The purpose of this essay is to show that there was one person, perhaps only one, who developed a rigorously scientific cosmology nearly two thousand years ago. Cosmology is the largest of all subjects, with a long history, and the cosmology considered here is the one that endured for the longest part, nearly three-quarters, of that history. By cosmology I mean a description of the universe as a whole and of the arrangement of its principal parts. But by scientific cosmology, (...) I mean something more. For a cosmology to be considered scientific, three criteria must be met: it must be quantitative, physical, and empirical. Quantitative means that it must assign some scale of distances and sizes to its parts. Physical means that it must rest upon some kind of physical or mechanical principles, causes, for the ordering and motion of its parts. Finally, empirical means that it must either be derived from observation or, if derived theoretically, as from physical or mechanical principles, it must be confirmed by observation. I set out these criteria, which may not be exclusive or exhaustive but are surely within reason, in order to define our subject and exclude mythological or theological cosmologies, which generally meet none of the criteria, and philosophical cosmologies, as those of Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes, which may meet one or two in some way, although not rigorously, but surely do not meet all three. I am not concerned with whether the cosmology or the criteria upon which it is based are correct. Compared to our present understanding, the scale may be off by orders of magnitude, the physics may be entirely mistaken, and the observations may be inaccurate. But if all three are present I would call the cosmology scientific, and if not I would not call the cosmology scientific. (shrink)

Summary Tycho Brahe's lunar theory, mostly the work of his assistant Christian Longomontanus, published in the Progymnasmata (1602), was the most advanced and accurate lunar theory yet developed. Its principal innovations are: the introduction of equant motion for the first inequality in order to separate the determination of direction and distance; a more accurate limit for the second inequality although requiring a more complex calculation; additional inequalities of the variation and, in place of the annual inequality in Tycho's earlier theory, (...) a reduction in the equation of time; in the latitude theory a variation of the inclination of the orbital plane and an inequality of the motion of the nodes; a reduction in the range of variation of distance, parallax, and apparent diameter. Some of these were already present in Tycho's earlier lunar theory (1599), but all were changed in notable ways. Twenty years later Longomontanus published a modified version of the lunar theory in Astronomia Danica (1622), for the purpose of facilitating the calculation through new correction tables, and also explained his reasons for parts of the theory in the Progymnasmata. This paper is a technical study of both lunar theories. (shrink)

For forty years, beginning with the publication of the first modern English translation of the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Stillman Drake was the most original and productive scholar of Galileo's scientific work of our age. During that time, he published sixteen books on Galileo, including translations of almost all the major writings, and Galileo at Work, the most comprehensive study of Galileo's life and works ever written. His collection Discoveries and Opinions on Galileohas remained in print since (...) its appearance in 1957 and has become the most widely read of all books on Galileo. In addition to his books, Drake published about 130 papers, of which nearly 100 are on Galileo and the rest on related aspects of the history and philosophy of science. This three-volume collection includes eighty of those papers. Drake's papers are an essential supplement to his translations and other books because it was in his papers that he wrote his most detailed technical studies of Galileo's scientific work. There is hardly a subject in Galileo's science that is not considered. Perhaps the most important is the series on mechanics and motion, in which Drake analysed Galileo's manuscript notes recording the experiments by which he discovered and confirmed the law of the acceleration of falling bodies. There are also papers on the notes in which Galileo recorded his discovery of Jupiter's satellites and on other aspects of Galileo's astronomy, including his defence of the Copernican theory. Other papers consider Galileo's life and scientific work in general, exploring what Drake calls the 'scientific personality' of Galileo along with his scientific method and philosophy of science. In addition to the papers on Galileo, there are a number of papers on medieval and early modern science, principally on mechanics, and on the philosophers A.B. Johnson and J.B. Stallo, both of whom influenced Drake's own philosophy of science. (shrink)

This paper is another of the papers presented at a conference on Pain organised under the auspices of the London Medical Group. Mark Swerdlow deals with the work of pain relief clinics and explores their value. He gives the background as to what these clinics are, describes who is treated, how they are staffed and finally offers his opinion as to their effectiveness.

