Abstracts Archive

[...] Rational Mechanics will be the sciences of motion resulting from any forces whatsoever, and of the forces required to produce any motion, accurately proposed and demonstrated [...] And therefore we offer this work as mathematical principles of his philosophy. For all the difficulty of philosop...

In this talk I assess how the availability of Newton's writings in a searchable, digital format has transformed our capacity to understand and explain his intellectual work. I examine the ways in which the existence of various datasets has allowed modern researchers both to examine Newton's work in ...

This presentation seeks to show how naturalistic attitudes and interests that developed in the sixteenth century were a part of Boyle’s intellectual milieu. Their influence is seen in the evolution of his reflections on natural philosophy. From early in his natural philosophical career, Boyle rout...

The importance and profile of transmutational alchemy in royal and princely courts of the early modern period, particularly in German lands, has been a valuable area of research for some time. Hopeful transmuters, or those with other valuable chymical knowledge, frequently offered themselves and fou...

William Gilbert (1544-1603), a founder of early modern science in Britain, was the author of De magnete (On the Magnet, 1600), esteemed by many later natural philosophers for its rejection of scholasticism and extensive use of experiment. Since the 19th century, Gilbert has been routin...

This panel aims at shedding light on a relevant field of the history of science: botany. The study of plants remained generally immersed in collections of items or in the work of apothecaries, or displayed a secondary role in scientific knowledge. Although this picture has never been properly engage...

 The fields of the History of Science and Environmental History have both staked their professional inquires on the assumption that science attempts to know nature. Yet new work in both fields has raised new questions. If there are eras and places in which the concept of nature did not even exist, ...

Albert the Great’s De vegetabilibus represents the first complete treatise on the vegetal world in the medieval Latin West. Albert focuses on plant physiology, especially dealing with digestion, as he adapts the doctrine of human digestion to plants by describing every activity in them as due to a...

The nature and extent of Isaac Newton’s religiosity has become a dominant feature of Newtonian scholarship, ever since the opening of the Jerusalem archives. However, whereas Richard Westfall, for example, could acknowledge Newton’s piety, and recognize the earnestness with which he had pursued ...

One might expect that our knowledge about a figure as well known and influential as Isaac Newton would be in a settled state after some three hundred years of historical research.  The present session reveals the reality to be quite the contrary.  The world of Newton scholarship is in a st...

In seventeenth-century Europe the practice of curating specific alchemical texts in order to create a comprehensive body of work increased rapidly owing to the technology of the printing press and the belief that these types of tract were most successful when used in tandem. Evidence of readership p...

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In the study of the conflict thesis of science and religion, two central questions persist: Why does belief in inevitable historical conflict between science and religion remain current, in spite of over a half century of historians' best efforts to refute it. Why did this belief and its central nar...

The subject of Isaac Newton’s alchemy has raised varying degrees of controversy since the 1936 Sotheby’s auction that made it widely known to the public.  Thanks to the sudden availability of about a million words on alchemy written by the famous physicist over a period of some thirty years, th...

In the Seventeenth century medicine, botany does not restrict to the uses of simples and the fabrication of therapeutics, but also to the analogy between plants and animals. The study of plants work in the explanation of some specific living conditions, operations, and organs. In this paper, I espec...

It used to be widely accepted that the eighteenth-century emergence of the 'aesthetic' as a category of experience depended on an explicit denial of the pleasures, pains, and functions of the body. In recent years, however, scholars such as Aris Sarafianos have become increasingly interested in...

When medieval and early modern England was threatened by currency crisis, the possibility of transmutation became a matter of state. From the fourteenth century, English monarchs and their ministers cracked down on counterfeiting while simultaneously turning to alchemists to help resolve bullion sho...

European dried gardens from the 16th century have been traditionally associated with either the traditional genre of pharmacopeias or with the emergence of early modern botany.  This paper reviews a sample of the 37 known exemplars of these bound collections of books, and argues that the design...

In early modern Europe, many princes saw enormous value in supporting natural knowledge at court, regularly supporting experts who could extend the power of the state over nature and sustain the health of the sovereign. In the mid-sixteenth century, however, a disturbing cluster of incidents at seve...

Darwin’s idea of an evolutionary tree of life sprouted from this and other tree-sketches of his early notebooks (Notebook B, 1837), illustrating the way in which all species are connected by common descent. In On the Origin of the Species (1859), there is one “indispensable [illustration] to sho...

In early April of 1602, Kepler took what was to prove a fateful step in working out his Mars theory. He had already formulated a prototype of the “area law,” which we now know as his Second Law. This, he thought, would be a more accurate replacement for Ptolemy’s equant, which he saw as a stan...

This session investigates how early modern European courts influenced, and were influenced by, controversies over natural knowledge, taking alchemy as its exemplar. Alchemy was always a politically-inflected science, whose practitioners promised to both preserve and enrich the person of the prince b...

This paper looks at famed chemist (or chymist) Robert Boyle’s Origin of Forms and Qualities and considers an un-named target of Boyle: William Harvey. Boyle published Origin of Forms and Qualities in 1666 as an attempt to eliminate reliance on Aristotelian forms, promoting instead his own corpuscu...

It has long been debated whether Newton's theory of color and, more generally, his optical investigations are mathematical, but Newton himself always insisted that his theory of color and that of the colors of thin plates are mathematical theories. He based his claim on his ability when utilizing th...

In 1875 Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait published The Unseen Universe, an odd book that attempted to combat materialism by using the newly formulated law of the conservation of energy to rationally explain supernatural ideas like miraculous happenings, the immortality of the soul, Christ’s ...

In 1861 the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker published a devastating review of an expedition undertaken by his German rivals, the Brothers Schlagintweit, to India and Central Asia. “There is ... a suspicion abroad,” Dalton informed readers of the Athenaeum, “that the brothers’ appointment was o...

In 1700 Johann Bernoulli (1667-1748) brought barometric light under control with his 'new phosphor'. It initiated a wave of inquiries that resulted, among other things, in the development of the first electrical engines. Bernoulli's apparatus was just one instance of phosphor at that time. Light-bea...