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Mixtures is of central importance for Galen's views on the human body. It presents his influential typology of the human organism according to nine mixtures (or 'temperaments') of hot, cold, dry and wet. It also develops Galen's ideal of the 'well-tempered' person, whose perfect balance ensures excellent performance both physically and psychologically. Mixtures teaches the aspiring doctor how to assess the patient's mixture by training one's sense of touch and by a sophisticated use of diagnostic indicators. It presents a therapeutic regime based on the interaction between foods, drinks, drugs and the body's mixture. Mixtures is a work of natural philosophy as well as medicine. It acknowledges Aristotle's profound influence whilst engaging with Hippocratic ideas on health and nutrition, and with Stoic, Pneumatist and Peripatetic physics. It appears here in a new translation, with generous annotation, introduction and glossaries elucidating the argument and setting the work in its intellectual context.

Martin Folkes (1690–1754) was Newton's protégé, an English antiquary, mathematician, numismatist and astronomer who would in the latter part of his career become simultaneously president of the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries. Folkes took a Grand Tour from March 1733 to September 1735, recording the Italian leg of his journey from Padua to Rome in his journal. This paper examines Folkes's travel diary to analyse his Freemasonry, his intellectual development as a Newtonian and his scientific peregrination. It shows how, in this latter area, how he used metrology to understand not only the aesthetics but also the engineering principles of antique buildings and artefacts, as well as their context and place in the Italian landscape. Using Folkes's diary, his account book of his journey in the Norwich archives, and his correspondence with other natural philosophers such as Francesco Algarotti (1712–1764), Anders Celsius (1701–1744) and Abbé Antonio Schinella Conti (1667–1749), this paper will also demonstrate to what extent Folkes's journey established his reputation as an international broker of Newtonianism, as well as the overall primacy of English scientific instrumentation to Italian virtuosi.

This bibliography does not aim at comprehensiveness. It is conceived as a guide to future reading and research, beyond the works mentioned in the text. The topic of the Enlightenment has never been short of major general surveys. Besides those mentioned in the text, the reader might consult still valuable examples of an older style of interpretation well represented by the lively writing of Paul Hazard, The European Mind 1680–1715 (first published in French in 1935, English translation 1963), and his European Thought in the Eighteenth Century: From Montesquieu to Lessing (1946 and 1963). Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (London, 1968) is valuable for its extended treatment of science in this period. Lucien Goldmann, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment: The Christian Burgess and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1973) examines this period from a Marxist perspective. Radical reinterpretations of the Enlightenment are well represented by Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981). More recently, Jonathan Israel's trilogy, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006), The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), and Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (Oxford, 2011) has been hotly debated. See also Anthony J. La Vopa, ‘A New Intellectual History? Jonathan Israel's Enlightenment’, Historical Journal , 52 (2009), 717–38; Antoine Lilti, ‘Comment ecrit-on l'histoire intellectuelle des Lumieres?’, Annales ESC 64 (2009), 171–206. See also Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hans Reill, eds, What's Left of the Enlightenment? A Post-Modern Question (Stanford, CA, 2001); Daniel Gordon, ed., Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History (New York, 2001). Conflicts over the meaning of the Enlightenment may be further explored in E. Behr, ‘In Defence of Enlightenment: Foucault and Habermas’, German Studies Review , 2 (1988), 97–109, and in Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in The Foucault Reader , ed. P. Rabinow (New York, 1984). See also Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge MA, 1992).