Professor Westman’s reply need be considered only briefly. When I received for review The Copernican Question, Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order, with its superlative commendations, I believed I had in my hands a book of surpassing erudition, the culmination of more than forty years of study by one of the world’s greatest experts on Copernicus and the astronomy and astrology of the Renaissance and early modern period. Imagine my surprise as I read this vast tome and discovered that it did (...) not appear worthy of Professor Westman’s eminence. Still, I reviewed the book as well as I could and, leaving aside matters of opinion, concentrated upon two issues, competence and trust. Is Professor Westman .. (shrink)

The last chapter of Politian's first Miscellanea dealt with the amica silentia lunae through which the Greeks sailed back to Troy. He argued that the phrase should not be taken literally, as a statement that Troy fell at the new moon, but in an extended sense, as a poetic indication that the moon had not yet risen when the Greeks set sail. This reading had one merit: it explained how Virgil's moon could be silent while the Greeks were en route (...) but shine during the battle for the city. Yet Politian's effort to identify the phase of the moon described by Virgil was anything but clear: Non igitur aut sera fuerit aut pernox luna, tum nec lunae quidem omnino coitus, sed tempus arbitror potius quamdiu illa non luceret. Accordingly, though his arguments were sometimes repeated by commentators and teachers, they won little assent from scholars who occupied themselves seriously with the passage. In his Adversaria Turnebus took silentia lunae as referring ‘ad noctis taciturnitatem…non ad interlunium’. In the first chapter of his De rebus per epistolam quaesitis Giano Parrasio sharply criticised the fuzziness of Politian's explanation: ‘Ambages istae sunt, ambages’. More important, he quoted a line from the Little Iliad: νξ μν ην μέσση, λαμπρ δ' πέτελλε σελήνη. This he rendered ‘Nox erat intempesta, nitebat et aurea coelo Luna’, and inferred from it that the moon had been up when Troy fell. In his Virgilius collation scriptorum Graecorum illustratus, finally, Fulvio Orsini published a scholium on Euripides' Hecuba, one which quoted both the line from the Little Iliad and an analysis of it by the Peripatetic Callisthenes. He too took the line as refuting Politian. (shrink)

Technical chronology establishes the structure of calendars and the dates of events; it is, as it were, the foundation of history, particularly ancient history. The chronologer must know enough philology to interpret texts and enough astronomy to compute the dates of celestial phenomena, above all eclipses, which alone provide absolute dates. Joseph Scaliger, so we are told, was the first to master and apply this range of technical skills: Of the mathematical principles on which the calculation of periods rests, the (...) philologians understood nothing. The astronomers, on their side, had not yet undertaken to apply their data to the records of ancient times. Scaliger was the first of the philologians who made use of the improved astronomy of the sixteenth century to get a scientific basis for historical chronology. So Mark Pattison. This verdict can be challenged on a number of grounds. The one relevant at present is simple: Scaliger himself claimed far less. He certainly said that technical chronology had been untouched in modern times — not an entirely fair judgement — but in antiquity it had been practised in exactly the manner he considered proper, or so he believed. In particular he singles out Censorinus, whose De die natali drew extensively on Varro's lost Antiquitates rerum humanarum, books 14–19, for information on chronology. Students of Varro have long appreciated the importance of Censorinus. His dry and compact treatise offers Varronian views on etymology, the human life-span, and the course of history itself, all couched in language so jejune as to suggest that he added little or nothing to what he read. (shrink)

The last chapter of Politian's first Miscellanea dealt with the amica silentia lunae through which the Greeks sailed back to Troy . He argued that the phrase should not be taken literally, as a statement that Troy fell at the new moon, but in an extended sense, as a poetic indication that the moon had not yet risen when the Greeks set sail. This reading had one merit: it explained how Virgil's moon could be silent while the Greeks were en (...) route but shine during the battle for the city . Yet Politian's effort to identify the phase of the moon described by Virgil was anything but clear: Non igitur aut sera fuerit aut pernox luna, tum nec lunae quidem omnino coitus, sed tempus arbitror potius quamdiu illa non luceret. Accordingly, though his arguments were sometimes repeated by commentators and teachers, they won little assent from scholars who occupied themselves seriously with the passage. In his Adversaria Turnebus took silentia lunae as referring ‘ad noctis taciturnitatem…non ad interlunium’. In the first chapter of his De rebus per epistolam quaesitis Giano Parrasio sharply criticised the fuzziness of Politian's explanation: ‘Ambages istae sunt, ambages’. More important, he quoted a line from the Little Iliad: νξ μν ην μέσση, λαμπρ δ' πέτελλε σελήνη. This he rendered ‘Nox erat intempesta, nitebat et aurea coelo Luna’, and inferred from it that the moon had been up when Troy fell. In his Virgilius collation scriptorum Graecorum illustratus, finally, Fulvio Orsini published a scholium on Euripides' Hecuba, one which quoted both the line from the Little Iliad and an analysis of it by the Peripatetic Callisthenes. He too took the line as refuting Politian. (shrink)

