Written by the 11th-century Spanish Arab, Abh Muhammad ibn MucnOn Twilight and the Rising of Cloudsdh's value of around 52 miles remained standard until the 17th century, when it was revised sharply downward in consideration of atmospheric refraction and barometric studies. The treatise itself survives in a single Hebrew exemplar, 25 Latin exemplars, and an Italian exemplar derived from the Latin. At the heart of this present study is a critical text based on a fullscale comparative transcription of 22 of (...) the Latin manuscripts, ranging in date from the 13th to the 17th century. (shrink)

This article examines how Jesuit Gabriele Beati taught the subject of sunspots in two textbooks commemorating his teaching of natural philosophy and mathematics at the Collegio Romano. Whereas Beati defended the incorruptibility of the heavens in his natural philosophical course, he argued that sunspots were located on the face of the sun itself and generated and corrupted like terrestrial clouds in his mathematical one. While it may be tempting to attribute these different presentations to censorship practices within the Jesuit Order, (...) they are best understood as the result of disciplinary distinctions and scholarly practices shared widely by scholars across Europe. (shrink)

The relations between different areas of knowledge have been a subject of interest to philosophers as well as to scientists and mathematicians from antiquity. While recent work in this direction has been largely concerned with the question whether one branch of knowledge can be reduced to another , the questions which exercised the Greek philosophers on these matters have a different starting point. Taking for granted that there are a number of distinct areas of knowledge, they proceeded to consider a (...) variety of relations which they observed to hold among the sciences as they knew them; the question of the priority of one science to another is a recurrent theme. In fact, three sorts of orderings were noticed, and the associated conceptions of priority are interesting. Only one of them is the concern of the present paper, though, and I shall briefly describe the remaining two only for purposes of contrast. (shrink)

The Society of Jesus established an extensive range of measures designed to ensure uniformity in natural philosophical questions. These culminated in the Ordinatio pro Studiis Superioribus of 1651. Such measures did have significant effects on the teaching and publishing of physics among the Jesuits in Germany; it was impossible for Jesuits to openly adhere to atomism, the Cartesian view of body or heliocentrism, for example. But many Jesuits did not agree with all the provisions governing censorship and attempted to mediate (...) their implementation in several ways which this study identifies. The most important of these was the use of terms such as true, probable or false. Provided that Jesuit authors identified the orthodox opinions as true or most probable, they could discuss alternative views in great depth. The essay culminates in two case studies from Germany, one from the mid-seventeenth century, the other from the first half of the eighteenth century, which illustrate the interaction of censorship and physics in actual practice. (shrink)

A document discovered in the Roman archives of the Jesuits sheds new light on the involvement of the Jesuit mathematician Christoph Scheiner in the trial of Galileo. The document suggests that Scheiner did not initiate the 1632–33 proceedings against Galileo, despite a long suspicion of his role in the events leading to Galileo’s condemnation, abjuration, and house arrest. An exploration of the contrasting conceptions of the scientific enterprise competing for hegemony within the Society of Jesus at the time of the (...) trial leads to the development of a model of scientific exchange based on money rather than gift giving. (shrink)