Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science

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Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments......Page 6
Contents......Page 7
Chapter 1: Overview: Contingency in Nature......Page 9
Secondary......Page 15
Chapter 2: Introduction......Page 16
2.1 Ontological Contingency......Page 18
2.2 Renaissance Paths to Natural and Epistemological Contingency......Page 24
2.3 Epistemological Contingency......Page 26
Secondary......Page 31
3.1 Introduction......Page 33
3.2.1 The Threat of Necessitarianism......Page 35
3.2.2 New Directions in Causation and Modal Theories......Page 40
3.2.3 Ockham’s Criticism of Scotus......Page 43
3.3.1 Knowledge of Causal Principles......Page 46
3.3.2 Ockham’s Rule for Causal Determination......Page 50
3.3.3 Power and Sacraments......Page 51
3.4.1 The Psychologization of Final Causality......Page 53
3.4.2 Banishing Ends from Nature......Page 55
3.4.3 Providence and Laws of Nature......Page 58
3.5 Conclusion......Page 60
Primary......Page 61
Secondary......Page 62
Chapter 4: Monsters, Laws of Nature, and Teleology in Late Scholastic Textbooks......Page 66
4.1 Introduction......Page 67
4.2 The Textbooks: Authors and Contexts......Page 69
4.3 The Metaphysical Assumptions: Weak Regularity and Strong Finality......Page 72
4.4 Nature’s Mistakes, the Preternatural, and “Weak” Laws of Nature......Page 74
4.5 “Strong” Finality and Diversity of Ends......Page 77
4.6 For the Benefit of Human Souls: Monsters as Portents......Page 82
4.7 Chance, Second Causes, and Providence......Page 85
4.8 Final Remarks: From “Weak” to “Strong” Laws of Nature......Page 89
Primary......Page 93
Secondary......Page 94
Chapter 5: Practices and Theories of Contingency in Renaissance Approaches to Nature......Page 98
5.1 Contingency and Practice in Scholastic and Post-scholastic Conceptions......Page 99
5.2 The Codification of Experience as a Problem in the Epistemology of Contingency......Page 101
5.3 Nature: The Living Art and the Realm of Contingency......Page 106
5.4 Divine and Human Creativity: An Access to Worldly Contingency......Page 110
5.5 Conclusion......Page 115
Primary......Page 116
Secondary......Page 117
6.1 Introduction......Page 119
6.2 Symmetry, Uniformity, and the idea mundi......Page 121
6.3 Sphericity as Physical Necessity......Page 128
6.4 Toward a Natural Philosophy of the Sphere......Page 134
6.5 Conclusion......Page 137
Primary......Page 138
Secondary......Page 139
Chapter 7: Astrological Contingency: Between Ontology and Epistemology (1300–1600)......Page 141
7.1 Introduction......Page 142
7.2 Contingency in the Late Medieval Corpus Astrologicum......Page 143
7.3.1 What Was Lutheran Astrology?......Page 150
7.3.2 Contingency and Epistemology......Page 153
7.4 Conclusion......Page 157
Primary......Page 158
Secondary......Page 159
Chapter 8: Secundum Quid and Contingentia: Scholastic Reminiscences in Early Modern Mechanics......Page 160
8.1 Contingentia: A Principle of Causality in Medieval Conceptions of Nature......Page 161
8.2 Theologizing Approaches to Natural Contingency......Page 162
8.3 Secundum Quid and Circularity as “Contingented Straightforwardness” in the Scholastic Scientia de Ponderibus......Page 165
8.4 Inclinatio Recte Eundi: Benedetti’s Generalization from Weights to Forces......Page 170
8.5 Galileo’s Cosmologization of Mechanics......Page 174
8.6 From Inclinatio to Inertia: Cartesian Perspectives......Page 178
8.7 Concluding Remarks: Contingency and Beyond......Page 180
Secondary......Page 182
Chapter 9: Manipulating Matter and Its Appetites: Francis Bacon on Causation and the Creation of Preternaturals......Page 184
9.1 Introduction......Page 185
9.2 The Role of Pretergenerations in Bacon’s Natural Philosophy......Page 186
9.3 Laws of Nature and Bacon’s Doctrine of Forms......Page 188
9.4 Latent Processes......Page 191
9.5 Natural and Artificial Generations......Page 194
9.6 Conclusions: Manipulating Matter and Its Appetites......Page 198
Secondary......Page 199
10.1 Introduction......Page 201
10.2 Descartes’ “Epistemological Contingency”......Page 209
10.3 Descartes’ Ambiguous Description of Nature in Le Monde: “Ontological Contingency”?......Page 213
10.4 Conclusion......Page 215
Primary......Page 217
Secondary......Page 218
11.1 Gentlemen’s Laws......Page 220
11.2 Boyle’s Hypothesis and Boyle’s Law......Page 224
11.3 Hooke and Mechanics......Page 228
11.4 From Boyle’s Law to Hooke’s Law......Page 232
Primary......Page 235
Secondary......Page 236
Chapter 12: Necessity, Contingency, and Freedom in Descartes’ Physiology: Spontaneity in Nature......Page 239
12.1 Introduction......Page 240
12.2 General Problems and the Varieties of Modality in Descartes......Page 241
12.3 Spontaneity in the Behavior of Cartesian Automata......Page 248
12.4 Conclusion......Page 261
Secondary......Page 262
Chapter 13: Losing One’s Temper: Contingency in Early Modern Medicine......Page 264
13.1 Introduction......Page 265
13.2 A Galenic Body......Page 267
13.3 Harvey......Page 273
13.4 Lower......Page 276
13.5 Locke......Page 279
13.6 Epilogue: Friedrich Hoffmann......Page 281
Primary......Page 285
Secondary......Page 286
Chapter 14: The Immanent Contingency of Physical Laws in Leibniz’s Dynamics......Page 288
14.1 Introduction......Page 289
14.2 The Geometrical and the Physical in the Optics......Page 292
14.3 Modality and the Elasticity of Collision......Page 299
14.4 The Measure of Force and the Hierarchy of Laws......Page 305
14.5 Concluding Remarks......Page 313
Secondary......Page 314
15.1 Obsessed......Page 316
15.2 An Urge Is Born......Page 319
15.3 Complication......Page 322
15.4 Paths of Unification......Page 324
15.5 Experiment Connects to Probability......Page 328
15.6 Conjectures......Page 336
Primary......Page 338
Secondary......Page 340

Citation preview

Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science  332

Pietro Daniel Omodeo Rodolfo Garau Editors

Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science

Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science Volume 332 Editors Alisa Bokulich, Boston University Jürgen Renn, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Michela Massimi, University of Edinburgh Managing Editor Lindy Divarci, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Editorial Board Theodore Arabatzis, University of Athens Heather E. Douglas, University of Waterloo Jean Gayon, Université Paris 1 Thomas F. Glick, Boston University Hubert Goenner, University of Goettingen John Heilbron, University of California, Berkeley Diana Kormos-Buchwald, California Institute of Technology Christoph Lehner, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Peter McLaughlin, Universität Heidelberg Agustı Nieto-Galan, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Nuccio Ordine, Universitá della Calabria Sylvan S. Schweber, Harvard University Ana Simões, Universidade de Lisboa John J. Stachel, Boston University Baichun Zhang, Chinese Academy of Science

The series Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science was conceived in the broadest framework of interdisciplinary and international concerns. Natural scientists, mathematicians, social scientists and philosophers have contributed to the series, as have historians and sociologists of science, linguists, psychologists, physicians, and literary critics. The series has been able to include works by authors from many other countries around the world. The editors believe that the history and philosophy of science should itself be scientific, self-consciously critical, humane as well as rational, sceptical and undogmatic while also receptive to discussion of first principles. One of the aims of Boston Studies, therefore, is to develop collaboration among scientists, historians and philosophers. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science looks into and reflects on interactions between epistemological and historical dimensions in an effort to understand the scientific enterprise from every viewpoint. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5710

Pietro Daniel Omodeo  •  Rodolfo Garau Editors

Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science

Editors Pietro Daniel Omodeo ERC Endeavor Early Modern Cosmology (GA n. 725883) Ca’ Foscari University of Venice Venezia, Italy

Rodolfo Garau ERC Endeavor Early Modern Cosmology (GA n. 725883) Ca’ Foscari University of Venice Venezia, Italy

This volume is an outcome of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (GA n. 725883 Early Modern Cosmology) ISSN 0068-0346     ISSN 2214-7942 (electronic) Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science ISBN 978-3-319-67376-9    ISBN 978-3-319-67378-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67378-3 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the institutions that supported our research and made this collective volume possible: the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (MPIWG), Department I; the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Episteme in Motion’ (at the Freie Universität of Berlin), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG); the University of Turin (Italy); the Israel Science Foundation (grant 469/13 based at Bar-Ilan University, and in particular professor Ohad Nachtomy); the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières; Bard College Berlin; the interdisciplinary laboratory Bild Wissen Gestaltung at the Humboldt University of Berlin (and in particular professor Christian Kassung and doctor Stefan Zieme); and the consolidator project Early Modern Cosmology funded by the European Research Council and based at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. We would also like to thank all the participants of the MPIWG Workshop The Idea of Contingency in Natural Philosophy and Science (which ran from January 2015 to December 2015), of the panel Contingency in the Early Modern Science and Natural Philosophy (History of Science Society, Chicago, November 6, 2014), and of the panel Matter of Contingency in the Early Modern Science of Nature (international conference Understanding Matter, Palermo, April 10–13, 2014) for their useful and constructive comments. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, who provided very useful comments, and Ian Lawson and Lindsay Parkhowell for the English revision of the papers.

