivision of ‘classical learning’ would have made little sense to the scholars of the period.


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influence of Arabic commentaries. Indeed, considerable humanist effort was di-

rected toward the recovery of such scholastic favorites as Aristotle, Galen, and

Ptolemy. And like scholastics, humanists were dedicated educators. If anything,

their bitter attacks on the ‘medieval corruptions’ only deepened their commitment

to impart to their students the purest renditions of classical texts. And that they

did.

With regard to ancient science, then, what did a student like Copernicus

have available to him as he entered the portals of a late-fifteenth-century univer-

sity? The short answer is, very nearly the whole of the surviving Greek scientific

corpus. Most of the Aristotelian writings in natural philosophy, which had been

translated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had been re-translated from the

Greek (rather than from Arabic intermediary texts) by fifteenth-century humanists.

By 1500, there were 11 complete printed editions of his corpus, nearly 150 edi-

tions of individual works, and more than 360 editions of commentaries.3 Both

Ptolemy’s Almagest (on astronomy) and his Tetrabiblos (on astrology) were

translated from the Arabic and circulated throughout the High Middle Ages, the

former first printed in 1515 and the latter in 1484. His Geography, however, was

first translated into Latin in the 1406 and first printed in 1477.4 Latin translations

of Galen (c. 130-200 C.E.), the great medical authority of late antiquity, became

the foundation of medieval medical education. His work, along with the invalu-

able compendium by Avicenna (980-1037), known in the West simply as

Avicenna’s Canon, were printed repeatedly from the late fifteenth century on-

ward. As a measure of Galen’s continued authority in the Renaissance, there

were more than 600 printed editions of his works between 1500 and 1600. Simi-

larly, Euclid’s Elements enjoyed wide circulation from the twelfth century, and

3 See Anthony Grafton, “The Availability of Ancient Works,” The Cambridge History ofRenaissance Philosophy, Charles Schmitt et al. eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1988), p. 769.4 Interestingly, despite the importance granted to Ptolemy’s Almagest, it was printed onlytwice in the early modern period (1515 and 1538), whereas his works on astrology andgeography went through scores of editions before the end of the sixteenth century.


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went through countless editions (mostly for classroom use) after its first printed

edition in 1482. Pliny’s massive treatment of natural history was one of the few

works to have survived continuously in the Latin West. Yet, interest in his work

seemed only to have increased in the Renaissance with more than 20 printed

editions of his Natural History just in the years between 1469 and 1489. Plato’s

Timaeus and his dialogues all appeared in print by 1484, just a few years after

the first printing (1471) of the collection of writings known as the Hermetic Cor-

pus. In addition to this list of major authors from classical antiquity there were a

number of minor writers including Lucretius, Iamblichus, and Sextus Empiricus in

philosophy; Archimedes and Proclus in mathematics, and Hippocrates in medi-

cine. And of course there was also an enormous body of commentary from an-

cient Greek, medieval Arabic and Christian, and, increasingly, humanist authors.

At no time in the thousand years or so since the collapse of the ancient

world had such a broad collection of scientific writings been assembled in one

place, at one time, and in one language: not in ancient Rome, not in Constantin-

ople, not in Baghdad, not in Toledo.5 We can point to at least three factors that

supported this extraordinary confluence of learning. First, from the twelfth cen-

tury there was a tradition of medieval scholastic openness to ancient and ‘foreign’

learning. Translations of both classical Greek texts and commentaries from Ara-

bic scholars became incorporated into the curricula of Christian universities.

Second, although humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries may have

complained bitterly about the quality of scholastic translations and may have

preferred to make their translations directly from the Greek rather than from Ara-

bic sources, they shared with scholastics an openness to classical learning.

Aided by the support of the great patrons—like Pope Nicholas V and Cosimo de’

Medici—humanists scoured Constantinople, the capital of the Greek Byzantine

Empire, for Greek texts. And like scholastics of an earlier century, humanists,

too, were educators and were quick to transmit classical learning as part of their


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pedagogical obligations to students. Third, unlike the world of medieval scholar-

ship which depended solely on copying and circulating manuscripts, from the

latter half of the fifteenth century onward humanists enjoyed the benefits of the

printing press. A typical press run could produce 500 identical copies of a given

text, thereby solving for the most part the problem of preserving what might have

a been a unique or rare manuscript copy. The continued growth of universities,

especially rapid in the latter half of the sixteenth century, helped make printing

textbooks based on the classics into a profitable business. In sum, the tradition

of intellectual openness, the ability to tap into rich sources of ancient literature,

and the power of the printing press as an engine for the mass production of texts

helped make possible the recovery and dissemination of virtually the whole of the

ancient scientific corpus.