In the mediaeval and early modern periods the notion of necessity was found important in both theological and scientific areas. For the mediaevals, following Aristotle, a scientific result had to be deduced from universal, necessary principles via a valid syllogism, to yield a universally necessary conclusion: It is clear [said Aristotle] that if the propositions from which a deduction proceeds are universal, then it is necessary for the conclusion of such a demonstration … to be eternal. There is therefore no demonstration of perishable things, nor any understanding of them simpliciter but only incidentally, because nothing holds of them universally but only at some time and in some way. In the late fifteenth century Petrus Garsia, bishop of Ussellus in Sardinia, noted that this left experimental results outside the scientific fold: “To assert that … experimental knowledge is science or a part of natural science is ridiculous … [Experimental knowledge] according to those of that opinion, is practical knowledge, whereas natural science in itself and in all its parts is purely speculative knowledge.” This view was still held in the early modern period, especially among the writers of logic texts, although others, following Francis Bacon, pointed to natural philosophy's need for a new notion of demonstration. Theologically, the derivations of truths about God and God's relation to humanity provided examples of necessity, but another, distinct, modal notion was also in play, that of necessary existence, which remained an important notion, theologically, throughout the early modern period. For the mediaeval views I shall concentrate on Aquinas, whose writings provide us with a variety of senses, sometimes overlapping, of necessity, and which also provide a clear account of the notion of necessary existence. Necessity and Necessary Existence in Aquinas There are a number of senses of necessity in Aquinas and other mediaeval authors. Here I consider four which remained important in the early modern period: necessity as the self-evident, tensed necessity, absolute necessity, and necessary existence. Self-Evidence Thomas notes that “self-evident” truths need not be obviously self-evident: necessary truths may be difficult to discover. Effectively dismissing the ontological argument when considering the question “Whether the existence of God is self-evident?”

Thomson's election to the Cavendish Chair William Thomson could still not be enticed back to Cambridge from Glasgow, despite a memorial, spearheaded by J.J. Thomson and sent to him with the signatures of a number of distinguished Cambridge scientists, urging him to stand. The Cavendish Chair was duly advertised and for the first time there was a competitive election. There were five candidates – Richard Glazebrook, Joseph Larmor, Osborne Reynolds, Arthur Schuster and Joseph John (J.J.) Thomson. Larmor was now Professor of Natural Philosophy at Queen'sCollege, Galway, while Reynolds and Schuster both held professorships, in Engineering and Applied Mathematics respectively, at Owens College, Manchester. Somewhat to his own and the University's surprise, the electors offered the chair to the 28-year old Thomson. Glazebrook was Rayleigh's choice, but Davis and Falconer (1997) argue that he was too wedded to the programme of the precise establishment of physical standards to appeal to the electors. Reynolds was thought to be more an engineer than an experimental physicist. The electors took a bold gamble on Thomson, but he undoubtedly had the potential to become a distinguished physicist. Thomson had entered Owens College, Manchester at the age of 14 and was fortunate to be instructed by inspiring scientists – Thomas Barker lectured on mathematics, Balfour Stewart on natural philosophy and Osborne Reynolds on engineering physics. According to Arthur Schuster, Stewart made extensive use of argument by analogy, very much in the Maxwell tradition, and Reynolds, the pioneer of turbulent flow in fluid dynamics, lectured on the role of vortices in fluid motion. In Thomson's final years at Owens College, Schuster lectured on Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism and Poynting, who was to become a lifelong friend, was developing his insights into the interpretation of Maxwell'sequations. This training stood him in good stead when he was successful at his second attempt in obtaining funding in the form of an exhibition to Trinity College; in 1876 he matriculated studying for the Mathematical Tripos. Thomson was coached by Edward Routh and in 1880 he graduated second wrangler behind Joseph Larmor and joint first Smith'sPrize winner.

