In the early modern age, two causal models are clearly identifiable: action at a distance—a typical Renaissance paradigm, widespread among thinkers involved in natural magic and seventeenth-century Neoplatonists—and action by contact, on which both the Aristotelians and the Cartesians agreed. Pierre Gassendi too seems to endorse the motto: ‘Nihil agit in distans nisi prius agit in medium’ [Nothing acts at a distance unless it acts through a medium]. In this essay, it will be shown that a third causal model exists, (...) according to which material bodies are surrounded by ‘atmospheres’ of effluvia or qualities, which spread within a circumscribed ‘sphere of activity’, whose extension is peculiar to each body. In particular, it will be shown: what the third causal model was like, from an ontological point of view, that is, how it centred on the concepts of effluvium and spiritus, or qualitas; what this model was like, from a gnoseological point of view; how it was theorized by... (shrink)

The twelve decades of modern academic history of physics have provided enough material for the study of the history of history of physics, the focus of which is the development of the opinions and methods of historians of physics. The achievements of historians of physics are compared with the achievements of their objects of research, the physicists. Some correlations are expected. The group of historians-researchers and the group of their objects interacted. In several cases, the same person started out as (...) a researcher and later moved on to the field of researcher of research achievements. There are also some competence-related quarrels between the two groups, the historians and the physicists. The new science called history of history of physics could be useful in a special case study of Jesuits. Jesuit professors formed a special group of physicists and historians studying the physicists, who were very influential in their time. Jesuits, except the very best of them such as Rudjer Bošković, Athanasius Kircher, or Christopher Clavius, were later omitted from historical surveys by their Enlightenment opponents. In the second half of the 19th century, Jesuit historians produced a considerable amount of useful biographies and bibliographies of their fellows. This makes them an interesting research subject for the history of history of physics as one of the best researched scientific-oriented networks worldwide, especially the Jesuits who were active in China. (shrink)