The core of the ‘revolution’ that historians of science have wanted to see

in the sixteenth and especially the seventeenth centuries, consists chiefly of the

eclipse of this classical legacy. If we were to imagine a second scholarly en-

counter—this time between two men separated by only two hundred years, say,

the young Copernicus and the mature Newton—the result would likely be mutual

incomprehension. Although the conversation would be in Latin and between fel-

low-Christians, Copernicus would have understood very little of Newton’s sci-

ence; and Newton would have had almost no use whatsoever for the astronomy,

medicine, and natural philosophy that Copernicus had studied so assiduously in

Krakow, Padua, and Rome. In the two-thousand-year history of the Greek scien-

tific corpus, it would be difficult to find another two-hundred-year period with as

much conceptual distance separating beginning from end.

Ancients & Moderns

The significance of these transformations was not lost on their contempo-

raries; they well understood that the scientific literature they had inherited from

5 While not quite as extensive, the recovery work of Muslim scholars in eighth and ninth-


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the Ancients was undergoing revision—and in some cases rejection—even as

they sought to comprehend that legacy. Although no figure from the early mod-

ern period used the language of revolution—they tended to speak instead in

terms of the ‘restoration’ or ‘reform’ of knowledge—, there was an unmistakable

awareness of the growing distance between ‘Ancients and Moderns’. By 1504,

the navigator Amerigo Vespucci, realizing that the lands across the Atlantic he

had visited were in fact ‘new lands’ completely unknown by the Ancients, was

emboldened to declare that his discovery, “surpasses the opinion of our ancient

authorities”. When José de Acosta, the Jesuit missionary, was sent to South

America in 1571, he feared he and his companions would be burnt to a crisp as

they crossed the Equator, because Aristotle and most other ancient authorities

were in agreement that no one could survive a transit of the ‘Torrid Zone’. He

could only laugh—at himself and at Aristotle—when he found the day of crossing

so cold that he needed to warm himself in the sun. The advertisement for Mer-

cator’s Geography claimed to treat “universal geography, as well Modern, as An-

cient”. When, in 1609, Kepler began his book on the ‘new astronomy’ by com-

paring and contrasting the new world systems of Copernicus and Tycho with the

old system of Ptolemy, he ‘interrogated’ Ptolemy as to why his system failed to

explain this or that detail of planetary motion.6 Two decades later, Galileo cast

his famous defense of the Copernican theory as a debate among representatives

of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Copernicus and called the work, “Dialog on the Two

Chief World Systems”. Bacon called one of his many books on scientific method,

the ‘New Organon’, named after the ‘old Organon’ of Aristotle which he rejected

and wished to replace.

Although seventeenth-century mathematicians and natural philosophers

found themselves increasingly at odds with the ‘Ancients’, they were reluctant to

reject them out of hand. Even Newton, whose Principia (1687) signaled more

than any other, the demise of the ancient system of the world, implied in the

century Baghdad comes closest. See {Rashed ???}


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opening lines of his concluding section, that the Ancients had, in fact, understood

the basics of his system. The motif that unites the various modes of engagement

that the Moderns of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had with the An-

cients is not so much one of revolt or even reform—though, to be sure, those

elements were not missing—but ‘argument’, ‘debate’, or (more politely) ‘conver-

sation’.

Literary Conversations & Corpora

The metaphor of a literary conversation was a powerful one, and human-

ists especially were fond of using it to emphasize the perceived interconnected-

ness of the classical legacy. Extending the metaphor only slightly, they saw

themselves not only as being capable of following the conversation by virtual of

their ability to recover and read ancient texts. They also believed that they could

enter into those conversations through their own writings and publications. The

Renaissance notion of the ‘republic of letters’ also captures something of this

sense of a community of scholars bound together by their exchanges of commu-

nications. The imagery of an on-going discussion among ancient philosophers

and mathematicians from different time—recall that more than seven centuries

separate the lives of Pythagoras in southern Italy and Ptolemy in Alexan-

dria—itself dated back to the early Middle Ages. It was Dante who gave this im-

age its greatest poetic expression when, in the fourth canto of his Inferno, he and

his guide to the underworld, the poet Virgil, come upon a gathering of men in

Limbo.7

We reached the boundaries of a splendid castle

6 See Kepler, ”New Astronomy”, Ch. 3-P5, pp. 000 below.7 Dante, The Inferno, trans. Mark Musa {???}, Canto IV, ll. 115-136, pp. {??-??}. InDante’s allegory, Limbo is the first Ring of Purgatory located just outside the gates ofHell. Here is where the "Virtuous Pagans" must reside, undeserving of the physical tor-ments of the lower rings of Hell yet equally undeserving of the reward of Heaven since


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that seven times was circled by high walls

defended by a sweetly flowing stream.