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Contents

1 Overview: Contingency in Nature����������������������������������������������������������    1 Stephen Gaukroger 2 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    9 Rodolfo Garau and Pietro Daniel Omodeo 3 Contingency and Causal Determinism from Scotus to Buridan���������   27 Magali Roques 4 Monsters, Laws of Nature, and Teleology in Late Scholastic Textbooks ������������������������������������������������������������������   61 Silvia Manzo 5 Practices and Theories of Contingency in Renaissance Approaches to Nature������������������������������������������������������������������������������   93 Pietro Daniel Omodeo 6 “Qualis alio modo reperiri non potest.” A Few Words on Copernican Necessity��������������������������������������������������������������������������  115 Jonathan N. Regier 7 Astrological Contingency: Between Ontology and Epistemology (1300–1600) ��������������������������������������������������������������  137 Steven Vanden Broecke 8 Secundum Quid and Contingentia: Scholastic Reminiscences in Early Modern Mechanics��������������������������������������������������������������������  157 Pietro Daniel Omodeo 9 Manipulating Matter and Its Appetites: Francis Bacon on Causation and the Creation of Preternaturals��������������������������������  181 Doina-Cristina Rusu

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10 Descartes’ Physics in Le Monde and the Late-Scholastic Idea of Contingency ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  199 Rodolfo Garau 11 Bacon and the Virtuosi: Experimental Contingency and Mechanical Laws in the Early Royal Society��������������������������������  219 Francesco G. Sacco 12 Necessity, Contingency, and Freedom in Descartes’ Physiology: Spontaneity in Nature ��������������������������������������������������������  239 Balint Kekedi 13 Losing One’s Temper: Contingency in Early Modern Medicine��������  265 Sean Dyde 14 The Immanent Contingency of Physical Laws in Leibniz’s Dynamics������������������������������������������������������������������������������  289 Tzuchien Tho 15 Ars experimentandi et conjectandi. Laws of Nature, Material Objects, and Contingent Circumstances��������������������������������  317 Enrico Pasini

Chapter 1

Overview: Contingency in Nature Stephen Gaukroger

As far as scientific theories are concerned, contingent events are those that fall outside their explanatory framework, either because the theory doesn’t have the resources to explain them or because the events are unpredictable in principle. In what follows, the focus is on contingency as a problem about how we describe those features of the world that fall outside our best theories including our best high-level theories. On this understanding of contingency, contingent things are things that just happen. I want to explore how contingency, in this sense, has remained a problem from ancient to early modern scientific theories and to sketch how what might be termed “the problem of contingency” has been transformed. Let me start with Aristotle, who brings out the issues well. There are two kinds of contingencies in Aristotle, which may be connected, but which for simplicity I want to keep apart.1 The first is the distinction between events that have an explanation and accidents. Consider Aristotle’s example of two cases. In the first, I learn that a man who owes me money is going to be at the market at a particular time on a particular day, and knowing this I go to the market to confront him. In the second, I do not know where the man is, and I just happen to be in the market where he is. For Aristotle, the first meeting has an explanation: I purposely went to the market to meet the debtor. The second is accidental. It was pure chance that I happened to be in the market at the same time as him, and accidents do not have explanations: that is why we call them accidents. The Stoics, by contrast, did not believe in accidental events. They were determinists, and they argued that, in the second case, there was a chain of events that caused me to be in the market at a particular time and there 1  For a full and detailed account of contingency in Aristotle and in the Stoics, see Richard Sorabji (1980).

S. Gaukroger (*) The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. D. Omodeo, R. Garau (eds.), Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 332, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67378-3_1

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was a chain of events that caused the man to be there at that time, and if we go back far enough in the chains of events, we can connect the two. For the Stoic, there are no contingencies in nature, whereas for Aristotle there are. But what I want to focus on is a second kind of contingency, which is specific to scientific explanation. Aristotle’s conception of scientific demonstration is that demonstrations identify the nature of bodies and account for their properties in terms of these natures. I say that this tree puts out broad flat leaves in Spring because it is an elm, and that is what elms do. I say that this body falls to the ground when released from my grip because that is what heavy bodies do. I have accounted for the behavior of the body by identifying its nature. But some behavior that bodies manifest is not due to their nature. When I throw a body in the air, then its behavior is not due to its nature: it is unnatural. Aristotelian physics does not explain such unnatural behavior: it falls outside the domain of science. The problem was of course that much of this inexplicable behavior turned out to be basic to natural processes. The ancient practical mathematical disciplines that captured it—such as statics, optics, and astronomy—were neither physics, which derived things from physical natures, or mathematics, which derived behavior from mathematical natures (as in deriving the sum of the internal angles of a triangle from more basic properties of triangles). What replaced the Aristotelian notion of explanation in the seventeenth century was mechanism, which had two features.2 First, macroscopic physical events are reducible to the interactions between micro-­ corpuscles that make up bodies: there is nothing in the natural realm that cannot be accounted for in micro-corpuscularian terms, and this is the ultimate form of all natural explanations. Second, all interactions between these micro-corpuscles are deemed to be a result of exchange of motion resulting from physical contact and are as a consequence characterizable wholly in terms of mechanics. For mechanists, anything that fell outside these constraints—anything not susceptible to micro-reduction and whose constituents were not describable wholly in mechanical terms—was not part of the physical domain. The mechanists had two options in such cases. First, it could be reduced to something physical. Life, for example, was reduced to biomechanics, so that there were no genuinely living things: life was just an appearance caused by a particular kind of mechanical complexity. The second kind of case is the one of relevance to us here. This is where qualitative features of the world, such as colors and sounds, are construed as psychic additions of the perceiving mind. In the second half of the seventeenth century, mechanists were fixated on the task of absolving physical enquiry of responsibility for a huge range of questions that had been the staple of physical enquiry since antiquity. These were effectively treated as merely contingent features of the universe, by contrast with the real physical core. Of course, mechanists would not have put it in these terms. They insisted that the mechanist core was all there was to the world: it was just that there were all these added extras which one could ultimately get rid of. But they were not added extras: they were events that it was beyond the resources of mechanism to explain.  See Gaukroger (2006).

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They were events happening in the world, just like the events that mechanists believed they were able to describe. The idea was that if the two realms of the explicable and the inexplicable were translated into the two realms of explicable genuine physical events and apparent physical events that were not genuine, then the problems would go away, but of course they didn’t.



But let us consider not the realm of the inexplicable but turn rather to the realm of the explicable. I want to consider two paradigm cases of mechanical explanation—optics and celestial mechanics—which acted as models of success in the seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries. Did they in fact avoid contingency in one form or another? I want to suggest not. Take the case of optical refraction, where what was at stake was a fundamental assumption of mechanism and one which, in this context, had gone unchallenged even by Newton. This is the assumption of the ultimate homogeneity of matter.3 Newton’s prism experiments had shown that different colors are refracted differently, and it was evident that this is what is responsible for chromatic aberration. He explored whether it might be possible to avoid chromatic aberration by using composite lenses—thin lenses glued together—where the divergence of different colored rays induced by the first lens was corrected in the second lens. What one would need to do to construct such an achromatic lens would be to coordinate the refractive indices of the two joined lenses in such a way as to cause the rays to reconverge. Newton calculated that a combination could never be made to work better than a single lens, however, which meant that the problem of chromatic aberration could not be overcome in refracting telescopes. In response, he developed a reflecting telescope. Yet right from the start, there was reluctance to embrace the reflecting telescope: the reflection by the mirror produced an image much weaker than that of refracting telescopes, and the mirror itself tended to tarnish very quickly. These difficulties were significant and meant that the refracting telescope was that used throughout the rest of the century,4 with Hooke in particular arguing that the difficulties with the refracting telescope could be overcome.5 The formula for refraction on which Newton’s calculations rested was not questioned until 1748, however, when Euler replaced it with one which had the consequence that achromatic lenses were in fact possible in principle.6 Much controversy surrounded this move,  See Hutchison (1991).  See van Helden (1974). 5  See Nakajima (2006). 6  Simplifying somewhat, take the case where a homogeneous light ray travelling through a medium (say air) meets one of two different optically denser media (medium 1 and medium 2). In both cases, blue rays and red rays will diverge on entering the denser medium. Let B and R be the refractive indices for the blue and red rays in medium 1 and b and r be the refractive indices for the red and blue rays in medium 2. Newton’s formula is as follows: (R–1)/(B–1) = (r–1)/(b–1). Euler shows, on theoretical grounds, that this cannot be correct and substitutes a different formula: logR/ logB = logr/logb. 3 4

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but in 1757 a compound achromatic lens was patented, and an account of it published, by a lens-maker, John Dollond.7 On the face of it, Euler had been vindicated. The problem was that Dollond did not work from formulas expressing ratios between refractive indices, as Newton and Euler did, but instead ignored such considerations and designed the lenses on the basis of measured values of the refractive indices. These measurements did not fit either Newton’s or Euler’s formula: in fact they did not fit any formula. Euler characterizes Dollond’s calculations as “bizarre and revolting” and attempts, unsuccessfully, to develop a new theory of achromatic lenses in which the regularity of refractive indices is retained.8 Dollond’s lenses undermined a fundamental tenet of mechanistic optics, namely, the uniformity of refraction. By the principle of the uniformity of refraction, each interface and medium was held to have characteristic refractive powers, so that if two interfaces had the same power, they would produce identical refractions; moreover, the equality of refracting powers could be tested by passing rays of any particular color through them. Above all, refracting powers were held to be related to the density of the material, construed as homogeneous. But Dollond’s experience with lenses showed that individual media exerted idiosyncratic influences on the rays that passed through them. Actually, it’s worth remembering here the problems that French experimenters such as Mariotte had in reproducing Newton’s prism results, which Newton put down to them using the wrong kind of glass.9 Anyway, Dollond realized that the rays in some cases simply seemed to react with the medium through which they passed, and their behavior was capturable, if at all, in terms of chemical affinities rather than in terms of some homogeneous material.10 A range of questions which had seemed absolutely secure—etherial explanation, optical density, median rays, and Newton’s harmonic division of the spectrum—thereby came into question. It now looked as if the wrong kind of resources had been deployed, at least beyond a certain level of approximation, and even d’Alembert came to accept that it could not simply be a question of equations for refraction, writing that “there is no theoretical way either to establish or refute Newton’s equation or that of Euler … experience is the only completely reliable means of determining, not only the [values of the various refractive indices] but also [the fourth] when one knows [the other three].”11 In sum, from the point of view of physics, how light is refracted through glass has an element of contingency. We can find such contingency held up as a model for certainty in the other discipline: celestial mechanics.