In February of the year 1616 a group of advisers to the Holy Office met in Rome to consider the Copernican teaching that the Earth moved around a stationary Sun. They concluded that this theory was ‘foolish and absurd in philosophy’, and that it explicitly contradicted many passages of Holy Scripture ‘according to the literal meaning of the words’. For the latter reason the doctrine was declared formally heretical. While it was the name of Copernicus that appeared in the official decree of the Holy Office, and Copernicus's De revolutionibus (1543) that was then placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, the chief target of the decree was the brilliant astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). The famous Florentine, who for several years had openly championed the motion of the Earth, was specifically warned at this time against teaching or defending this controversial theory – a theory that was deemed to be at odds with the biblical witnesses. At first Galileo seemed content to comply with the wishes of the ecclesiastical authorities, but eventually, in 1632, he published his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems which, in spite of its dialogue form, set out a relatively unambiguous case for Copernicanism. In the following year Galileo was tried in Rome and convicted of ‘vehement suspicion of heresy’. On 22 June 1633, in a room adjoining the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, he read a humiliating retraction of his views concerning the motion of the Earth. He was placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life and his Dialogue was added to the Index, where it stayed until 1835.The well-known story of Galileo lends a certain credence to the idea that throughout history there has been a perennial struggle between a rational and enlightened scientific world-view on the one hand and the forces of religious oppression on the other. It must be said that, amongst historians of science, the myth of an ongoing conflict between science and religion now finds few, if any, adherents. Nevertheless, on the face of it the Galileo affair does suggest that the victories of the new seventeenth-century science – ‘natural philosophy’ as it was then known – were won only against a determined opposition from those who believed that the literal words of Scripture were the sole authority in scientific matters.

Kepler was the greatest mathematical astronomer of his generation and, with Galileo , the strongest advocate of the Copernican system in the first third of the seventeenth century. His determination of the elliptical orbit of Mars and his three laws of planetary motion , taken together with his attempt to delineate the forces that cause planetary motion, effectively instituted the new discipline of celestial mechanics (Kepler 1992 [1609]). Kepler also made major advances in optics . In his Ad vitellionem paralipomena (Kepler 2000 [1604]), he established the modern theory of vision and of the functioning of the eye as an optical device. Then, in his Dioptrice (1611), he significantly advanced the theory of the telescope. Descartes’ intellectual debt to Kepler is deep and complex and has often been misunderstood or oversimplified. In a rare display of candor, Descartes confessed to Mersenne in 1638 that Kepler had been “his first master in optics” (AT II 86). This refers, first of all, to Descartes’ successful demonstration of the anaclastic properties of planohyperbolic lenses, following his discovery of the law of refraction of light in 1626–27. Descartes was stimulated by Kepler's surmise along these lines in the Dioptrice, where he had to employ an approximate version of the law. Equally importantly, in his Dioptrics (1637), Descartes transposed into mechanistic terms Kepler's revolutionary theory of vision. However, the intellectual links between Descartes and Kepler extend further, to their overall natural philosophical agendas and results: just as Kepler was not simply an astronomer, so Descartes was not simply a mathematician or metaphysician. Descartes, like Kepler, was a bold, pro-Copernican and anti-Aristotelian natural philosopher. Both also envisioned the mathematization of natural philosophy, pursuing that aim in the form of what Descartes explicitly called “ physico-mathematics .” The goal was to revise the Aristotelian view of the mixed mathematical sciences – such as astronomy, optics, and mechanics – as merely descriptive or instrumental. These disciplines were to become more intimately related to natural philosophical issues of matter and cause , the details depending upon the brand of natural philosophy an aspiring physico-mathematician endorsed. This is the deeper lesson that Kepler's novel, more physicalized optics taught to the young Descartes, and what he pursued in optics and theory of light throughout his career, employing corpuscular-mechanical rather than Keplerian Neoplatonic conceptions of matter and cause (Schuster 2012, Dupre 2012).