. . .

And when I raised my eyes a little higher

I saw the master sage of those who know,

sitting with his philosophic family.

All gaze at him, all pay their homage to him;

and there I saw both Socrates and Plato,

each closer to his side than any other;

Democritus, who said the world was chance,

Diogenes, Thales, Anaxagoras,

Empedocles, Zeno, and Heraclitus.

I saw the one who classified our herbs:

Dioscorides I mean. And I saw Orpheus,

Tully, Linus, Seneca the moralist,

Euclid the geometer, and Ptolemy,

Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna,

and Averroes, who made the Commentary.

The "master of those who know” is of course Aristotle. Around him are gathering

the great philosophers and mathematicians of pagan antiquity—as well as a cou-

ple of Muslim scholars, Avicenna {dates?? } and Averroes {dates??}. It is a

striking image—and not simply because of the Christian prejudice that it betrays.

Dante has created an imaginary world, a "timeless present", wherein the great

minds of the previous 1800 years are brought together to discuss for all eternity

the great philosophical questions. There are Hellenes from the 6th century B.C.E.

and from the 2nd century C.E.; there are Greeks, Italians, Persians, and Arabs.

There are mathematicians and astronomers, moralists and naturalists, physicians

as Pagans they "knew not baptism" and thus could not partake in salvation through


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and botanists. What makes it possible for them to "converse"—what made it

possible for Dante even to conceive of their having a conversation—was the sur-

vival of their texts, texts that froze their thoughts and enabled them to be pre-

served through the ages in many different lands.

Almost exactly two centuries later, Raphael depicted in his so-called

‘School of Athens’ a scene strikingly similar to Dante’s. Working at the conflu-

ence between Renaissance art—he was a younger contemporary of Leonardo

da Vinci and a slightly older contemporary of Michelangelo—Raphael painted a

tableau consisting of several ensembles of pagan philosophers and mathemati-

cians engaged in intense discussion. The opening wedge of figures in the fore-

ground focuses attention on the two central figures, Plato and Aristotle (beneath

the central arch of the temple), while at the same time drawing the viewer into the

scene. The fresco, covering the entire wall of a room originally intended to serve

as the library of Pope Julius II, is a visual invitation to enter the classical ‘temple

of learning’ and join the conversation. This is of course exactly what the scholars

of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did.

Christ.


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Fig. 1) Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’

Raphael’s composition comprises groups of figures learning from—and

occasionally arguing with—the great scientific authorities of Greek antiquity; and

so it was the readers of their texts. While humanists were eager to see the liter-

ary legacy of the ancients as a single body of knowledge, they also understood

its ‘natural’ division into coherent groupings of texts centered on a given author.

There were, for example, the Euclidean corpus of writings on geometry, arithme-

tic, and optics; the Aristotelian corpus on natural philosophy; or the Galenic cor-

pus on medicine. In the narrow sense, ‘corpus’ could mean just the writings di-

rectly attributable to the classical author in question. In the broader sense, how-

ever, it could also mean closely related texts from named or unnamed disci-

plines. The ‘pseudo-Aristotelian’ work entitled ‘On the Cosmos’, for example,

was long held to have been written by Aristotle though we now know that it was

composed by an unknown follower of his. More broadly still, the ‘Aristotelian


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corpus’ could further include the penumbra of commentaries and glosses on his

texts written by his students, medieval Moslem and Jewish scholars, and Chris-

tian scholars form the thirteenth century onward.

Fig. 2) Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’ (detail of Plato and Aristotle) {redo}


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Fig. 3) Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’ (detail of Euclid)


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Fig. 4) Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’ (detail of Pythagoras)

Fig. 4) Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’ (detail of Ptolemy)


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Despite the self-evident differences in the content of the various classical

scientific corpora, they shared several characteristics in common. First and most

obviously, each was a collection of writings from, or attributed to a particular his-

torical figure; Euclid, Plato, Claudius Ptolemy, Aristotle, Galen of Pergamum, and

Pliny the Elder.8 In each case, these classical authors borrowed from predece s-

sors, learned from contemporaries, and had his work augmented by later gen-

erations. Despite the complications of attribution, generation after generation of

scholars has taken these authors to be the principal architects of their respective

literary edifice, and so traditionally each corpus has been known eponymously.

