This paper focuses on the mathematisation of mechanics in the seventeenth century, specifically on how the representation of compounded rectilinear motions presented in the ancient Greek Mechanica found its way into Newton’s Principia almost two thousand years later. I aim to show that the path from the former to the latter was optical: the conceptualisation of geometrical lines as paths of reflection created a physical interpretation of dia­grammatic principles of geometrical point-motion, involving the kinematics and dynamics of light reflection. Upon (...) the atomistic conception of light, the optical interpretation of such geometrical principles entailed their mechanical generalisation to local motion; rectilinear motion via the physico-mathemat­ics of reflection and the Mechanica’s parallelogram rule; circular motion via the physico-mathematics of reflection, the Archimedean squaring of the circle and the Mechanica’s extension of the parallelogram rule to centripetal motion. This appeal to the physico-mathematics of reflection forged a realist founda­tion for the mathematisation of motion. Whereas Aristotle’s physics rested on motions which had their source in the nature of the elements, early modern thinkers such as Harriot, Descartes, and Newton based their new principles of mechanical motion upon selected elements of the mechanics of light motion, projected upon the geometry of the parallelogram rule for rectilinear and, ultimately, circular motion. (shrink)

Decades before Newton’s Principia ushered in the age of modern science, Aristotelian physics faced a serious challenge against its weakest point, in the quest to construct a new theory of projectile motion. Yet how were such new principles of motion conceived, without reference to an established theory of mechanics? This paper explores the conceptual space between the rejection of Aristotle’s physics and the appearance of Newton’s physics in which people such as Harriot and Galileo sought new ways to understand mechanical (...) phenomena. This paper seeks to show that both Harriot and Galileo looked to the zeitgeist of accepting the law of reflection as a law of oblique projection-rebound for all material bodies, for their foundational conceptual resource. The kinematics and dynamics of light’s compound, oblique motion had been developed over centuries within optics, and constituted the ‘ideal’ resource for novel analyses of oblique projectile motion. Whereas Harriot’s inclusion of air resistance restricted the generalizability of optical principles to his simplest case, the upright parabola, Galileo’s idealized analysis of projectile motion in a vacuum represented all cases of projectile motion as upright parabolas. He was thus able to generalize these optical principles to projectile motion per se. (shrink)

In a 1961 interview, Beckett warded off philosophical interpretations of his work: ‘I’m no intellectual. All I am is feeling’. Despite the emotional intensity of Beckett’s post-war writing, Beckett criticism has tended to ignore this claim, preferring the kinds of philosophical readings that Beckett here rejects. In particular, Beckett criticism underestimates the element of rage in his work. This paper argues that Beckett’s post-war breakthrough is enabled by a radical reconsideration of the nature of feeling and of rage in particular. (...) It involves the rejection of the idea of rage as pathological and the embrace of a positive conception of rage as drive or compulsion, a locus of energy and even pleasure.This paper reads the ‘Moran’ section of Molloy as a kind of ‘rage fable’, drawing on the ancient Greek concept of thymos, of anger as a virtue. It draws on Alfred Adler’s theory of the ‘masculine protest’, with which Beckett was familiar from his extensive note-taking on Adler in 1934-5, and Sianne Ngai’s discussion of the distinction between irritation and rage. According to this reading, Moran’s report charts a narrative of thymotic liberation from the irritations of servitude, prefiguring the Unnamable’s abandonment to impersonal affective intensities. It ends by suggesting that the prose of the Trilogy might be better understood, not as a ‘syntax of weakness’ but as a ‘syntax of rage’, a stylistic correlative of the imperious drive of thymos. We might then begin to understand the Trilogy as the epic of a heroic, impersonal, implacable and liberated rage. (shrink)