Summary When dealing with philosophical questions such as the choice of a world system or the substance of heaven, some sixteenth-century astronomers, including Tycho Brahe and Christophe Rothmann, devised more accurate experimental setups so that they could refine their celestial observations. With this desire to listen to nature arose new questions, in particular that of atmospheric refractions, the understanding and resolution of which became decisive to guarantee the best accuracy. However, to solve such practical problems, it was necessary to consider (...) their philosophical and theological background, as well as the knowledge of optics inherited from the medieval period. We examine this heritage and its transmissions through the works of Peter Ramus's assistants, especially Jean Pena and Friedrich Risner. From this first survey, we try to analyse the lively debate on atmospheric refractions in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by exploring the argumentative structure, the philosophical background, and the epistemological grounds of the discourse of authors such as Tycho Brahe, Christoph Rothmann, and Johannes Kepler. (shrink)

This paper takes up Shannon Rodgers’ 2016 critique of curriculum writers’ call for observable verbs, pp. 563–578), and argues that a more effective line of critique should focus not on metaphorical thinking, but on the notion of observation itself, by way of Nietzsche on metaphor, the history of astronomy, the non-existence of dragons and dissuading indigenous people from voting.

The studies that make up this book were written and brought together to honor the memory of Jan Pinborg. His unexpected death in 1982 at the age of forty-five shocked and saddened students of medieval philosophy everywhere and left them with a keen sense of disappoint ment. In his fifteen-year career Jan Pinborg had done so much for our field with his more than ninety books, editions, articles, and reviews and had done it all so well that we recognized him (...) as a leader and counted on many more years of his scholarship, his help, and his friendship. To be missed so sorely by his international colleagues in an academic field is a mark of Jan's achievement, but only of one aspect of it, for historians of philosophy are not the only scholars who have reacted in this way to Jan's death. In his decade and a half of intense productivity he also acquired the same sort of special status among historians of linguistics, whose volume of essays in his memory is being G. L. Bursill-Hall almost simultane published under the editorship of ously with this one. Sten Ebbesen, Jan's student, colleague, and successor as Director of the Institute of Medieval Greek and Latin Philology at the University of Copenhagen, has earned the gratitude of all of us by memorializing Jan 1 in various biographical sketches, one of which is accompanied by a 2 complete bibliography of his publications. (shrink)

The paper argues that the two best known formal logical fallacies, namely denying the antecedent (DA) and affirming the consequent (AC) are not just basic and simple errors, which prove human irrationality, but rather informational shortcuts, which may provide a quick and dirty way of extracting useful information from the environment. DA and AC are shown to be degraded versions of Bayes’ theorem, once this is stripped of some of its probabilities. The less the probabilities count, the closer these fallacies (...) become to a reasoning that is not only informationally useful but also logically valid. (shrink)