chapter 12 Luck in Aristotle’s Physics and Ethics Monte Ransome Johnson Human life is pure luck. (Solon apud Herodotus 1.32.4) He said that he owed thanks to luck for three things: ‘first, that I was born a human and not a beast; second, a man and not a woman; third a Greek and not a Barbarian’. (Diogenes Laertius 1.33) Aristotle was the first philosopher to offer a systematic account of luck (he tuche) and to include it as a significant topic in both physics and ethics. In the Physics he complains that his predecessors, although they treat luck as a cause, have not explained its relation to art, nature, and necessity: ‘they all speak of some things happening by luck and others not, and so they should have at least taken some note of these things’ (196a15–17). Thus Aristotle repeatedly calls for an investigation of luck and the wider phenomena of spontaneity (to automaton). This he delivers not only in Physics 2.4–6, but also in several other stretches of natural philosophy (APo. 1.8–11; Cael. 2.6; GA 3.11; Metaph. 7.7–9). In his ethics, Aristotle blazes a parallel dialectical trail. Although the predecessors mentioned luck in their ethical discussions (Aristotle himself refers to Socrates 1 in Plato’s Euthydemus), no one before Aristotle defined luck or explained how it relates to the causes of happiness. Aristotle, however, explicitly framed the problem of moral luck in several sustained discussions (EN 1.9–11; EE 7.14; MM 2.8). In physics, Aristotle walks a middle course between one extreme of making luck and spontaneity the causes of everything in the universe, and another extreme of eliminating these causes. Thus although Aristotle refuses to recognise any spontaneous occurrences in the heavens, he theorised many spontaneous phenomena in the meteorological and EE 7.14.1247b15. See Plato Euthydemus 279c. Aristotle complains that Socrates focused only on ‘what virtue is’ and not ‘how or why it comes about’ (i.e. its causes) at EE 1.5.1216b10.

‘There is no method except to be very intelligent.’ (T. S. Eliot, 1921) There is a history behind the adulation of the scientific and empirical in the west: behind its ‘scientism’, which is obsession with science or even faith in it, as opposed to respect (and gratitude) for its obvious achievements. To trace this history, or perform a ‘genealogy’, in Foucauldian terms, is to suggest that what we take for granted – here, the obsession with science – is simply or merely the outcome of contingent circumstances that might have been otherwise. (It should nevertheless be noted that this does not prove that a particular set of values is worth less. Everything has to come from somewhere, and is not relegated to less standing in virtue of that.) The history here is that at around the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, western Europe entered what is now known as the Era of Scientific Revolutions. In England Boyle and Hooke gave their names to laws governing the behaviour of gases and springs respectively; Harvey is credited with discovering the circulation of the blood (although this appears to have been known in China and the Arab world several centuries earlier). Elsewhere in Europe, Vesalius systematised anatomy, Galileo developed powerful new telescopes and established that the Earth goes round the Sun, and Leeuwenhoek’s improvement of the microscope made something like modern microbiology possible. Leibniz and, later in the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton developed the mathematics that science needed for its advances. The development of science, which in fact at this time was called ‘natural philosophy’, was formalised through the foundation of the Royal Society in London in 1665 and similar bodies elsewhere in Europe and America.

The first unquestionably big idea in the history of philosophy was the idea of form. The idea of course belonged to Plato, and was then domesticated at the hands of Aristotle, who paired form with matter as the two chief principles of his metaphysics and natural philosophy. In the medieval period, it was Aristotle’s conception of form and matter that generally dominated. This was true for both the Islamic and the Christian tradition, once the entire Aristotelian corpus became available. For this reason, although there is much to say about the fate of Platonic Forms in medieval thought, the present chapter will focus on the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotelian commentators have been puzzled by form and matter for as long as there have been Aristotelian commentators. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that these are topics about which Aristotelians have never formed a very clear conception, and that their failure to do so was the principal reason why Aristotelianism ceased to be a flourishing research program from the seventeenth century onward. For those who aspire to a modern revival of Aristotelianism, the concepts of form and matter can easily take on the aspect of a kind of Holy Grail, such that if only we could get these ideas clearly in focus, we could see our way forward on any number of philosophical fronts, such as the union of mind and body, the coherence and endurance of substances, the nature of causality, and so on.