 Dollond (1757–8).  See Hutchison’s masterly account in Hutchison (1991). 9  See Schaffer (1989). 10  Hutchison (1991), 150–1. 11  D’Alembert (1761–80), iii. 342–3. 7 8

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One of the features that marked out the nonmechanical physical disciplines from the mechanical ones was the aspiration to certainty in the mechanical d­ isciplines. The model par excellence was the celestial mechanics set out in Newton’s Principia. But celestial mechanics relied not only on the mathematical techniques of geometry, algebraic analysis, and calculus but also on observation. From the middle of the eighteenth century, there were a number of attempts to explore the relation between the two.12 Condorcet, for example, argued in 1768 that comparison of mathematical laws, which yielded necessary truths, and observational laws, which were imperfectly known, was the prime concern of those working in this area.13 The latter were not necessary because they were the product of the free will of an intelligent being who willed the world to be as it is rather than in any other way. God could have willed the world to be regulated by a completely different set of laws.14 Necessary laws were a manifestation of human rationality, whereas contingent ones were a manifestation of divine choice. Condorcet did not see the two as being qualitatively and unbridgeably different however, and he sought a connection in hypothetical terms.15 Five years later, Laplace offered what was to become the canonical statement of this view, writing that “The present state of the system of Nature is manifestly a consequence of its state in the preceding moment, and if we conceive of an intelligence who, at a given instant, grasps all the relations between beings in this universe, it would be able to determine, at whatever time in the past or the future the respective position, motion and, generally, the properties of these beings.”16 In following up this claim, he goes beyond Condorcet’s suggestion, opening up uncertainty to a measure of quantitative treatment: Physical Astronomy, that subject which, of everything we know, does the greatest honour to the human mind, offers us the idea, imperfect as it is, of what such an intelligence would be like. The simplicity of the laws describing what makes celestial bodies move, and the relationship between their masses and their distances, allows us, using Analysis, to follow their motions up to a certain point; and to determine the state of the system of these large bodies in past or future centuries it is enough that observations provide the mathematician with their position and speed at a given moment. Man owes this capacity to the power of the instrument he employs, and to the small number of relations involved. But ignorance of the different causes that are involved in the occurrence of these events, and their complexities, together with the imperfection of Analysis, prevent him from pronouncing with the same certainty on the greatest number of phenomena. For him, therefore, there are things that are uncertain, and there are some that are more probable and others that are  The issues were tied up with the questions of whether God was required for anything more than creating the world and to what extent the laws governing it could have been other than they are. See, for example, Batteu (1769). 13  Condorcet (1768), 4. 14  Cf. d’Alembert (1743), xxiv–xxv. 15  Condorcet (1768), 4–5. 16  Laplace (1878–1912), viii, 144. 12

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less probable. Given the impossibility of complete knowledge, he has sought to compensate by determining their different degrees of likelihood; so that we owe to the frailty of the human mind one of the most delicate and ingenious [forms of] Mathematics, namely the science of chance or probabilities.17 The introduction of probability theory into celestial mechanics raises some fundamental questions about models of understanding which bear directly on the relation between the natural and the moral sciences. The mechanical disciplines traditionally aspired to certainty, an aspiration associated with the ability to formulate theories in a rigorously mathematical form. The mathematical techniques involved here are geometry, algebraic analysis, and calculus. By contrast, the mathematics that we find in chemistry, for example, is arithmetic, often a simple manipulation of proportions. But there was another form of mathematics, probability theory, first developed in the correspondence between Pascal and Fermat in the 1650s and shaped into a mathematically powerful discipline by Jacob Bernoulli in the early eighteenth century. In his Ars Conjectandi (1713), Bernoulli writes of this discipline: To conjecture is to measure the probability of something, and the Art of Conjecture, or the Stochastic Art, is for this reason defined as the art of measuring as exactly as possible the probabilities of things, so that in our judgments and actions, we can always choose or follow the path that it would be better, safer, more preferable, and more considered to take; all the wisdom of the philosopher and the prudence of the statesman consists in this alone.18 This conception of probability locates it firmly in the moral sciences, and at first sight it may seem that probability theory could have little relevance to a mechanical discipline such as astronomy, which, from Newton’s Principia onward, was treated by many as a model of geometrical and analytical precision. But Laplace’s resort to probability theory in astronomy turned out to pave the way for very significant advances. The transformation was achieved by taking astronomy out of the realm of absolute certainty that was so dear to those who took mechanics as the paradigm form of scientific activity. It did not accomplish this by making astronomy less mathematical but by making it more mathematical, adding powerful new mathematical techniques to its resources without depriving it in any way of those resources it already relied upon. The new mathematical techniques explored and accounted for uncertainty, rather than treating uncertainty simply as an obstacle to progress and something to be overcome. Such an approach to uncertainty had direct consequences for a model of scientific enquiry that promoted certainty as the hallmark of successful enquiry. Two things are distinctive about these statistical and probabilistic procedures for our purposes. First, not only do they not originate in developments in highlyquantified areas of the sciences, such as mechanics, but they cover all disciplines—natural and moral sciences—without distinction, by contrast with geometry and analysis, for example. Second, they are models of rigorous quantitative enquiry.  Ibid., 144–5.  Bernoulli (1713), 213. For an assessment of the importance of Beroulli’s contribution, see Hacking (1971).

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Yet, whether in celestial mechanics or population studies, their value consists in showing how to determine reliable approximations rather than establishing certainty. This is a development of some consequence in considering models of successful scientific practice. Rather than rejecting contingency, pretending it isn’t there, one develops quantitative techniques to embrace it. But it remains contingency.

Bibliography Primary Alembert, Jean Baptiste Le Ronde D’. 1761–80. Opuscules mathématiques. Paris: David. ———. 1743. Traité de Dynamique. Paris: Coignard. Batteux, Charles. 1769. Histoire des causes premières: ou, Exposition sommaire des pensées des philosophes sur les principes des êtres. Paris: Saillant. Bernoulli, Jacob. 1713. Ars Conjectandi, opus posthumum. Basel: Thurnisiorum. Condorcet, Nicolas de. 1768. Le Marquis de Condorcet à Mr. D’Alembert sur le Système du Monde et sur le Calcul Intégral. Paris: Didot. Dollond, John. 1757–8. An Account of Some Experiments Concerning the Different Refrangibility of Light. Philosophical Transactions 50: 733–743. Laplace, Pierre-Simon. 1878–1912. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: École Politechnique.

Secondary Gaukroger, Stephen. 2006. The Emergence of a Scientific Culture. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press. Hacking, Ian. 1971. Jacques Bernoulli’s Art of Conjecturing. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 22: 209–229. Hideto Nakajima, Hideto. 2006. Robert Hooke as an Astronomer. In Robert Hooke: Tercentennial Studies, ed. Michael Cooper and Michael Hunter, 49–62. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hutchison, Keith. 1991. Idiosyncrasy, Achromatic Lenses, and Early Romanticism. Centaurus 34: 125–171. Schaffer, Simon. 1989. Glass Works: Newton’s Prisms and the Use of Experiment. In The Uses of Experiment, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer, 67–104. New  York: Cambridge Univeristy Press. Sorabji, Richard. 1980. Necessity, Cause and Blame. London: Duckworth. van Helden, Albert. 1974. The Telescope in the Seventeenth Century. Isis 65: 38–58.

