Vesalius and the Reading of Galen's Teleology*

1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy G. Siraisi
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
New Information ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Experience ◽  
Ancient Texts

Sixteenth-century approaches to the world of nature remained resolutely bound to ancient texts. Hostility to the medieval past, new theories, new experiences, and new information were evidently abundantly present. But medieval predecessors were far more likely to be criticized for failure to understand ancient authority than for slavish dependence on it; dissatisfaction with intellectual tradition was apt to express itself in form of a call for return to the ideas of ancients who preceded the standard school authors in time; and in every branch of natural philosophy, natural history, and medicine, examination of the writings of ancient Greek authors was a major, perhaps the major, part of the task of the investigator. Innovators — some of them very bold and some very eccentric indeed — reworked, recombined, and criticized the ancients, or measured their teachings against modern experience; but they seldom ignored them.

scholarly journals Hippocrates, Galen, and the uses of trepanation in the ancient classical world

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Symeon Missios
Keyword(s):  
Surgical Procedures ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
The State ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Classical World ◽  
The World ◽  
Medical Writers ◽  
Ancient Texts

✓Trepanation (ανατρησιζ) is the process by which a hole is drilled into the skull, exposing the intracranial contents for either medical or mystical purposes. It represents one of the oldest surgical procedures, and its practice was widespread in many ancient cultures and several parts of the world. Trepanation was used in ancient Greece and Rome, as described in several ancient texts. Hippocrates and Galen are two of the most prominent ancient Greek medical writers, and their works have influenced the evolution of medicine and neurosurgery across the centuries. The purpose of this paper is to examine Hippocrates' and Galen's written accounts of the technique and use of trepanation in the ancient Greek and Roman world. Examination of those records reveals the ancient knowledge of neurological anatomy, physiology, and therapeutics, and illustrates the state and evolution of neurosurgery in the classical world.

Robert Boyle and Subversive Religion in the Early Restoration

1974 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 275-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Free Inquiry ◽  
Ancient Greek Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Competing Ideas ◽  
Early Restoration

Boyle's natural philosophy as it evolved in the 1660s was the product in part of some competing philosophies and theologies. Since he defined his own thought in terms of these others, one of the best ways of understanding it and its origins would seem to be to study it in relation to this context of competing ideas—especially as this has never before been done for Boyle. This was no mere battle over philosophical and religious ideas; beneath the surface lay extreme ideological differences; the nature of society and government was at stake just as it was in Boyle's dialogue with the sects in the late 1640s and the 1650s. Indeed some of his opponents in the 1660s still represent positions against which he argued before the Restoration, and these are the ones I wish to consider here.In 1665 or 1666 Boyle wroteA Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature. By “the vulgarly received notion of nature” he means the conception deriving from ancient Greek philosophy, both Platonic and Aristotelian, that there is a governing agency in nature apart from God which cannot be reduced to the mechanical principles of matter and motion. This agency is called variously plastic nature, the astral spirits or the soul of the world, and as Boyle says is conceived by “the schools” as “a being that…does always that which is best.” Boyle's intention is to show that his own idea of nature is preferable to this Peripatetic and Platonic one because his goes further than its rival towards a proper understanding of the relations between Creator and creation.

Machines

On Purpose ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 42-60
Author(s):  
Michael Ruse
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Change ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter discusses the Scientific Revolution that is dated from the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543, the work that put the sun rather than the earth at the center of the universe to Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687, the work that gave the causal underpinnings of the whole system as developed over the previous one hundred and fifty years. Historian Rupert Hall put his finger precisely on the real change that occurred in the revolution. It was not so much the physical theories, although these were massive and important. It was rather a change of metaphors or models—from that of an organism to that of a machine. By the sixteenth century, machines were becoming ever more common and ever more sophisticated. It was natural therefore for people to start thinking of the world—the universe—as a machine, especially since some of the most elaborate of the new machines were astronomical clocks that had the planets and the sun and moon moving through the heavens, not by human force but by predestined contraptions. In a word, by clockwork!

scholarly journals Gli erbari aretini da Andrea Cesalpino ai giorni nostri

2008 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
University Museum ◽  
Over Time

The production of this book has been made possible by the collaboration of a number of scholars and the generosity of the Arezzo Provincial Authority. It provides detailed descriptions of the contents of precious botanical collections amassed by natives of Arezzo, or simply conserved in institutions situated within the territory. The book provides an overview of both herbals of dried plants and painted herbals from the sixteenth century up to the present, starting from the one created in 1563 by the Arezzo doctor Andrea Cesalpino. The first herbal in the world to be organised through systematic criteria, this collection is now in the Botanical Section of the Florence University Museum of Natural History, together with another small eighteenth-century herbal produced by a pharmacist from Cortona, Agostino Coltellini. Conserved in Cortona itself is another eighteenth-century herbal, this one painted by Mattia Moneti, while in Castiglion Fiorentino and Poppi respectively are the intriguing collections of the Hortus siccus pisanus (18th century) and of the Biblioteca Rilliana (late 17th century). Also described in the book is a herbal from the Convent of La Verna (18th century) and the Egyptian herbal of Jacob Corinaldi (19th century), conserved in Montevarchi. Finally there are also the modern herbals, illustrating the continuity over time of a practice that is the foundation of all systematic study. The book is in fact rounded off by an anastatic reprint of the description of the Cesalpino herbal published in 1858, which is still a seminal work for studies such as those contained in this collection.