Second, each corpus focused on a related set of natural phenom-

ena—related, that is, in the mind of the author in question and in accordance with

his working categories of description and explanation. In most cases, the classi-

cal corpora distinguish themselves from one another by virtue of the relatedness

of phenomena and the coherence of the principles used to explain them. While

the phenomena of the natural world may be broken down and categorized in an

infinite number of ways, the ancient authors were fairly consistent in dividing

them up. Thus, the Euclidean corpus concerned itself primarily with rigorous de-

duction in geometry; the Ptolemaic with astronomy and geography; and the Ar-

istotelian with the foundations of knowledge and the principles underlying change

in nature. The Galenic corpus took as its object of inquiry the human body

(anatomy and physiology) and its maladies (theory of disease, therapeutic, die-

tetics). The Plinean corpus attempted to give a natural history of the world, es-

pecially in its rarer and stranger manifestations. The Platonic corpus, though

best known for the moral questions it addressed and its concern for ‘the good (or

examined) life’, nonetheless contained a philosophy of nature as enduring as the

8 One could include in this list Hermes Trismegistus, who in the Renaissance wasthought to have been an actual historical figure and to whom was attributed the ‘Her-metic corpus’. See Hermes, “Corpus Hermeticum”, Ch. 1-P4, pp. 000.


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Aristotelian. And like the Aristotelian, it too strove to explain the ‘first principles’

of natural order.

Third, it was not only the bundling of phenomena that gave a corpus its

coherence but also the principles, concepts and methods that were supposed to

guide investigations into those phenomena. Astronomy was the science of the

heavens, and natural objects were the stars and planets. What inspired ancient

Greek astronomy—and what distinguished it from all other ancient sky-watching

traditions—was the belief that geometry could be used to model the motions of

the stars and planets. More precisely, the challenge was to account for their

complex motions in terms of a composition of simply uniform circular motions.

Greek medicine had as its proper object of study not the ‘great world’ in the sky

above but the ‘little world’ of the human body. Here the task was not simply un-

derstanding its ‘motions’ (i.e. anatomy and physiology) but also how to restore

the sick to a state of health. The guiding principles in Greek medicine were many

and complex, yet the belief that in the importance of the four humors in regulating

the body’s functions was central; good health resulted from a balance of humors,

ill health from an imbalance. Greek geometry took as its principle objects the

imaginary or ‘fictitious’ elements of form (points, lines, planes, circles, spheres,

etc.) and of number (odd and even numbers, primes, ratios, etc.). The work of

geometry and arithmetic was to determine necessarily true propositions about

the relationships among these mathematical objects—whether those truths had

any bearing on the ‘real world’ of nature was another matter.

In addition to classical author, related phenomena, and coherent ap-

proach, each corpus had a fourth characteristic: it owed its survival to a commu-

nity of discussants. That is, somebody, typically a latter-day disciple, took the

time and made the effort to gather, collate, transcribe, and redact the surviving

writings of ‘the master’ in order to produce an edition of the corpus in question.

And that edition, or fragments thereof, must have been copied and re-copied

through the ages. In the absence of such a community, texts do not survive or

survive only rarely. For example, all of Aristotle’s dialogues, surely modeled on


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Plato’s, have been lost. What we have from his original literary corpus are in fact

mostly lecture notes from his students, notes which were first edited and pub-

lished some three hundred years after his death. All surviving versions of

Euclid’s Elements trace back to an edition first compiled in the 4th century by

Theon of Alexandria, more than seven centuries after Euclid’s death. His works

on {??} and {??} have been lost. Nothing at all has survived from Pythagoras

(his disciplines were secretive about the knowledge he revealed to them and

though they surely wished to preserve his wisdom, they were little inclined to

publish them).

