John Dee's Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion. Nicholas H. Clulee

Isis ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-135
Author(s):  
Lesley B. Cormack
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Science And Religion

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 197-202
Author(s):  
Mike A. Zuber
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Chemical Processes ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Jacob Boehme ◽  
Material Substances

The epilogue summarises the book’s narrative and outlines avenues for future research. Spiritual alchemy is chiefly important as a hybrid that defies a straightforward distinction between science and religion. In a way, its story is one of religious dissenters productively appropriating natural philosophy to articulate their faith. After laboratory alchemy was effectively eclipsed and the link to Jacob Boehme weakened, spiritual alchemy lost its internal cohesion and gave way to many divergent interpretations of alchemy that distanced it from the manipulation of material substances through chemical processes. Future studies will be able to shed more light on various alternative interpretations of alchemy that can now be perceived more clearly in contrast to the long tradition of spiritual alchemy described in this book.

scholarly journals Robert Boyle and the representation of imperceptible entities

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDER WRAGGE-MORLEY
Keyword(s):  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Scientific Ideas

AbstractIn this essay, I examine Robert Boyle's strategies for making imperceptible entities accessible to the senses. It is well known that, in his natural philosophy, Boyle confronted the challenge of making imperceptible particles of matter into objects of sensory experience. It has never been noted, however, that Boyle confronted a strikingly similar challenge in his natural theology – he needed to make an equally imperceptible God accessible to the senses. Taking this symmetrical difficulty as my starting point, I propose a new approach to thinking about the interconnections between Boyle's natural philosophy and natural theology. For the most part, studies of science and religion in the early modern period work by seeking out the influence of explicitly stated religious beliefs on scientific ideas. I argue, by contrast, that we need to focus on Boyle's representational practices, using his attempts to represent imperceptible entities as a means of uncovering metaphysical and theological presuppositions that he did not always articulate when stating his religious beliefs. With new interpretations of bothA Discourse of Things Above Reason(1681) andSome Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of the Resurrection(1675), I show that there were crucial similarities between Boyle's practices for representing both God and atoms. I go on to show, moreover, that Boyle used these practices to enact an ontological stance at odds with one of his most important professed beliefs.

Albertus, Magnus or Magus? Magic, Natural Philosophy, and Religious Reform in the Late Middle Ages*

2010 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Collins
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Dominican Order ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Albert The Great ◽  
Human Endeavor ◽  
The Witch

AbstractThis article analyzes the fifteenth-century attempt by the Dominican order, especially in Cologne, to win canonization for the thirteenth-century natural philosopher Albert the Great. It shows how Albert's thought on natural philosophy and magic was understood and variously applied, how the Dominicans at Cologne composed his vitae, and how the order's Observant movement participated in these developments. It situates the canonization attempt at the intersection of two significant trends in which the order was a leading participant: first, the late medieval efforts to reform Christian society beginning with the religious life of monks and mendicants; second, the increasing concerns about the practice of learned and demonic magic that laid groundwork for the witch-hunting of the early modern period. The article aims to shed light on intersections of science and religion — their apprehension and negotiation — at a decisive moment in European history for both fields of human endeavor.

scholarly journals Demystification of the Idea Of Transcendent God or is it Possible to Unite Religion and Science?

2020 ◽  
pp. 17-28
Author(s):  
Andrew Gizha ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Religion And Science ◽  
Principal Autonomy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Life Phenomena ◽  
True Knowledge ◽  
Theological Thought

The article considers the historically determined relation of two essential forms of social consciousness, science and religion. The condition for the productivity of its disclosure is going beyond the limits of a simple and non-reflective preference for a state of faith or scientific knowledge. It gives the opportunity of formation of veracious cognitive discursive-conceptual practice. First of all, it presupposes philosophic formulation that is a non-idealized approach to comparative-analytical view on the existence of science and religion as social life phenomena. Secondly, it needs a valid socio-culturally determined essential basis for this or that view on a given relation. Thirdly, it reaches its determinacy in the desired transformation of socially determined types and ways of perception. Preliminarily, religion and science are to be determined in their principal autonomy. In sociohistoric regard, religion is the basis and vital condition for the appearance of the archaic patrimonial form of the social. Science, starting from the era of Greek natural philosophy, asserts such a cognitive dialectic of concepts, where there is no place for external compulsion, but the sphere of freedom of the thinking individual is formed. In both cases, we observe the output into limiting statement of sensually-material or conceptual-ideal regards. Their further existence requires well-known separation of the spheres of the essential presence of science and religion. Also, it is necessary to preserve the religious sense of the cosmically-generic significance of man with the retention of humanity as its immanent quality, but without the Old Testament cosmologically-oriented traditions. Natural science, on the other hand, establishes a monopoly on true knowledge of nature, society, history, and thought, without, accordingly, the positivist limitations of its own premises. The result of these differentiations will be the procedure of dearchaization of theological thought, its establishment in the perspective of the predominant moralethical and subject-rationalistic orientation.

Divine Variations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terence Keel
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Reasoning Strategies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Difference ◽  
Biblical Commentaries

The view that science and religion are necessarily in conflict has increasingly lost favor among scholars who have sought more nuanced theoretical frameworks for evaluating the configurations of these two bodies of knowledge in modern life. This book situates, for the first time, the modern study of race into scholarly debates concerning whether the conflict thesis is a viable analytic framework for assessing the relations between religion and science. Arguing that the conflict model is thoroughly inadequate, this book shows that the formation of the race concept in the minds of Western European and American scientists grew out of and remained indebted to Christian intellectual history. Religion was not subtracted from nor did it stand in conflict with constructions of race developed across the modern life and health sciences. The argument made in this book is based on a reexamination of paratheological texts and biblical commentaries from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, works in early Christian natural philosophy, seminal studies in German ethnology and early nineteenth-century American social science, debates among twentieth-century Progressive Era public health scientists, and contemporary genetic analysis of ancient human DNA. Divine Variations recovers the hidden history of how Euro-American scientists inherited from their Christian ancestors a series of ideas and reasoning strategies about race that profoundly shaped the modern biological construction of human difference.

scholarly journals Before Science and Religion: Learning from Medieval Physics

2021 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-135
Author(s):  
Tom McLeish
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
Scientific Imagination

Scientists today are surprised when confronted by the sophistication of natural philosophy of the thirteenth century. Although clearly of a former age and holding very different perceptions of material structure, its mathematical and imaginative exploration of nature is striking. It also finds a natural theological and contemplative framing; because of this it can work as a resource for contemporary projects constructing ‘theology of science’ and constructing different approaches to the relation of science and religion. Taking the work of the English polymath Robert Grosseteste from the 1220s as an example, I exemplify these claims in more detail through three aspects of medieval physics: 1) a teleological narrative for science; 2) a fresh apprehension of scientific imagination; and 3) a christological and incarnational metaphysics.

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