The essay explores Newton's assertion that geometry is grounded in mechanics, and demonstrates that this claim arises from his understanding of mathematical postulates. Several of Newton's unpublished works on the foundations of mathematics are examined, highlighting the various systems of postulates he developed throughout his lifetime as the foundations of geometry. Newton's research is placed in the broader context of seventeenth-century studies on axiomatics, particularly in relation to the works of mathematicians Viète and van Schooten. The article presents an inferential interpretation of Newton's conception of postulates, offering new insights into his philosophy of mathematics. This, in turn, clarifies the significance and implications of Newton's statement regarding the relationship between geometry and mechanics.
This article uses the corollaries on the densities of the planets in Book III of Isaac Newton's Principia and the manuscript notes in his personal edition of Nicolaus Mercator's astronomical textbook to reveal a social history of both the reception of Newton's cosmology and physical astronomy, and its initial conception and development.
This paper examines how the seventeenth-century Dutch Cartesian Johannes de Raey sought to reconcile the philosophies of Descartes and Aristotle. It focuses on De Raey's identification in Aristotle of a doctrine corresponding to Descartes's subtle matter and asks which strand of the Aristotelian tradition he relied on for this identification. The study centres on De Raey's 1652 disputation De materia subtili and also draws on his lecture notes preserved in manuscript form, his earliest disputation, and the disputations of his teacher Henricus Regius, in which De Raey often served as respondent. The analysis shows, first, that De Raey interpreted Aristotle as positing a subtle body analogous to the element of the stars. Second, it argues that De Raey arrived at this reading by relying on the interpretation of the Generation of Animals by the Wittenberg medical professor Daniel Sennert, whose works De Raey encountered early in his career while studying medicine under Regius. Finally, De Raey gave Sennert's interpretation a decisively materialist turn, thereby making it possible to read Aristotle within a corpuscular, Cartesian framework. In this respect, he can be placed within the broader seventeenth-century movement to reinterpret Sennert's Aristotelianism in corpuscular terms.
This essay explores the representations and uses of animal pain in early modern Italian anatomy and agronomy, focusing on the pig as both an experimental subject and a productive resource. Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, anatomists including Andreas Vesalius, Realdo Colombo, Carlo Fracassati and Marcello Malpighi relied on nonhuman bodies - especially pigs and dogs - to investigate the mechanisms of life. The animal's cry served simultaneously as evidence of suffering and as a confirmation of scientific authority. Concurrently, the agronomist Vincenzo Tanara emphasized the pig's profitability within rural economies, and the writer Giulio Cesare Croce praised its value to urban life. By combining the history of anatomy, the history of agronomy and the history of food, this study shows how pigs, living and dead, occupied a nexus of compassion and exploitation, anatomical knowledge and food production. The pig reveals a distinctive configuration of early modern knowledge, where ideas about animal utility not only circulated between different knowledge and practices, such as anatomy agronomy and cookery, but were also shaped by the porous boundaries between them.