The History of the Idea of Glued Linen Armour

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-514
Author(s):  
Sean Manning
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
World History ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Textile Technology ◽  
The World ◽  
Close Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Texts

Many people have heard that ancient warriors wore armour of many layers of linen cloth glued together. Critics emphasize the lack of archaeological or written evidence for this construction; supporters emphasize that their reconstructions resemble armour in ancient art and pass practical tests. Both present the theory as one that first appeared in the 1970s. This article make two contributions to the debate. It shows how sixteenth-century scholars used a peculiar medieval chronicle to understand the linen armour in ancient texts, and how paraphrases and mistranslations of their theory ultimately lie behind the glued linen of today’s experiments, and it places this debate in the world history of fabric armour and the history of armour scholarship. It proposes that theories about the armour in vase paintings and sculptures should be based on archaeological evidence, types of armour documented in other cultures, or a close study of ancient textile technology, not on simply examining artwork and reading ancient texts.

Astrology, Magic, and Optics: Facets of John Dee's Early Natural Philosophy

1977 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 632-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas H. Clulee
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Form ◽  
Scholarly Attention

John Dee (1527-1608) has received increasing scholarly attention since the completion in 1952 of I. R. F. Calder's massive dissertation, ‘John Dee Studied as an English Neoplatonist,’ and with the publication of Peter French's John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus, Dee's career and works should be fairly familiar. Prior to Calder's study, John Dee's press had been none too good, and serious scholars have labored under the burden of demonstrating Dee's place within some important intellectual tradition, so that he might be rescued from the opinion, based upon his penchant for occult studies, that he was ‘… the sport, the laughing-stock and die pray of daemons,’ or, in more modern form, ‘a rather silly man.’

Dialogism and Territoriality in a Mughal History of the Islamic Millennium

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 220-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Anooshahr
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
European Literature ◽  
The Third ◽  
New Information ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

AbstractThe sixteenth century witnessed the flowering of European literature that claimed to describe the encounter between Western travelers and the indigenous population of the rest of the world. Similarly, some Persianate writings of the same period present a dialogical encounter, not so much with the Europeanother, but with rival Muslim empires. One of the writers in this genre was Jaʿfar Beg Qazvīnī, sole author of the third part of theTaʾrikh-i alfī(Millennial History), supervised by the Mughal emperor Akbar. In his book, Jaʿfar Beg drew on an unprecedented store of sources from rival courts and treated the Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids as essentially equal political and cultural units following identical historical trajectories. He also developed one of the earliest Mughal expressions of “Hindustan” encompassing South Asia in its entirety. While most analyses of this outstanding example of dialogical historiography have downplayed its value because of its paucity of new information, the present article will seek instead to demonstrate its significance for its unusual worldview.

Miscellaneous Mastery: Reading Clement of Alexandria

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
MARK EDWARDS
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Second Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Aulus Gellius ◽  
Clement Of Alexandria ◽  
Pliny The Elder ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Amorphous Character ◽  
Ancient Texts

The aim of this learned and enterprising book is to elucidate the structure and intention of Clement's Stromateis by comparing it with pagan texts from the first and second centuries of our era which belong, as we might now say, to the same genre. This term, which is chaperoned by quotation marks on p. 15, has proved itself heuristically indispensable, but has no closer equivalent in ancient Greek than genos, which is as likely to denote the style or metre of a work as its place in a critical taxonomy. Strict conventions governed versification and the composition of speeches for given occasions, but it is we who have all but invented the epyllion and coined our own names for the novel, the autobiography and the didactic poem. While Heath proposes on p. 138 to render Stromateis as ‘layout’, ‘miscellany’ is the term that is now most commonly applied to this and other ancient texts whose amorphous character seems to resist taxonomy. As Heath observes, however (p. 24), there are all too many specimens of Greek and Latin writing which are in some sense miscellaneous: she might have quoted the thesis of her namesake, Malcolm Heath, that abrupt transitions, divagations and surprises were not aberrations from the classical norm, but calculated devices to heighten the pleasure or whet the interest of the reader, both in poetry and in prose. The culture of ubiquitous imitation was also a culture of unceasing improvisation, and both practices are amply illustrated in Heath's comparison of the Stromateis with four books from the second century to which it bears an obvious resemblance: the Natural history of Pliny the Elder, the Convivial questions of Plutarch, the Attic nights of Aulus Gellius and the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus.

Music and the Making of Modern Science

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Pesic
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Arithmetic Geometry ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Musical Scale ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The World

Music played a significant role in the making of modern science. In ancient Greek natural philosophy, music formed the earthly meeting place between numbers and perception. For the next two millennia, music remained a central part of higher education, united with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy in the quadrivium. Accordingly, innovations reverberated between all these fields. This book presents the “scientific revolution” more as a phase in the restoration and augmentation of the ancient project of musicalizing the world than a change in the basic project of natural philosophy. After discussing the original Pythagorean synthesis of music, mathematics, and sense-experiment, the book presents cases in which prior developments in music led to some new direction in science from the fourteenth century to the twentieth. These include encounters between harmony and fifteenth-century cosmological controversies, between musical initiatives and irrational numbers, between vibrating bodies and emergent electromagnetism. The book presents new accounts of Johannes Kepler’s use of music, of René Descartes’s and Marin Mersenne’s interweaving of music and natural philosophy, of Isaac Newton’s imposition of the musical scale on color, of Leonhard Euler’s musical work in relation to his mathematics and optical theory, of Thomas Young’s musical optics, of Hermann von Helmholtz’s and Bernhard Riemann’s development of new concepts of space from studies of seeing and hearing, of atomic spectra as overtones, of Max Planck’s experiments with harmoniums and choruses in relation to his subsequent quantum theory, and of the continuing quest for cosmic harmonies in contemporary physics.

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