Chapter 2

Introduction Rodolfo Garau and Pietro Daniel Omodeo

In a famous inaugural speech delivered at the University of Zürich on 9 December 1922, What is a natural law?,1 Erwin Schrödinger pointed out the difficulty that the pioneers of quantum physics encountered in their attempt to introduce a nondeterministic conception of physical laws. Schrödinger defended a vision according to which natural regularities are the statistic result of particle interactions occurring by chance. Hence, the idea that nature is determined by necessity appeared to him as a sort of long-lived philosophical prejudice which was no longer supported by the most recent scientific advancements and which he thus intended to put into question. In his view, the strength behind the understanding of the physical world as absolutely necessitated stemmed from the authority of a millenary philosophical tradition: From where does the general, widespread belief in the absolute causal determinacy of molecular events and the conviction of the unthinkability of the contrary originate? Indeed, from the inherited millenary habit to think causally, which makes an undetermined event, an absolute, primary accident, appear as perfect nonsense to us.2

The conception of nature that he questioned was the Laplacean idea that perfect knowledge of the laws of nature and of the present conditions of a physical system allows one to predict its future developments with certainty. As he stated in a conference held in Berlin in 1931:  Schrödinger (1929).  Ibid., 11: “Woher stammt nun der allgemein verbreitete Glaube an die absolute, kausale Determiniertheit des molekularen Geschehens und die Überzeugung von der Undenkbarkeit des Gegenteils? Einfach aus der von Jahrtausenden ererbten Gewohnheit, kausal zu denken, die uns ein undeterminiertes Geschehen, einen absoluten, primären Zufall als einen vollkommenen Nonsens, als logisch unsinnig erscheinen läßt.” 1 2

R. Garau (*) · P. D. Omodeo (*) ERC Endeavor Early Modern Cosmology (GA n. 725883), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. D. Omodeo, R. Garau (eds.), Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 332, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67378-3_2

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R. Garau and P. D. Omodeo Until about one and a half decades ago, nobody doubted that. Absolute determinism was, so to say, the foundational dogma of classical physics. The clear example to which one oriented himself was classical mechanics: given a system of mass points, their mass, place, and speed in an initial moment, and given the force laws, through which they interact, their movements can be calculated for all future times. This theory found its brilliant confirmation in its application to the celestial bodies.3

Schrödinger argued that the resistance encountered by his not-deterministic understanding of physics derived from a belief (even faith, “Glaube”) that originated in the historical connection between mechanics and mechanism – that is, the conception of nature inaugurated in the seventeenth century by philosophers such as Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes, which yielded a vision of natural phenomena as the result of necessary kinetic interactions between particles. Such encounter, while providing fertile terrain for the rise Newtonian mechanics, had instilled an unshakable certainty in the absolute necessity of natural phenomena. Schödinger may have been right in describing the origin of the resistance of the early twentieth-century academic world against his understanding of quantum mechanics. Nonetheless, our aim in the present volume is to argue that he was less accurate when he argued that before quantum mechanics the very idea of science at large was inextricably intertwined with that of necessary determinism and that this logical linkage coincided with causal thought tout court. Schödinger was certainly not alone in claiming such a thing. Alexandre Koyré, while characterizing early modern science as a passage from approximation to exactitude, employed the idea of causal determinism and mathematical certainty as a yardstick for scientificity in general, although he also emphasized how it was slowly established and only emerged with difficulty from the natural debates of the Renaissance. Similarly, Anneliese Maier saw the idea of physical determinism as the via magistra from medieval to modern science; with this in mind, her studies on the forerunners of Galileo aimed to rehabilitate medieval thought from the suspicion of being far removed from the scientific outlook. In his 1950 classic work on the history of science – tellingly entitled The Mechanization of the World Picture4 – Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis presented mechanism, that is, the encounter of mathematical physics and material determinism, as the leitmotiv and telos of scientific advance “from Pythagoras to Newton.” This volume intends to problematize the idea that early modern science, at its origins, was invariably characterized by such a strong commitment to an understanding of nature as determined by necessity and, as a consequence, the understanding of science as invariably bearing a deterministic vision of nature. In-depth 3  Schrödinger (1932), 2: “Bis vor etwa 1 ½ Jahrzehnten hatte man daran nie gezweifelt. Der absolute Determinismus ist sozusagen das Grunddogma der klassischen Physik gewesen. Das durchsichtigste Beispiel, an dem man sich dabei orientiert hatte, war die klassische Mechanik: gegeben ein System von Massenpunkten, ihre Massen, Orte und Geschwindigkeiten in einem Anfangszeitpunkt, gegeben die Kraftgesetzte, wonach sie aufeinander einwirken. Dann läßt sich ihre Bewegung für alle künftige Zeiten vorausberechnen. In der Anwendung auf die Himmelskörper hatte diese Theorie ihre glänzende Bestätigung gefunden.” 4  Dijksterhuis (1950).

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studies on the Aristotelian legacy in Galileo’s and Descartes’s physics have shown the philosophical continuity underlying the passage from medieval Aristotelian ­science to preclassical mechanics.5 Drawing on these insights, we propose that, at the threshold of the “Scientific Revolution,” the empirical and mathematical sciences, as well as the philosophical reflections upon them, were not embedded in a vision of nature which was rigidly determined by necessity. Instead, such a vision emerged, slowly and contradictorily, from an understanding of nature as the “realm of contingency.” This can be described as a form of “diminished or conditional necessity,” which characterized late-Scholastic and Renaissance natural philosophies at large. Our second proposal, which is closely related to the first, is that, during this passage to a necessary vision of nature, contingency turned into a theoretical problem, which questioned and challenged the limits of the theories held by early modern inquirers. In this sense, contingency slowly began to be seen no longer as an intrinsic characteristic of natural phenomena but rather as a limit of the theoretical frames that scientists and inquirers applied to the study of nature. Through this suggestion, we also mean to question a static and atemporal understanding of epistemological categories. Indeed we argue that there is something fundamentally different in the way an Aristotelian natural philosopher defined a wonder or a monstrous birth as “contingent,” a modern scientist defines the unexpected result of an experiment, and a quantum physicist the behavior of a photon.6 Although to each inquirer these instances appeared self-evidently contingent, by this they meant very different things. Here we are not going to present necessity and contingency as immutable epistemological categories that constitute unchangeable presuppositions for all scientific accounts of nature. Rather, we consider these epistemological categories as “historical a priori,” that is, ones that represent preconditions of knowledge as a priori and self-evident, though historically situated and therefore changeable over time – we consider necessity and contingency as historical categories resulting from the combination of various intellectual elements: epistemological, philosophical, material, as well as theological and broadly speaking intellectual.7

2.1  Ontological Contingency We have named this first kind of contingency  – that is, the one that appeared to characterize late-Scholastic and Renaissance natural philosophies – “ontological,” as it appears to have implied that contingency is an intrinsic characteristic of nature. With this, however, we do not intend to equate contingency to chance nor to propose that it was a per se alternative to an understanding of nature as regulated  See Damerow et al. (2004) and Renn et al. (2001): 29–149. See also Omodeo and Renn (2015).  On how the wondrous loomed large over early modern science, see Daston and Park (1998). 7  On the idea of historical a priori, see Daston (2008), Feest and Sturm (2011), and Daston and Galison (2007). 5 6

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by laws.8 In fact, early modern visions of the world generally excluded an idea of nature ruled by chance. Such rebuttal of mere chance  – often identified with Epicurean τύχη and Lucretian casus – was also motivated by the strong theological backbone that informed early modern natural philosophy. Nothing could be more extraneous to the widespread trust in God’s Providence permeating his Creation than Schrödinger’s comparison of the kinetic behavior of gas to a game of dice,9 which rather resembles the Epicurean doctrine of clinamen, which horrified most early modern inquirers. Neither Giordano Bruno’s ontological reappraisal of Lucretian physics nor Pierre Gassendi’s sober atoms-and-void matter theory excluded a superimposed, providential order of nature. Rather, it was precisely the tension between the belief in the existence of an order bestowed by God upon nature and the observable lack of absolute regularity of natural phenomena, together with the influence of the Aristotelian conception of physical sciences that prompted reflections on contingency both at the ontological and theoretical levels. The Scholastic attribution of contingency to the realm of sublunary nature heavily relied on Aristotle’s division of the sciences into necessary ones, such as the geometrical and mathematical sciences, and those characterized by regularity, but not necessity (“for the most part”.) In brief, this latter category encapsulated all knowledge applying to sublunary phenomena, such as the part of physics dealing with the terrestrial realm, and medicine. The watershed between these two kinds of sciences was identified in the presence of accident and chance, which, for Aristotle, fell into the domain of unaccountability. Aristotle determined that the reason why necessity does not dominate the sublunary world as it does with the celestial one was because of their different material composition, so that the matter characterizing our world, “capable of being otherwise than as it for the most part is, is the cause of the accidental.”10 In this way, the epistemological boundaries of science came to be identified with the ontological limits of the unpredictability of the behavior of material things.11 8  For an account of the development of the concept of natural laws in the early modern period, see Daston and Stolleis (2009). 9  Schrödinger (1932), 14: “[man denkt sich], daß beim Zusammenstoß zweier Moleküle nicht durch die bekannten Stoßgesetze, sondern durch ein passendes Würfelspiel die weitere Bahn der Moleküle bestimmt wird.” “[One imagines], that the collision of two molecules determines the further course of the molecules not by the known laws of collision, but by a suitable dice game.” 10  Aristotle (2014), 1621: “Since, among things which are, some are always in the same state and are of necessity (nor necessity in the sense of compulsion but that which means the impossibility of being otherwise), and some are not of necessity nor always, but for the most part, this is the principle and this the cause of the existence of the accidental; or that which is neither always nor for the most part, we call accidental […] Therefore, since not all things are or come to be of necessity and always, but the majority of things are for the most part, the accidental must exist” (Metaphysics E 1026b27-1027a28). 11  See also ibid., 1622: “But while what is for the most part exists, can nothing be said to be always, or are there eternal things? This must be considered later, but that there is no science of the accidental is obvious; for all science is either of that which is always or of that which is for the most part. For how else is one to learn or to teach another? The thing must be determined as occurring either always or for the most part, e.g. that honey-water is useful for a patient in a fever is true for

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Crucial to this description of chance is Aristotle’s notion of final causation. Since Aristotle claims that all phenomena and events have a certain cause or originate from a set of causes, chance can only follow if we attend to the final cause that the object or agent was likely pursuing. In other words, it is only if we know the intended outcome or supposed end of the action or activity of a certain agent or thing that we can evaluate whether they have or have not deviated from it. In Physics II, after expounding the difference between nature as art and as causal powers, Aristotle claims that chance and spontaneity (“τύχη καὶ αὐτόματον”) must also be listed among the causes that are present in nature.12 His statement was meant to oppose those who either ruled out chance from nature or attributed the origin of the universe to it: “[…] there is a third class of events besides these two – events which all say are by chance – it is plain that there is such a thing as chance and spontaneity; for we know that things of this kind are due to chance and that things due to chance are of this kind.”13 However, while “[…] results from chance are appropriate to agents that are capable of good fortune and of action generally,” and “therefore necessarily chance is in the sphere of actions (197b1-197b13)”:14 [t]he spontaneous on the other hand is found both in the beasts and in many inanimate objects. We say, for example, that the horse came spontaneously, because, though his coming saved him, he did not come for the sake of safety. Again, the tripod fell spontaneously, because, though it stood on its feet so as to serve for a seat, it did not fall so as to serve for a seat. (197b14-197b17)15

