Historians have claimed that the two closely related concepts of animism and natural teleology were both decisively rejected in the Scientific Revolution. They tout Robert Boyle as an early modern warden against pre-modern animism. Discussing Avicenna, Aquinas, and Buridan, as well as Renaissance psychology, I instead suggest that teleology went through a slow and uneven process of rationalization. As Neoplatonic theology gained influence over Aristotelian natural philosophy, the meaning of animism likewise grew obscure. Boyle, as some historians have shown, exemplifies (...) this uneven process. There is an unresolved tension between his religious convictions and the implicit animism of his empirical practice. (shrink)

Sixteenth century pharmacology was still very much under the influence of a distinction going back to ancient medicine: the distinction between effects of medicaments that were taken to be explainable by the elementary qualities, their mutual modification in mixture, and the combination of these modified elementary qualities on the one hand, and the effects of medicaments that were taken not to be explicable in this manner.1 Galen coined the expression that a medicament of the latter kind possesses the capacity of (...) acting "by its whole substance,"2 and the question of how actions of the whole substance could be explicated gave rise to heated controversies in early modern pharmacology. Did Galen just... (shrink)

ZusammenfassungAuf der Grundlage einer Vielzahl von Quellen, darunter Manuskriptnotizen und eine breite Auswahl an veröffentlichtem Material, bietet dieser Artikel zum ersten Mal in englischer Sprache eine Analyse von Landis Werken vor ihrem medizinischen und philosophischen Hintergrund. Ich behaupte, dass Landis Werk zwar charakteristisch für das paduanische Milieu des 16. Jahrhunderts ist, dass aber seine Herangehensweise an methodische Fragen der Anatomie und der Kunst sowie seine Paraphrase von Aristoteles’ De anima es ermöglichen, ihn in der Mitte der häretischen Tradition zu verorten, (...) die von Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) bis Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623) reicht. (shrink)