Most popular accounts of the introduction of Aristotle’s natural philosophy credit Arabic civilization with transmitting classical Greek works to the Latin West. By contrast, a few contemporary authors, hostile to Islam, deny any contribution of the Islamic world to scholasticism. Neither claim is credible. As we shall see, although Arabic Aristotelianism did not provide the primary access to Aristotle’s texts themselves, it did make a profound contribution to scholastic natural philosophy. Confounding this dispute is a misunderstanding of the significance of Arabic-based Aristotle translations. Scholastic authors seldom commented on translations based on the Arabic Aristotle. Almost every major scholastic commentary on Greek philosophical works is based on a direct translation from Greek into Latin, with a few early exceptions. Scholastics evidently recognized that though they were often harder to follow and more obscure than translations from the Arabic Aristotle, Greek-based translations were closer to the original. So let us look chiefly at the influence of the interpretative tradition of Arabic Aristotelianism on the Latin West, after saying a few words on translations of Arabic texts. We will suggest that though scholastics did not comment on Arabic-based translations of Aristotle, without these translations and more importantly without the interpretative tradition that accompanied them, the scholastic tradition would have been much poorer; indeed, it might never have arisen. After all, James of Venice’s translations had been available since about 1150, but Aristotelian analytics, metaphysics, and natural philosophy began to influence major scholastic authors only when the Michael Scot translations became available around 1225.

Modern assessments of the extent, nature and direction, of the connection between Orphism and Pythagoreanism remain widely divergent. This chapter examines a number of examples and concentrates on individual actors, phenomena, and specific texts. It focuses on those features that are most commonly considered as the principal areas of overlap between Orphism and Pythagoreanism. The chapter suggests that a number of texts coming from Pythagorean and Orphic sources share a general methodology of giving new religious relevance to concepts issuing from and integrated into natural philosophy. Thus, the connection between Orphism and Pythagoreanism might take subtler forms than adherence to metempsychosis and a vegetarian diet. Greek religion is marked by a high degree of variation at the level of local communities and individual conceptions. It turns to the level of literary phenomena, texts written by Pythagoreans and poems attributed to Orpheus, and the more specific doctrinal points expressed in them.

The atmosphere and its manifold changes have held fascination for men and women ever since human beings have trod this Earth. Its study played an integral role in the evolution of natural philosophy from which all of our present sciences have sprung. F. Sherwood Rowland, Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, 1995 It is widely believed that the abundance of the principal gases N 2 and O 2 is determined by equilibrium chemistry. One of the larger problems in the atmospheric sciences is that of reconciling that belief with the uncomfortable fact that these same gases are cycled by the Biosphere with a geometric mean residence time in thousands of years. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (1974) Sherwood Rowland’s comment at the banquet held to honor receipt, along with Paul Crutzen and Mario Molina, of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, places the atmosphere at the center of some of the most influential scientific discoveries to have been made during human history. Within Rowland’s comment we can recognize Thales of Miletus who in the sixth century BC struggled to understand the different states of water and the process of evaporation, Lavoisier in the late eighteenth century discerning the exchange of oxygen between organisms and the atmosphere, and Arrhenius in the early part of the twentieth century calculating the relation between the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and the earth’s surface temperature. The importance of the atmosphere in the history of natural philosophy is clearly underscored by these seminal studies. Within all of these studies, however, is the undeniable influence of the earth’s surface and in particular the earth’s biosphere, on the chemical composition and dynamics of the atmosphere. The two are linked in a type of “co-dependency” in which processes and change can only be understood through studies that include both biotic and abiotic systems. The requisite nature of the nexus between the biotic and abiotic domains of the earth system is recognizable, albeit in extreme form, in the controversial concept of “Gaian homeostasis” laid out by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in 1974. While we (the authors) do not, in its entirety, endorse the tenets of a Gaian earth, we do recognize the value of this concept in defining the biosphere and atmosphere as coupled and interdependent systems. It is this interdependency, and the processes that maintain it, that will be the focus of this book.

Descartes is well known as a mathematician and natural philosopher. However, none of Descartes's biographers has described the invitation he received in 1633 to fill a chair in theoretical medicine at the University of Bologna, or the fact that he was already sufficiently known and respected for his medical knowledge that the invitation came four years before his first publication. In this note I authenticate and contextualize this event, which I refer to as the ‘Bologna affair’. I transcribe the letter written to the Bolognese Senate announcing efforts to bring Descartes to the university and explain the events that led to Descartes receiving the invitation. While many questions about the Bologna affair cannot be answered because of the paucity of the historical record, I conclude that the event invites us to consider again the larger historiographical issue of how best to integrate the history of medicine with the history of science and philosophy during the early modern period.