The spontaneous activity of natural things, Aristotle clarifies, is to be seen as intrinsically opposed to nature not only in respect to the end but also to the cause. Indeed, while the cause of the natural activity of objects is internal (which means, it depends on the form or nature of the thing), spontaneous activity is produced by external causes.16 Crucial to this description is Aristotle’s notion of impediment (ἐμπόδισμα), which would go on to constitute an important trait of the late-­ Scholastic characterization of contingency. Aristotle believes that the motion of natural things is characterized by their principle or ἀρχή. While most of these the most part. But one will not be able to state when that which is contrary to this happens, e.g. ‘on the day of new moon’; for then it will be so on the day of new moon either always or for the most part; but the accidental is contrary to this. We have stated, then, what the accidental is and from what cause it arises, and that there is no science which deals with it” (1027a15-1027a27). 12  See Aristotle (1984), 334: “But chance and spontaneity are also reckoned among causes: many things are said both to be and to come to be as a result of chance and spontaneity. We must inquire therefore in what manner chance and spontaneity are present among the causes enumerated, and whether they are the same or different, and generally what chance and spontaneity are” (Physics, II, 195b31-195b36). 13  Ibid., 334–335, (196b10-196b17). 14  Ibid., 337. 15  Ibid. 16  Ibid., 338: “The difference between spontaneity and what results by chance is greatest in things that come to be by nature; for when anything comes to be contrary to nature, we do not say that it came to be by chance, but by spontaneity. Yet strictly this too is different from the spontaneous proper; for the cause of the latter is external, that of the former internal” (197b18-197b36).

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motions reach their natural end, others are impeded by extrinsic factors from doing so.17 In this f­ ramework, while physical phenomena are mostly regular, irregularities can otherwise often occur or, as Aristotle puts it, “[i]n natural products the sequence is invariable, if there is no impediment.”18 Aristotle’s “last pagan commentator,” Alexander of Aphrodisia, forcefully affirmed the link between Aristotelian philosophy and natural contingency in On Fate (“Περὶ εἱμαρμένηs”). In this work, which loomed large over medieval and modern philosophical debates, Alexander rejected the Stoic equation of nature and fate. According to him, this equation was based on a false deduction of the existence of natural necessity from the observation of natural regularities, such as celestial bodies and the transmission of specific characters through reproduction. Necessity, in fact, relates solely to laws in their universality but not to individual instantiations, as is seen in the generation of monsters, corruption, and disease. As a consequence: …something always occurs in the same and constant manner if it belongs to those [phenomena] that occur according to nature, following an underlying law which they evidently respect in a determinate manner. Yet, among natural beings some others occur against nature; moreover, not all [existing things] are according to nature, as is the case with the works of art. Thus, next to the things descending from Fate are others that occur against Fate. Since that which occurs against nature exists, it is not idle to affirm that we should concede the existence of that which occurs against Fate next to that which descends from Fate. We should reasonably say that the nature of every thing is its own principle and the cause of the disposition of all things is that from which they occur according to nature.19

The last sentence of this passage reveals a crucial implication of the understanding of contingency inspired by Aristotle’s philosophy. If there are phenomena in nature that happen just by chance (and are therefore impossible to account for), and if making science means to investigate regularities, it follows that, when we are dealing with phenomena that are prone to display irregular behaviors (such as those occurring in the sublunary world), we shall focus on their internal elements of necessary causality to account for them – that is, on their essence or forms. As a consequence, contingency is not understood as a limitation of the epistemological framework that we apply to nature but rather as an intrinsic characteristic of nature.  Ibid., 340: “[…] those things are natural which, by a continuous movement originated from an internal principle, arrive at some end: the same end is not reached from every principle; nor any chance end, but always the tendency in each is towards the same end, if there is no impediment” (199b14-199b18). 18  Ibid. 19  Alexander of Aphrodisia (1658): “Unde et illud sequitur, quod eorum quae natura sunt, secundum legem aliquam praeviam, quae de iis determinate ferri videtur, unumquodque semper et constanter fiat. Cum vero inter ea quae natura fiunt, alia etiam praeter naturam fiant, et non omnia secundum naturam (eodem modo quo in Artis operibus fieri videmus) sequitur ut et inter ea quae Fato fiunt locum etiam habeant ea quae praeter Fatum fiunt. Adeo ut, si locum habeat id quod praeter naturam est., nec sit illud inane prorsus nomen, inter ea. etiam quae fato fiunt, illi, quod est. prater Fatum, locus concedendus sit. Nec igitur a ratione alienum est. si dicamus propriam cuiusque rei naturam, eius principium esse, causamque dispositionis omnium, quae ab ea. secundum naturam fiunt.” [Emphasis added] 17

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Though contingent phenomena have causes, they lie outside of what can be scientifically stated because of their intrinsic property of being contingent, and not because of an inadequacy of our method.20 As argued by Anneliese Maier in her Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert (1949), Scholastic natural philosophers generally maintained that natural agents (in contrast with free agents or “agentes ob intellectu”) were “causae determinatae,” that is, determined to act necessarily by their forms toward a certain end.21 Therefore, all natural phenomena were seen as necessitated according to their formal determination. However, at the same time, natural agents could be seen as contingent in another way, that is, according to the effective actualization of their formal determination. To give an example, a stone is necessarily determined by its form to fall toward the center of the earth which is at the same time the center of the world. This determination cannot be seen as contingent to any extent. However, accidental circumstances may well impede this action from taking place. Therefore, even if its formal determination is necessary, the actualization of this determination remains contingent. As Maier effectively summarizes: [i]n addition to this contingency of freedom, Scholasticism has a second idea of contingency, namely, that concerning natural events. This is not the modality of the agere on the side of the cause, but the modality of the fieri on the side of the effect. For though every act of a natural agent works with necessity, the effect does not always occur with necessity, but can be somehow thwarted by other causes or by the lack of disposition in the patiens or otherwise. In this case one speaks of “contingent” events, whereby the word contingency no longer denotes the undeterminateness of the action, but the uncertainty in the realization of the effect.22

 For a discussion of the issue of contingency and necessity in medieval philosophy and its theological implication, see Roques, Chap. 3 of this volume. 21  Maier (1949), 222–223: “Jede anorganische Ursache, jedes ‘agens a natura’ wirkt nach Aristoteles mit Notwendigkeit, d.h. immer und immer in derselben Weisen, ein agens libere (ein agens ab intellectu) dagegen mit Kontingenz derart, dass es unter gleichen Bedingungen einen Effekt hervorbringen oder nicht hervorbringen kann. Es ist das ein fundamentaler Unterschied swichen den beiden Gruppen von wirkenden Kräften, die die Scholastik unterscheidet: die einen sind causae determinatae, die mit mechanischer Notwendigkeit auf ein bestimmes Ziel hinwirken und immer wirken (oer wenigstens immer zu wirken bestebt sind), während die andern causae intederminatae sind, die ceteris paribus mit einer ‘contingentia ad utrumlibet’ wirken oder nicht wirken können.” 22  Ibid., 223: “[…] neben dieser Kontingenz der Freiheit gibt es für die Scholastik noch eine zweite, nämlich eine Kontingenz der natürliche Ereignisse. Bei dieser handelt es sich nicht um die Modalität des agere auf Seiten des Ursache, sondern um die Modalität des fieri auf Seiten des Effekts. Denn obwohl jedes agens naturale mit Notwendigkeit wirkt, tritt der Effekt nicht immer mit Notwendigkeit ein, sondern kann per accidens durch andere Ursachen oder durch die mangelnde Disposition im patiens oder sonst irgendwie vereitelt werden. In diesem Fall spricht man von ‘kontingenten’ Ereignissen, wobei das Wort Kontingenz nicht mehr die Undeterminiertheit des Wirkens, sondern die Unsicherheit im Zustandekommen der Wirkung bezeichnet. Der Gegensatz zu dieser Kontingenz ist die Modalität derjenigen Effekte, due schlechtin immer und unvermeidlich eintreten, wenn die sie anstrebenden Ursachen gegeben ist.” 20

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In Scholasticism (and in general, premodern natural philosophy), this latter form of contingency was commonly defined as “contingentia ut plurimum.” According to this conceptualization, contingentia ut plurimum (that is, contingency for what concerns things happening for the most part) characterized phenomena of the sublunary world in that they can be impeded by external constraints from carrying out their natural activity to completion. One can trace back an influential example of such a conceptualization of contingency in Scholasticism to Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics. Here, Aquinas characterizes contingent phenomena as those that can be impeded, in contrast with necessary ones, which cannot be impeded at all.23 Such a formulation, as often happens, was codified and reported by Scholastic manuals (as, for instance, by Rudolph Goclenius’ 1613 Lexicon Philosophicum24 and by Johannes Micraelius’ 1653 homonymous work25) at least until the mid-sixteenth century. Examples of this conceptualization found their place not only in physics but also in “biological” and medical studies. In these domains, the emergence of irregularities  – such as monstrous births  – was often understood as deriving from the departure from teleological determination due to the resistance of matter.26