As a physical object, any given manuscript can survive for perhaps no

more than a few hundred years. To live, the corpus must reproduce. But of

course it cannot reproduce itself. The only means of textual reproduction avail-

able until the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century was to copy

one manuscript from another by hand—a long, labor-intensive, and error-prone

process. The task was further compounded by the highly technical content of

texts of Euclid or Ptolemy and the sheer magnitude of surviving texts Aristotle or

Galen. This meant that for a corpus to survive there had to be strong incentives

to preserve it. That we have the Aristotelian, or Euclidean, or Platonic corpora

available to us now is a testament of two thousand years of preservation work,

which necessarily also means two thousand years of interest and incentive in

comprehending and discussing those texts.9

Yet another shared quality of the scientific corpora was their ability to

serve as almost self-contained systems of explanation. Each corpus provided

the reader with a vocabulary and set of concepts which it used in a more or less

consistent manner to identify a central problem. In the case of Ptolemaic astron-

9 To gain some idea of the complexities involved in these chains of transmission, seeDavid C. Lindberg, “The Transmission of Greek and Arabic Learning to the West,” Sci-ence in the Middle Ages, David Lindberg, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1978), pp. 52-90 or the article on Euclid by John Murdoch in the Dictionary of ScientificBiography, Charles Coulston Gillispie, ed. (New York: Scribners, 1970-1980). Vol. {??},pp. {??}


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omy, for instance, the text instructs the reader regarding the meaning of critical

terms and constructions and provides examples so that, after much labor, read-

ers could themselves pursue the program of Greek astronomy on their own. This

self-contained quality of a corpus added immeasurably to its authority as a

source of knowledge about the natural world. Indeed, among the educated elites

in three different civilizations (the Hellenistic, medieval Arabic, and medieval

Christian) and for more than a thousand years, these corpora were looked upon

as repositories of legitimate, certified, and authoritative knowledge about the

workings of nature.

Such a view was certainly prevalent in the Renaissance. By the early

sixteenth century there was a general consensus among the learned of Europe

that classical science was ‘canonical’. Although that consensus dissolved by the

end of the seventeenth, humanist veneration of the past powerfully re-enforced

vision inherited from the medieval scholasticism regarding the ‘unity of knowl-

edge’. Despite the separate points of origin of the scientific corpora in the classi-

cal world and despite their distinct trajectories through time and space, most

Western scholars from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries tended to see

them as elements in a unified body of knowledge. Indeed, many strove mightily

to unite and reconcile what from the modern perspective appear to be highly dis-

parate traditions. Whatever differences and contradictions there might have

been in the classical scientific corpora, most scholars preferred to emphasize the

connections. To be sure, there was much in the corpora to encourage this view.

Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy all agreed that the Earth was at rest and at the very

center of the cosmos. Plato studied under the disciples of Pythagoras and in-

corporated their number theory and geometry into his natural philosophy. Aris-

totle’s matter theory, with its four elements and four qualities, reappeared in Ga-

len’s theory of constitutional humors. Pliny’s description of the oikumene, or

‘known world’, was roughly co-extensive with Ptolemy’s. Ptolemy used proposi-

tions from Euclid’s geometry in his astronomy.


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The classical corpora were united in a different, more pragmatic sense as

well. The sustained efforts of medieval scholastics and Renaissance humanists

had resulted in the recovery and circulation of virtually the whole of the surviving

scientific corpora. Classical Greek scientific learning, in other words, had be-

come physically unified in the Renaissance. As more and more classical texts

and commentaries came off the presses, what had been a widely dispersed liter-

ary heritage became a set of printed texts that could be consulted almost at will

in major libraries.

There is more than a little irony in the fact the dissolution of the Renais-

sance consensus regarding the unity of classical corpora was, in large part, a re-

sult of the sustained scrutiny of their content by humanists. As more and more

classical writings surfaced and became more and more widely available, scholars

began to notice more and more inconsistencies. Textual inconsistencies grew

to become irreconcilable contradictions. Even when the texts spoke univocally in

regard to, say, landmasses and anatomical structures, the experience of sailors

and anatomists flatly contradicted them. Much of the intellectual drama of the

‘Scientific Revolution’ has to do with first with the recover and mastery of the

classical scientific corpora and second, with the rejection of their authority, indi-

vidually and collectively.

Organization

Taking our lead from the humanists’ vision of classical science, we have

treated the primary readings as “literary conversations” and arranged these con-

versations by corpora. We have chosen to focus on six of the most important:

the Euclidean, neo-Platonic/Hermetic, Aristotelian, Ptolemaic, Galenic, and

Plinean. While these by no means exhaust the scientific legacy of antiquity, they

do cover what has traditionally been seen as the most important disciplines


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transformed by the events of the early modern period.10 Six of the eight chapters

are ordered under these headings, two are not. In addition, we have included a

chapter focusing on the other great ancient literary tradition that informed early

modern speculations on the natural world: Scripture. The traditional periodization

of the Scientific Revolution (ca. 1500 to 1700) coincides with the most turbulent

centuries in the history of Christianity. The science of the day cannot be under-

stood apart from its theological inheritance and its confessional strife. In interac-

tions between ‘science and religion’—insofar as the two can be treated sepa-

rately in the early modern period—were complex, subtle, and always mutual.