Technical chronology establishes the structure of calendars and the dates of events; it is, as it were, the foundation of history, particularly ancient history. The chronologer must know enough philology to interpret texts and enough astronomy to compute the dates of celestial phenomena, above all eclipses, which alone provide absolute dates. Joseph Scaliger, so we are told, was the first to master and apply this range of technical skills: Of the mathematical principles on which the calculation of periods rests, the (...) philologians understood nothing. The astronomers, on their side, had not yet undertaken to apply their data to the records of ancient times. Scaliger was the first of the philologians who made use of the improved astronomy of the sixteenth century to get a scientific basis for historical chronology. So Mark Pattison. This verdict can be challenged on a number of grounds. The one relevant at present is simple: Scaliger himself claimed far less. He certainly said that technical chronology had been untouched in modern times — not an entirely fair judgement — but in antiquity it had been practised in exactly the manner he considered proper, or so he believed. In particular he singles out Censorinus, whose De die natali drew extensively on Varro's lost Antiquitates rerum humanarum, books 14–19, for information on chronology. Students of Varro have long appreciated the importance of Censorinus. His dry and compact treatise offers Varronian views on etymology, the human life-span, and the course of history itself, all couched in language so jejune as to suggest that he added little or nothing to what he read. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Martha Nussbaum's Aristotelian analysis of compassion and pity is faulty, largely because she fails to distinguish between an emotion's basic constitutive conditions and the associated constitutive or "intrinsic" norms, "extrinsic" normative conditions, for instance, instrumental and moral considerations, and the causal conditions under which emotion is most likely to be experienced. I also argue that her defense of compassion and pity as morally valuable emotions is inadequate because she treats a wide variety of objections (...) as all stemming from a common commitment to a Stoic conception of the good. I argue that these objections can be construed as neutral between conceptions of the good. I conclude by arguing that construed in this way there are nonetheless plausible replies to these objections. (shrink)

ABSTRACT An overview of some of the main modes of making images of natural objects and processes, as they have appeared in the history of science, leads to two main conclusions. First, the dichotomies that have traditionally distinguished, for example, art from science, museums from laboratories, and geometrical from algebraic methods have produced a poverty of understanding of visualization. It is at the intersections of these dichotomies where much of the creative work of science occurs, and it is into those (...) intersections that this Focus section leads us. Second, the section suggests that we need to understand images as arguments. Generalizing, we need to develop a “materialized epistemology” that reunites sensual with ideational knowing. Recent work in the history of science is already pointing the way and producing a dramatically new historiography. (shrink)

From the point of view of non-classical logics, Heyting's implication is the smallest implication for which the deduction theorem holds. This book studies properties of logical systems having some of the classical connectives and implication in the neighbourhood of Heyt ing's implication. I have not included anything on entailment, al though it belongs to this neighbourhood, mainly because of the appearance of the Anderson-Belnap book on entailment. In the later chapters of this book, I have included material that might be (...) of interest to the intuitionist mathematician. Originally, I intended to include more material in that spirit but I decided against it. There is no coherent body of material to include that builds naturally on the present book. There are some serious results on topological models, second order Beth and Kripke models, theories of types, etc., but it would require further research to be able to present a general theory, possibly using sheaves. That would have postponed pUblication for too long. I would like to dedicate this book to my colleagues, Professors G. Kreisel, M.O. Rabin and D. Scott. I have benefited greatly from Professor Kreisel's criticism and suggestions. Professor Rabin's fun damental results on decidability and undecidability provided the powerful tools used in obtaining the majority of the results reported in this book. Professor Scott's approach to non-classical logics and especially his analysis of the Scott consequence relation makes it possible to present Heyting's logic as a beautiful, integral part of non-classical logics. (shrink)

Is it possible to establish a line of research that brings Gabriel Marcel and Jean-Paul Sartre closer together? With this article, we will positively support this idea, by distancing ourselves from the overly rigid interpretations that exclusively focus on antinomic elements sliding into a reductionist and nowadays “canonical” presentation of the relationship between these philosophers. Beyond the undeniable and, fortunately, unmediated differences between the two philosophers, this article aims to investigate their positions regarding the concept of “relationship”. In doing so, (...) we will highlight how Gabriel Marcel’s “coesse” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “being-for-others” have numerous points of contact that place both philosophers, beyond their personal positions in the religious sphere, within the common ground of “existentialism”. (shrink)