 Aquinas: “Sciendum etiam quod quidam definierunt esse necessarium, quod non habet impedimentum; contingens vero sicut frequenter, quod potest impediri in paucioribus. Sed hoc irrationabile est. Necessarium enim dicitur, quod in sui natura habet quod non possit non esse: contingens autem ut frequenter, quod possit non esse. Hoc autem quod est. habere impedimentum vel non habere, est. contingens. Natura enim non parat impedimentum ei quod non potest non esse; quia esset superfluum.” “[…] someone defines to be necessary what does not have any obstruction; and also contingent for what concerns things that happen for most part as what can be impeded on few occasions. But this is not correct. Indeed, they say necessary is defined as what by nature cannot not be; contingent or for the most part, what can not be. Rather, what can have or not have impediment is contingent. Nature indeed does not dispose an impediment for what cannot not be, for this would be superfluous” Commentaria in libros physicorum,” in Corpus thomisticum, electronic edition (http://www.corpusthomisticum.org), lib. 2 l. 8 n. 4. […]−2. 24  Goclenius (1613), 464: “Modi, quo Continges aliquid dicitur, tres sunt: Unus, quo dicitur quid evenire plerunque [sic] seu ut plurimum: Alter, quo pro re nata: Tertius, quo raro, ut fortuna. Primi Modi contingentia per se causas habent, & sunt epistemata, cum sint eorum rationes universales, ut necessariorum, quibus sunt vicina. Secundi et Tertii modi contingentia non habent causas necessarias, sed accidentalis. Itaq; non sunt epistemata. Horum (secundi & tertii modi) causae dicuntur indefinitae, quia effecta possunt efficere, vel non efficere, ita ut incerta sint. Ac Aliae sunt liberae, aliae fortuitae, & casuales.” “There are three ways in which something is said to be contingent. First, of what is said to happen for the most part; second, according to circumstances; third, and more rarely, by chance. The contingent things of the first kind have per se causes, and are sciences, because their properties are universal as those of things said to happen by necessity, to which are similar. […]” 25  Micraelius (1653), 277: “Contingens ut plurimum, est. quod fit natura, cui quandoque ponitur impedimentum,” that is, “Contingent for the most part is what happens in nature, whenever an impediment is given.” 26  See Manzo, Chap. 4 in this volume. 23

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2.2  R  enaissance Paths to Natural and Epistemological Contingency Contingency also held a fundamental role in the science and gnosiology of the Renaissance. Already in the fifteenth century, important reflections on the character of human knowledge and of nature, such as those from Nicholas of Cusa, anticipated the profound revision of the understanding of contingency that marked the Renaissance period at large.27 In this context, an element of novelty was introduced through the rise of the social and cultural status of the practical arts. This determined, among other things, an increasing interest in experiential knowledge, which is by definition intrinsically fluid and apparently lacks strict necessity. Accounting for this contingent aspect of practice represented a challenge that invested the practitioners with a theoretical predisposition and gave the learned scholars practical interests. More broadly, the category of contingency, applied to epistemology as well as to ontology, allowed both groups to reconceptualize the relation between experience and theory. A telling example can be found in Renaissance mechanics, whose mathematical formalization started precisely in this period and largely arose as a consequence of the growing interest in the practical arts. Renaissance scholars who engaged with mechanics generally agreed on the inevitability, as well as desirability, of including a codification of material vagaries in their theories. Material bodies, they assumed, rebel against formal cogency, that is to say, they can be described mathematically as they imply a certain regularity but do not entail perfect exactitude. However, contingency not only represented an unavoidable trait of mechanics understood as an art: it also permeated its theoretical tools. For instance, the scholastic concept of “necessitas secundum quid,” which originally referred to the ontological impossibility of absolute necessity in the created world, was transplanted from theology and applied to the progressively mathematized field of physics. Theologically, the notion of secundum quid referred to the limitation (quid) imposed by the vices upon the perfect realization of a virtuous life, whereas, in the field of statics, secundum quid referred to the mechanical constraints that limited, and also channeled, the perfect realization of natural tendencies. Scholars such as Cardano, Niccolò Targaglia, and Giovanni Battista Benedetti operationalized this “marker” of ontological contingency in their Archimedean reworking of the scientia de ponderibus – the medieval science of weights from Johannes de Nemore. Their reflections on circular motion as mechanically impeded straightforward motion were developed along a line of thought that ascribed a natural character to rectilinear motion and a violent one to circular motion. The relation of the necessary law prescribing natural linearity of motion to material bodies with the contingent reality of effective circular motion prepared Galilean proto-inertial views and Cartesian inertia.28 At a philosophical level, the recognition of the importance of contingency in mechanical disciplines brought about original epistemological reflections. 27 28

 We consider Cusanus from this viewpoint in Garau and Omodeo (2019).  This is the subject of Omodeo, Chap. 5.

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One example is how the polymath Girolamo Cardano emphasized the relevance of both the theoretical and the experiential components of arts such as mechanics and medicine – to mention only the two disciplines he most valued and contributed to developing. He claimed that the practice of these disciplines not only presupposed a deep understanding of their theoretical aspects (as, for instance, the geometrical and the mathematical proportions that ruled over machinery and theory and exact quantity in medicine). Rather, when it came to the arts, the particular and the contingent also mattered. Therefore, a skillful practitioner should rely on theory as much as on experience, for while the former is marked by the necessity of its principles and demonstrations, the latter must cope with material contingencies. Within this perspective, one can understand the statement of the military engineer Bonaiuto Lorini on fortifications: [T]hose who wish to deal with these works do not only need to know mathematics, in order to assess and realize them, but also have to be prudent and experienced mechanics. (Lorini 1596, 172)29

In astronomy, another field of natural inquiry investigated by mathematical means, the issue of contingency and necessity also held an important role during the Renaissance. An example of this can be seen in Copernicus’ cosmology, as presented in the first book of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543). His view did not imply a strict form of necessitarism. Instead of presenting an extensive treatment of material and efficient causes, Copernicus focused on formal and teleological necessity. He took the sphere as a model of supreme final and formal causation. The elements can be reduced to their essential activities as they must coalesce into relatively perfect spheres. Their only “natural” motion must be that of the sphere, that is, a circular revolution. Thus, by focusing on the world’s overall geometry, Copernicus marginalized the physical issue of the material causation of motion and focused on its formal and final necessities. Although his admirers found some elements of a physical theory in Book One of De revolutionibus – demonstrating Copernicus’s openness to a reform of physics–, he remained noncommittal on the material and efficient causes that bothered his followers. Many among them – most prominently Giordano Bruno, William Gilbert, and Johannes Kepler – developed vitalistic explanations of animal-like planetary motions through the heavens, which reintroduced contingency in the realm of cosmology. In fact, the thesis of the plurality of worlds, which many understood as corollary to Copernicus’s vision of a planetary Earth, suggested that terrestrial contingencies can be found in other planet’s landscapes, even though our eye cannot detect them from a distance. However, it was not Copernicus’s task but that of his readers and followers to face the problem of contingency descending from the principle of cosmological homogeneity.30

 “Adunque per le cose dette, ricorderò a quelli che si vorranno porre a così fatte imprese nel giudicare, overo comandare la essecutione, di qualsivoglia machina, essersi necessario non solo havere cognitione delle matematiche, ma ancora essere avveduto, e pratico mecanico.” 30  See Regier, Chap. 6. 29

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Contingency concerned the practical and astrological pendant of theoretical astronomy, the so-called astronomia practica, more directly. The art’s practitioners never questioned astrology’s inherent contingency – that of a conjectural art dealing with natural and human contingency – although the precise scope and meaning of this contingency were a matter of debate. In the Latin world, the passage from late medieval to early modern astrology was marked by a shift in the dominant interpretations of celestial influences. Medieval astrology was essentially an “art of embodiment,” in which anagogy and self-governance were considered fundamental while any uncertainty of the prognostics was accepted as inherent to the material world. Much of this relaxed attitude toward contingency changed during the sixteenth century, in no small part due to a new skepticism about astrology and the very reality of celestial influence. Cardano’s false prediction of the longevity of Edward VI of England provoked heated criticisms. In Melanchthonian Germany, astrology continued to flourish. Protestant practitioners of this art shifted their focus from the medieval concern with the bodily dimension of astral influences to a sort of praxeology, which aimed to maximize the material and spiritual profits descending from celestial governance over terrestrial vicissitudes and to minimize losses. Shifting priorities of astrological prediction also shaped attitudes toward contingency. In particular, whereas ontological contingency was at the center of late medieval body-­ oriented astrology, sixteenth-century astrological conjecture became an epistemological phenomenon that was often seen as accidental to the art.31

2.3  Epistemological Contingency We propose that it was during the seventeenth century, and with the establishment of early modern mechanism, that contingency lost the ontological understanding by which it was largely characterized in the Renaissance and progressively gained a prevailing epistemological meaning. We have named this second kind of contingency “epistemological contingency.” Here, we argue, contingency concerned a reflection on the limits of scientific methodology and learning practices. Since nature was increasingly portrayed as characterized by absolute necessity, phenomena that escaped the epistemological power of theoretical frameworks, systems of laws, or learning practices pointed to their expansion, even revision, or to a probabilistic approach to knowledge in general. This transformation is well exemplified, in more general philosophical terms, by Spinoza’s famous statement in Ethics 1, 29 that “[i]n nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way,”32 while in 1, 33 he defined contingency as a determined possibility which is

31 32

 Vanden Broecke, Chap. 7.  Spinoza (1984), 433.