From the early Middle Ages onward, Christian scholars struggled to understand

‘pagan’ writings like Plato’s ‘Timaeus’ and to reconcile its ‘natural’ teachings with

the inspire word of god. During the High Middle Ages, scholastic theologians

found in Aristotle’s natural philosophy, especially in his theory of form and matter,

concepts that helped them clarify the most profound and sacred doctrines of

Christianity. The exchange—and tension—between theology and natural phi-

losophy continued throughout the early modern period. By the latter half of the

seventeenth century the custom of arguing theological propositions from the evi-

dence of nature and of reconciling natural reason with divine revelation, had ac-

quired a name, natural theology. Despite the conflicts between religious and sci-

entific authority manifested in the trial and recantation of Galileo, natural theology

enjoyed a powerful resurgence in the wake of the ‘new science’ and especially in

Newton’s England.

The other chapter unconnected to a classical corpus consists exclusively

of readings from the seventeenth century. Even before that century began, the

‘conversation’ Moderns were having with the Ancients had become a rather

10 An more inclusive survey of the classical legacy would include works by Archimedes,Apollonius, and Diophantus in mathematics; Ptolemy on optics; Hippocrates, Herophilus,and Soranus in medicine; and Theophrastus and Dioscorides in natural history. And ofcourse with less emphasis placed on classical Greek sources, a survey of Renaissancecorpora would have to include the large and important literature on alchemy, books ofsecrets, and ‘technology’ manuals deriving from medieval Arabic and Latin traditions.


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heated argument. By mid-century, two novel approaches to the acquisition of

natural knowledge began to make themselves felt across a broad range of prob-

lems. One was experimental and the other mathematical. Often found in con-

junction with one another, they became banners under which many ‘Moderns’

proclaimed their independence from the legacy of the Ancients. Here is where

Moderns thrashed out new methods of investigation, new standards of evidence,

and new ways of representing nature mathematically. The chapter on the ex-

perimental philosophy and ‘physico-mathematics’—the contemporary term for

what we now broadly understand as mathematical physics—is thus without a lo-

cus classicus. But since proponents of ‘experimental philosophy’ and ‘physico-

mathematics’ usually had Aristotle as their primary target, we placed that chapter

immediately after the chapter on Aristotelian natural philosophy

Navigation: Pathways and Linkages

Six of the following either chapters or primary readings represent the six

major scientific corpora mentioned above.; the other two are on experimental

philosophy and physico-mathematics and on natural theology. Each of the

chapters based on a classical corpus begins with one or more selections from

the principal author of the corpus in order to present the central concepts, meth-

ods, and problems characteristic of that field. The rest of the selections in the

chapter are taken from later authors—a few from the medieval period, the vast

majority from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries authors—and are ar-

ranged chronologically. Without exception, the writings of the ‘Moderns’ were in

one way or another responses to the questions posed in those classical texts,

and they either amplify, modify, or challenge the core arguments of the classical

author. Thus, by reading the selections in chronological sequence as they are

presented in each chapter, the student can gain a sense of both the central prin-

ciples of the classical legacy and the debate provoked in later writers.

While a diachronic, or sequential, pathway through the primary volume

has the advantage of thematic coherence and chronological development, it does


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break up the historical unity of any given period. An alternative pathway through

the material would therefore be to read in succession authors who were contem-

poraries. One could begin with all the ancient authors; that is, the first selection

is each chapter (e.g., Euclid, Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen, Pliny, Augustine).

With this grounding an ancient science, one could then move to sixteenth-century

‘reformers’ (Copernicus, Paracelsus, Vesalius, etc.) and then to seventeenth-

century ‘revolutionaries’ (Kepler, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, etc. The advantage

here is that one gains insight into the interrelationships among the writings from a

particular era or within a given generation.

Whatever pathway one may take through the primary literature, I have

made every effort to make each selection self-contained and free standing. I

have, therefore, tried to avoid selecting snippets and have instead aimed at

pieces between 15 and 25 pages in length so as to preserve the conceptual in-

tegrity of the argument and the intellectual and literary style of the author.

and when i raised my eyes a little higher i saw the master...

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