84:4 October 2001
Physics Before Newton 

Advisory Editor: Karl Schuhmann, Utrecht)

This issue of The Monist deals with the theories of physics which were dominant in the centuries before Newton’s Principia. Special attention will be given to late Scholastic views of physics, for example in the work of the Conimbricenses and Toletus, and also in the work of such early Protestant Scholastics as Melanchthon, Keckermann and Alstedius. Consideration may be given also to Renaissance views of nature, for example as proposed by Telesio, Patrizi, Ramus; and to mechanicistic views of nature such as those of Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, and Malebranche. Galileo, Kepler and other prominent scientists may also be considered. Contributions are invited which expound and criticize the works of these and related thinkers, or which offer general surveys and elucidations of the philosophical significance of work in fields such as optics, astronomy and medicine in the period in question.

Table of Contents:

Raz D. Chen Morris

Optics, Imagination and the Construction of Scientific Observation

Frank D. Horstmann

Hobbes on Hypotheses in Natural Philosophy

Sven K. Knebel

Pietro Sforza Pallavicino's Quest for Principles of Induction

Cees van Leijenhorst

Place, Space and Matter in Calvinist Physics

Christoph Lüthy

An Aristotelian Watchdog as Avant-Garde Physicist: Julius Caesar Scaliger

Peter McLaughlin

Contraries and Counterweights: Descartes’ Statical Theory of Impact

Jean-Luc Solères

The Question of Intensive Magnitudes among some Jesuits in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries