Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno was a notable supporter of the new science which arose during his lifetime; his own role has been debated since the early 17th century. This work re-evaluates his contribution to the scientific revolution, emphasizing his links with the magnetic philosophers.

Table of Contents: Illustrations Acknowledgments Conventions Introduction 3 Ch. 1 Kinds of Natural Philosophy 14 Ch. 2 Methods of Bookishness 49 Ch. 3 Modes of Argument 82 Ch. 4 Bodin’s Philosophy of Nature 116 Ch. 5 Theatrical Metaphors 153 Ch. 6 The Reception of the Theatrum 180 Epilogue: The Legacies of the Theatrum 225 Notes 233 Bibliography 331 Index 369.

The ArgumentDuring the later European Renaissance, some scholars began to write about the history of scientific disciplines. Some of the issues and problems they faced in constructing their narratives have had long-term effects on the history of science. One of these issues was how to relate scholars from the Islamic traditions of scientific scholarship to those of antiquity and of postclassical Europe. Recent historians of science have rejected a once-common Western opinion that the contribution of these Islamic scientists had (...) lain mainly in their preservation of ancient texts that were then handed over to Western scholars, who mastered them and then moved beyond them as part of the scientific revolution. This article examines the first effort to write a history of mathematics, theLives of the Mathematiciansby Bernardino Baldi (1553–1617), to determine how he treated this issue in his work. Baldi's efforts are especially important here because he was also an early European scholar of Arabic.An examination of the work shows that Baldi did not share the negative views held by later Europeans about these non-European scientists. However, despite his knowledge of Arabic he had no active contacts with ongoing mathematical scholarship in Arabic. As a consequence, his narrative does follow the chronology of those later Europeans who would limit consideration of these mathematicians to approximately the ninth to the fourteenth centuries. In Baldi's writings, then, we can see the later narrative shape used by Western historians of science until recent years, but not the subsidiary role accorded to non-European scholars. (shrink)

This book diagnoses an urgent need for change and renewal in a period of crisis for philosophy, science and society. The Florentine Renaissance, some six hundred years ago, took a huge leap forward into realism, rationality and self-awareness. It was born out of the waning authority of medieval institutions and beliefs.We stand now at a similar junction in history. It is apparent to many that reductionist science with its materialist values -- the worldview that has driven modern culture for (...) the last two centuries -- is losing credibility. Its objectives of growth and acquisition, and its guiding principles asserting that there is no intrinsic meaning to life or purpose in the cosmos, are now widely seen as creating an unsustainable world. The essays gathered in A New Renaissance are a cultural response to the failings of the materialist worldview. Contributions in the first part diagnose the sources of the crisis in today's world. The second section searches for a new understanding of consciousness and mind, based on findings in recent non-materialist philosophy. The third section looks to a renewal of spirituality beyond religion, aiming to recapture the personal depth and connection to the cosmos that materialism denies or ignores. The fourth section examines possible reforms in politics, economics and education to help bring forth a society that can sustain the flourishing of human beings in the globally interconnected world of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

During the European Renaissance, scholars and members of the bourgeoisie showed a stronginterest in practical philosophy, namely ethics and politics. This shift was expressed in works that described ideal societies, also known as utopias. Meanwhile, the Renaissance philosophy of nature, influenced by Late Ancient philosophy and mysticism, imposed a new worldview, according to which nature was seen as a living entity. Renaissance political thinkers attempted to imbue their socio-political visions with a sense of natural philosophy. A principal (...) idea in utopian literature is the strong presence of science, a key factor in the transformation of nature. In its search for the ideal political order, humanity was not content with maximising nature’s benefits but envisioned creating a new nature, one that better served the socio-political ideals of the Renaissance and the early modern era. I would like to argue that the prominent role of technocracy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century utopias led gradually to the disruption and perversion of nature. Despite of the intentions of the utopian thinkers, their views on nature –which range from the unconditional respect to nature to its advancement through science – encouraged finally the mastery of nature, because they connected the socio-political progress with the exploitation of nature and the control of natural forces. In particular, a discussion on the relationship between humanity, nature and science in Renaissance utopian thought can shed some light on how early technocracy progressively led to the ravaging of nature. Departing from the major Renaissance philosophers’ all-encompassing perspective, political philosophers of the time, especially those who contributed to utopian literature, predominantly viewed nature as an instrument at the disposal of humanity and its science – a playground for human inventiveness and resourcefulness. With their works, they provided a new rationale, non-religious this time that defended humanity’s full exploitation of nature. (shrink)