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only undetermined for us, as “[…] a thing is called contingent only because of a defect of our knowledge.”33 In our view, this passage happened slowly and ambiguously. As the essays collected in this volume show, prominent figures of early modern mechanism, such as Descartes, were still ambivalent in portraying contingency as an intrinsic element of the natural world and as an epistemological limit to our understanding of this world. Francis Bacon is a further example of this ambivalence. Bacon, who was writing at the threshold of the seventeenth century and whose work was a bridge between Renaissance philosophy and modern empiricism, continued to allot a crucial ontological relevance to contingency. His idea of the advancement of learning was closely connected to the benefit that knowledge can bring to humanity, in particular practical knowledge and applications. In this perspective, he most valued the possibility to manipulate matter and its appetites for the benefit of human life. The artist’s imitation of nature, he maintained, is enabled by the possibility of making natural entities deviate from their natural course. In other words, the possibility to direct nature depends on its intrinsic contingency, as revealed by preternatural generation. In line with Renaissance conceptions of contingency as originating from materiality, he wrote in crude terms in De augmentis scientiarum (1623) that nature “is driven out of her ordinary course by the perverseness, insolence, and forwardness of matter and the violence of impediments.”34 One of the contributions to this volume shows how, on the one hand, Bacon was anchored to the idea of contingency as an intrinsic and ontological trait of natural phenomena, through which he provides a very different explanation than the one provided by scholastic-­Aristotelianism. On the other, his focus on the notion of “pretergeneration” (that is, nature’s spontaneous generation of monsters and errors), functional to his philosophical agenda aimed at mastering nature through art, represents a strong detachment from the Aristotelian idea that science only concerns phenomena happening necessarily for the most part. Protogeneration is understood by Bacon as a result of the Fall: “Matter, as well as humans, started to behave in such a way as to follow not only the general good, but also the individual one. It is this particular feature that renders possible the deviations from the usual course of nature.”35 Interestingly, Bacon does not see a direct contradiction between the idea of the existence of eternal laws of nature, imposed by God at the moment of the creation, and the fact that matter, either through pretergeneration or manipulation, which can eventually deviate from such laws. Indeed, Bacon identifies the Fall as the moment when the possibility for “alternative things,” that is, contingent deviation from the laws of nature, can take place. As a result, matter can be “seduced” – that is, driven away by the course it would otherwise follow through human manipulation  – in order to create new objects. At the same time, external conditions can determine spontaneous deviations from the natural course. Therefore contingency, in this view, is seen as both the result of human manipulation and an inner character of nature.  Ibid., 436.  Bacon (2011), 294. See Rusu, Chap. 9. 35  Rusu, Chap. 9. 33 34

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At some point in the seventeenth century, however, such a shift to a necessary understanding of nature eventually determined, in turn, an epistemological shift in the understanding of contingency. Truly, this did not happen homogeneously across all disciplines. For instance, the early modern attempts to make medicine – a science that perhaps more than any other has to cope with all sorts of contingencies – a science and not only a “techne” tended to erase the Galenic model of treating of irregularities by anchoring them to a system of hierarchically interconnected laws and to refer them to the experience and the eye of the expert physician.36 Physics, on the contrary, took decisively this direction. In a broad sense, seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy, understanding all phenomena as the result of microscopic bodies in motion, carried with itself both ideas that all phenomena follow necessarily from the reciprocal action of microscopic corpuscles and that, at the same time, the complexity and non-observability of such interactions largely prevented a full accountability of all possible way in which such particles were determined to behave. Since mechanical philosophy became largely the shared background of scientists, this way of understanding contingency was common not only to many “Cartesian” rationalistic thinkers but also to empirical and experimental inquirers. For instance, as early as 1686, in A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, the experimental inquirer Robert Boyle suggested that the apparent irregularities that we observe in nature are due to our limited power of understanding the providential design of God and the order he imposed on nature.37 In the philosophical framework he established, apparent “aberrations” or “irregularities” were likely; he intimated they were the result of our impossibility to refer to them to their “genuine causes”: […] I think it very possible that an artificer of so vast a comprehension and so piercing a sight as is the maker of the world might, in this great automaton of his, have so ordered things that divers of them may appear to us, and as it were break out abruptly and unexpectedly, and at great distances of time or place from one another, and on such accounts be thought irregular; which yet really have, both in his preordination and in the connection of their genuine causes, a reference that would, if we discerned it, keep us from imputing it either to chance or to nature's aberrations.38

Picking up the image of nature as a mechanical clock (one can perhaps recall the famous verses of Voltaire’s, “L’univers m’embarrasse, et je ne puis songer/ Que  See Dyde Chap. 13.  Boyle (1996), 101: “[…] it seems more allowable to argue a providence from the exquisite structure and symmetry of the mundane bodies, and the apt subordination and train of causes, than to infer from some physical anomalies that things are not framed and administered by a wise author and rector. For the characters and impressions of wisdom that are conspicuous in the curious fabric and orderly train of things can with no probability be referred to blind chance, but must be [ascribed] to a most intelligent and designing agent. Whereas on the other hand, besides that the anomalies we speak of are incomparably fewer than those things which are regular and are produced in an orderly way; besides this, I say, the divine maker of the universe being a most free agent and having an intellect infinitely superior to ours, may in the production of seemingly irregular phenomena have ends unknown to us, which even the anomalies may be very fit to compass.” 38  Ibid. 36 37

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cette horloge existe et n’ait pas d’horloger”),39 Boyle claimed that if Jesuit missionaries presented a clock to a Chinese king, and its alarm was set to a particular time of the day, the king would think that the alarm was likely due to a disorder in its mechanism. However, he would have recognized its regularity had the clock been set to chime each hour: let us consider that if, when the Jesuits that first came into China presented a curious striking watch to the king, he that looked to it had wound up the alarm so as to strike a little after one; if (I say) this had been done, and that these Chinese that looked upon it as a living creature or some European animal, would think that when the index pointing at two of the clock likewise struck the same hour, and so three, four and onward, they would judge that these noises were regularly produced, because they (at equal intervals of time) heard them, and whensoever the index pointed at an hour, and never but then. But when the alarm came unexpectedly to make a loud, confused and more lasting noise, they could scarce avoid thinking that the animal was sick or exceedingly disordered. And yet the alarming noise did as properly flow from the structure of the little engine, and was as much designed by the manager of it, as those sounds of the clock that appeared manifestly regular.40

The idea that the apparent irregularities and singular instantiations of nature could be traced back to an underlying regularity and necessity also animated the early modern interest in natural history, which was a fundamental part of the Baconian project. From the point of view of Aristotelian philosophy – in which no science whatsoever can be given of particular things  – a collection of particular instantiations, such as natural history appeared to Bacon, was rather seen as a gathering of oddities and curiosities rather than something that could be considered functional to a scientific enterprise. In the preface to Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, Rawley acknowledged that Bacon’s natural history might appear like “an indigested heap of Particulars,” which might seem “Vulgar and Trivial, mean and sordid, curious and fruitleß,” and that previous natural histories were rather “gathreth for delight and use” and full of pleasant Descriptions and Pictures” and “affect and seek after Admiration, Rarities, and Secrets” but that, however, it was functional to the broader project of “collect[ing] material for the Building” of science.41 The collection of seemingly contingent natural events, in addition to providing a repertoire of individual instantiations, was meant to make the underlying casual necessity of those events emerge.42 Such shift, however, did not take place abruptly, and opened up new questions and problems. While basing his system on strong intellectualist and deterministic stances (with the exception of the activity of the human soul), in the early exposition of his system of natural philosophy (Le Monde, 1632), Descartes still attributed the discrepancy between God’s action of recreation and preservation of nature and the actual behavior of bodies – displayed by the seemingly paradoxical derivation of rest and curvilinear motion from the divine determination to rectilinear, indefinite  Voltaire (1772), 9.  Boyle (1996), 102–3. See Garau, Chap. 10. 41  Bacon (1670), Preface (page number not listed). 42  On Bacon’s understanding of natural history, see Anstey (2012): 11–31. 39 40

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motion  – to the resistance of matter, which he appears to identify, whether consciously or not, with an element of intrinsic contingency in the domain of nature, in a similar fashion to scholastic physics. While such position was then corrected in the Principles of Philosophy (1637), this shift displays the slow adaptation of early modern inquirers to the transformation of contingency implied in the adoption of the mechanistic worldview.43 Descartes’ later studies on animal locomotion, on the contrary, though dealing with the thorny issues of freedom and spontaneity, display a more coherent shift toward the negation of contingency in the “biological” domain.44 The necessity of harmonizing the now predominant idea of natural laws with the apparent irregularity of the behavior of bodies yet determined by such laws was also a fundamental problem that entailed a new treatment of contingency. Leibniz’s investigation on the nature of natural laws (which he considered as contingent) and their difference from geometrical (and necessary) laws led him to claim that physical laws do not supervene but are instead the principles through which physical events and their aggregate effects are engendered. Here final causation is implied by the contingency of natural laws.45 Hooke attempted to reconcile the idea of necessary laws of nature (derived from early modern mechanism) with the issue of experimental contingency of Baconian derivation. In this frame, a significant shift between Hooke’s and the Cartesian and the Galilean approach to the laws of mechanics took place. While Descartes and Galileo saw in the concrete constitution of matter a limitation to the applicability of mechanical laws to real world and therefore posed mechanical laws in ideal systems where the interaction between bodies was deprived of friction and dissipation, Hooke maintained that mechanics, rather than abstract mathematics, provided the general laws of nature, and believe that such rules can be found and verified through experiments and observations on concrete bodies. This entailed a significant shift from the abstract mathematics of Galileo and Descartes to the concrete elastic bodies that were the subjects of Hooke’s experiments.46 More in general, early modern inquirers were particularly concerned with the impact of often unaccountable material contingency on experimental results and, given the impossibility of achieving a full control on experimental conditions, on the disuniformity in the results of replicated experiments. The two first responses to such problems were based, respectively, on the pre-­condition of abstraction, associated with mathematical procedures of control, as, for instance, in Galileo, and on the large-scale repetition of experiments, as, for instance, in Boyle, Santorio, and others. These new approaches progressively merged in the course of the eighteenth century, with the progressive application of probabilistic devices to the evaluation of experimental contingencies: “[i]n this way, epistemic probability” ended up being connected in a mathematically demonstrative way “to the quantitative  See Garau, Chap. 10.  See Kekedi, Chap. 12. 45  See Tho, Chap. 14. 46  See Sacco, Chap. 11. 43 44