The contributions of Portuguese and Spanish sixteenth century science and technology in fields such as metallurgy, medicine, agriculture, surgery, meteorology, cosmography, cartography, navigation, military technology, and urban engineering, by and large, have been excluded in most accounts of the Scientific Revolution. I review several recent studies in English on sixteenth and seventeenth century natural history and natural philosophy to demonstrate how difficult it has become for Anglo-American scholarship to bring Iberia back into narratives on the origins of "modernity." The roots (...) of this exclusion, to be sure, hark back to the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. The oversight is unfortunate for it has blinded scholars to the fact that the Iberians first created a culture of empirical, experimental, and utilitarian knowledge-gathering of massive proportions that did not get its cues from the classics or the learned, but from merchants, enterprising settlers, and bureaucrats. The Portuguese and the Spanish confidently saw themselves as the first "moderns," superseding the ancients. The English were the first to recognize this fact and they sought to imitate the new institutions of knowledge-gathering created by the Iberians. I demonstrate, for example, the Iberian origins of many of Francis Bacon's epistemological insights and metaphors. Spanish and Portuguese scholars have long been making this point. I therefore introduce English-speaking audiences to some of the most recent scholarship by Spanish scholars on sixteenth century Iberian science and technology. (shrink)

Renaissance and Baroque, two terms unknown in the ages they describe, are now an integral part of the general public's cultural vocabulary. The first encompasses European civilization from the mid-fifteenth century to around 1550, and the second refers to developments in the seventeenth century, with the intervening fifty years forming a period of transition termed Mannerism. Beginning with the appearance of Heinrich Wölfflin's Kunst geschichtliche Grundbegriffe in 1915, these two great epochs of intellectual development have been described quite successfully (...) by juxtaposing the one with the other. Wölfffin, for example, saw five great categories of discrimination between the two, namely Linear and Painterly, Plane and Recession, Closed and Open Form (Tectonic and A-tectonic Form), Multiplicity and Unity (Multiple Unity and Unified Unity), and Clearness and Unclearness (Absolute and Relative Clearness). More recently, Wylie Sypher in Four Stages of Renaissance Style has extended the list with the polar characteristics of Cyclic-Broken (Cyclothym-Schizothym), Exact-Abstract (Representational-Nonrepresentational), Visual-Haptic, Nearseeing-Farseeing, Dark-Light, Horizontal/Vertical-Oblique/Spiraling, and Points/Lines-Planes/Volumes. (shrink)

The possibility of the development of comparative thought made the Renaissance an era particularly favorable to the awakening of the scientific understanding of social phenomena. Isolated elements of such an attitude had already appeared, but now their accumulation became of decisive importance.

An early version of this paper was given at Smith College in October 1979 for a Renaissance conference on‘the lessons of history’ held in honour of Myron Piper Gilmore.

Historiography of Renaissance philosophy and science has long been characterized by tendencies to minimize the influence of medieval Arabic philosophy and science. According to the standard narrative, the humanists successfully eliminated Arabic writers, along with their Latin scholastic interpreters. Against this background, Dag Nikolaus Hasse calls for a "sober historical approach" in order to "assess the factual influence of Arabic sciences and philosophy in the Renaissance". His narrative is summarized by the title of his impressively erudite and well-documented...

The U.S. occupation of Japan transformed a brutal war charged with overt racism into an amicable peace in which the issue of race seemed to have disappeared.

(2009). A Review of “The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance by Fritjof Capra”. World Futures: Vol. 65, No. 3, pp. 222-223.

Hans Belting, _Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science_, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 303 pp.

In Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds, Donald Beecher explores the characteristics and idiosyncrasies of the brain as they affect the study of fiction. He builds upon insights from the cognitive sciences to explain how we actualize imaginary persons, read the clues to their intentional states, assess their representations of selfhood, and empathize with their felt experiences in imaginary environments. He considers how our own faculty of memory, in all its selective particularity and planned oblivion, becomes an increasingly significant dimension of (...) the critical act, and how our own emotions become aggressive readers of literary experience, culminating in states which define the genres of literature. Beecher illustrates his points with examples from major works of the Renaissance period, including Dr Faustus, The Faerie Queene, Measure for Measure, The Yorkshire Tragedy, Menaphon, The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolphus, and The Moral Philosophy of Doni. In this volume, studies in the science of mind come into their own in explaining the architectures of the brain that shape such emergent properties as empathy, suspense, curiosity, the formation of communities, gossip, rationalization, confabulation, and so much more that pertains to the behaviour of characters, the orientation of readers, and the construction of meaning. Discussing a breadth of topics – from the mysteries of the criminal mind to the psychology of tears – Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds is the most comprehensive work available on the study of fictional worlds and their relation to the constitution of the human brain. (shrink)

This paper is a tentative step towards a historical cognitive science, in the domain of memory and personal identity. I treat theoretical models of memory in history as specimens of the way cultural norms and artifacts can permeate ('proto')scientific views of inner processes. I apply this analysis to the topic of psychological control over one's own body, brain, and mind. Some metaphors and models for memory and mental representation signal the projection inside of external aids. Overtly at least, medieval and (...) Renaissance theorists agreed that such models had to allow for, or even guarantee, some conception of cognitive order and discipline. Individual memory traces had to be independent, not mixed up or interfering with others. The long tradition of improving or bypassing 'natural memory' by deliberately internalizing artefactual models was part of an arduous process of self-fashioning. Moral panic about confusion and mixture features centrally in the imposition of cognitive discipline in local memory traditions. (shrink)

This collection of essays, written by leading experts, showcases historiographical problems, fresh interpretations, and new debates in medieval and Renaissance history and political thought. Recent scholarship on medieval and Renaissance political thought is witness to tectonic movements. These involve quiet, yet considerable, re-evaluations of key thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Machiavelli, as well as the string of lesser known "political thinkers" who wrote in western Europe between Late Antiquity and the Reformation. Taking stock of thirty years of (...) developments, this volume demonstrates the contemporary vibrancy of the history of medieval and Renaissance political thought. By both celebrating and challenging the perspectives of a generation of scholars, notably Cary J. Nederman, it offers refreshing new assessments. The book re-introduces the history of western political thought in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the wider disciplines of History and Political Science. Recent historiographical debates have revolutionized discussion of whether or not there was an "Aristotelian revolution" in the thirteenth century. Thinkers such as Machiavelli and Marsilius of Padua are read in new ways; less well-known texts, such as the Irish On the Twelve Abuses of the Age, offer new perspectives. Further, the collection argues that medieval political ideas contain important lessons for the study of concepts of contemporary interest such as toleration. The volume is an ideal resource for both students and scholars interested in medieval and Renaissance history as well as the history of political thought. (shrink)

Renaissance Thought and Its Sources presents the fruits of an extraordinary lifetime of scholarship: a systematic account of major themes in Renaissance philosophy, theology, science, and literature, show in their several settings. Here, in some of Paul Oskar Kristeller's most comprehensive and ambitious writings, is an exploration of the distinctive trends and concepts of the Renaissance, grounded in detailed historical investigation.All of these fourteen essays were originally delivered as lectures. Part One identifies the classical sources of (...) class='Hi'>Renaissance thought and exposes its essential physiognomy, indicating its humanist, Aristotelian, and Platonist traditions. The next two parts present Renaissance thought in the historical context of the Latin and Greek Middle Ages. Part Four offers a thematic study of Renaissance thought, examining its characteristic conceptions of man's dignity, destiny, and grasp of truth. Part Five forms a summary from the perspective of a central theme of Renaissance intellectual life and of the entire Western tradition: the relation of language to thought and the seemingly insoluble contest between our literary and philosophical traditions.The reader of "Renaissance Thought and its Sources" enjoys the results of meticulous study in a concise yet comprehensive format. Throughout, Kristeller achieves a graceful blending of sever historical scholarship and adherence to humane values that the editor calls "nearly a lost art in our times.". (shrink)

Renaissance magic was an attempt to supply Platonism with a philosophy of nature that could compete with Aristotelian physics. It was expected to heal the increasing breach between science and faith. However, the basic presupposition of every magic worldview, the notion of a living universe, favors immanentism and arguably hastened the rise of secularism. Secularism, it should be noted, was not an identifiable set of theories but a process towards modernity with its correspondent philosophical theology. Three different stages in (...) that development can be shown in the philosophical systems of three famous Renaissance magicians: Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, and Tommaso Campanella. (shrink)