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evaluation of past knowledge (in the form of series of tests ­converging on some value of ‘probability’), although it is manifest that the measure of the probability of conjectures would be sourced from an a posteriori evaluation of contingent circumstances.”47

Bibliography Primary Aquinas, Thomas. Commentaria in libros physicorum. Corpus thomisticum, http://www.corpusthomisticum.org. Aristotle. 1984. In The Complete Works, ed. J.  Barnes, vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2014. In The Complete Works, ed. J. Barnes, vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Alexander of Aphrodisia. 1658. De fato et de eo quod nostrae potestatis est. Londinum: Typis Thomae Roycroft. Bacon, Francis. 1670. Sylva Sylvarum; or, A Natural History, in Ten Centuries. Whereunto Is Newly Added the History Natural and Experimental of Life and Death, or of the Prolongation of Life. London: William Lee. ———. 2011. In The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R.L. Ellis, and D. Denon Heath, vol. 4. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann and Holzboog. Boyle, Robert. 1996. Robert Boyle: A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dijksterhuis, Eduard J. 1950. De mechanisering van het wereldbeeld. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. Goclenius, Rudoph. 1613. Lexicon philosophicum. Frankfurt: Becker. Lorini, Bonaiuto. 1596. Delle fortificazioni. Venice: Rampazetto. Micraelius, Rudolph. 1653. Lexicon philosophicum. Stettin: Casparis Freyschmid. Schrödinger, Edwin. 1929. Was ist ein Naturgesetz? Die Naturwissenschaften 17 (1): 9–11. ———. 1932. Über Indeterminismus in der Physik; Ist die Naturwissenschaft Milieubedingt? Zwei Vorträge zur Kritik der naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis. Leipzig: Barth. Spinoza, Baruch. 1984. The Collected Works. Trans. E. Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Voltaire. 1772. Les cabales: oeuvre pacifique, 9. London: unknown.

Secondary Damerow, Peter, Gideon Freudental, Peter McLaughlin, and Jürgen Renn. 2004. Exploring the limits of Preclassical mechanics: A study of conceptual development in early modern science. New York: Springer. Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. 1998. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books. Daston, Lorraine. 2008. On Scientific Observation. Isis 99 (1): 97–110. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.

47

 See Pasini, Chap. 15.

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Daston, Lorraine, and Michael Stolleis, ed. 2009. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Feest, Uljana, and Thomas Sturm. 2011. What (Good) Is Historical Epistemology? Editors’ Introduction. Erkenntnis 75 (3): 285–302. Maier, Anneliese. 1949. Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Omodeo, Pietro, and Rodolfo Garau. 2019. Contingent Matemathics of nature in the renaissance: Cusanus’ perspective. In Wissensformen bei Nicolaus Cusanus, ed. C. Bacher and M. Vollet, 125–139. Regensburg: Roderer. Renn, Jürgen, Peter Damerow, and Simone Rieger. 2001. Hunting the White Elephant: When and How did Galileo Discover the Law of Fall? In Galileo in Context, ed. J. Renn, 29–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 3

Contingency and Causal Determinism from Scotus to Buridan Magali Roques

In this paper, I intend to present the way in which contingency and causal determinism relate in some major late-medieval views on the metaphysics of causation. I will focus on Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and John Buridan. First, I will show that Scotus’s new insights into the metaphysics of modalities had important consequences for the way contingency was related to causality: Ockham and Buridan do not consider contingency as a by-product of the necessary emanation of God any more but as a distinctive property of God as the first cause and, therefore, of the created world as a whole. Second, I will show that the growing interest from Scotus onward in explaining and justifying inductive reasoning led to an extensive analysis of the nature and function of the principle of the uniformity of nature. Third, I will explain why the progressive psychologization of final causes led to the exclusion of final explanations from physics. The consequence of this process is the development of a new way of conceiving chance and hazard, and the separation between free and natural agents. We can speak here of a tendentially mechanistic picture of the world.

3.1  Introduction The nature and status of causality were a key topic in late medieval philosophy and theology.1 The acceptance of invariable causal connections between certain phenomena lies at the heart of the medieval understanding of physics and metaphysics 1  There is no work of synthesis on medieval views on causation. See however the papers in C.  Esposito and P.  Porro (ed.), La causalité/Die Kausalität/Causality, Quaestio II (2002).

M. Roques (*) Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. D. Omodeo, R. Garau (eds.), Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 332, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67378-3_3

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and of central theological issues such as salvation and the sacraments. It also lies at the heart of the medieval theory of science, which is based on the Aristotelian principle that to know something is to know the cause of it. In the fourteenth century, two shifts occurred in the conception of causality. First Scotus’s reflections on modality inaugurated a new way of conceiving of the metaphysics of causation. Until Scotus, the standard view was that God caused the set of causes that exist in the real world, i.e., the so-called secondary causes, by means of a necessary process of emanation. On the contrary, Scotus perceived God as a free agent investigating the set of possibles and choosing the one that He will create. This shift had a major impact on the scholastic conception of efficient causality. For Scotus, contingency characterizes God’s will, rather than the action of secondary causes as Aquinas has argued. Much debate has centered on this shift.2 Scotus’s reinterpretation of the metaphysics of modalities had important consequences for the reflection on the relation between causation and determinism, which is a central issue in late medieval philosophy and theology. It also led to an intense discussion about the respective contributions of the so-called secondary and primary causes in a causal process. Second, from Scotus onward, a new interest emerges in the methodological problem of causality. How do we recognize a causal link and how do we test for a causal hypothesis? Some thinkers, the most famous being Nicholas of Autrecourt, began to ask whether causation is a purely epistemological category belonging solely to our description of experience.3 This shift affected the way inductive reasoning was conceived, and it led to an extensive analysis of the nature and function of the principle of the uniformity of nature. It was accompanied by a thorough examination of the function of teleological explanations in natural philosophy. The paper will be divided into three parts. First, I will show that Scotus’s new insights into the metaphysics of modalities had important consequences for how contingency was related to causality: Ockham and Buridan do not consider contingency as the result of the emanation of God’s causal power anymore but as a distinctive property of God as the first cause. Second, I will show that the growing interest from Scotus onward in explaining and justifying the mechanisms of induction led to See especially the bibliography by P. Porro and J. Schmutz, at the end of this issue, 669–698. For an overview of medieval theories of causation, see P.  Porro, “Ursache/Wirkung (Patristik; Mittelalter),” in J. Ritter, K. Gründer, and G. Gabriel (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 2001), vol. 384–389. 2  Some commentators think that it is a necessary step in the development of modern science. There is a tradition coming from Pierre Duhem and continuing with E. Grant, “The Condemnation of 1277, God’s Absolute Power, and Physical Thought in the Middle Ages,” Viator 10 (1979), 211– 244; A.  Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 121–179. 3  Nicholas of Autrecourt has sometimes been called a “medieval Hume.” He claims that there is no evident cognition of a necessary relation between cause and effect and that what is perceived is only a relation of contiguity between two things. But he does not deny the reality of the relation of causality. The most recent account of Autrecourt’s position on causality is C. Grellard, Introduction, in Nicolas d’Autrécourt, Correspondance. Articles condamnés, (Paris: Vrin, 2001), 56–65; id., “Le statut de la causalité chez Nicolas d’Autrécourt,” Quaestio 2 (2002), 267–289.

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a new investigation into the methodological and epistemological aspects of the problem of causality. Some first principles were recognized as being causal, and the question was asked how they can be known. From Scotus onward, science is concerned with empirical facts. Third, I will explain why the progressive psychologization of final causes led to the exclusion of final explanations from physics. This has as a consequence a new way of conceiving chance and hazard and the separation between free and natural agents. We can speak here of a tendentially mechanistic picture of the world.4

3.2  Causation and Determinism 3.2.1  The Threat of Necessitarianism Medieval philosophers and theologians of the Late Middle Ages, following Aristotle, state that the causal relation is a relation among things (primary or secondary qualities, sometimes substances), not among properties, states, or events. The causal relation is not external to things, as are the relations of conjunction, coincidence, and succession. Every effect is produced by its cause as internal to it. Medieval philosophers and theologians go further than Aristotle and explicitly argue that the link between cause and effect is necessary. Causal determinism is a key issue in Latin medieval discussions on causality.5 The question was asked whether and how the relation between cause and effect is necessary. The question is inherited from Muslim philosophers of the time of classical Islam. Prominent figures in this debate are Avicenna, Ghazali, and the Mutakallimun.6 4  This does not imply that fourteenth-century natural philosophy led directly to the Scientific Revolution or to seventeenth-century mechanism. First, fourteenth-century natural philosophy was not a unique body of doctrines defended by all thinkers who commented on Aristotle’s Physics in the Faculty of Arts. Second, the new insights on causality that I will discuss in this paper were conceived independently of other analyses in natural philosophy (concerning motion, matter, and forces), which are quite removed from the features standardly associated with mechanism. These analyses have led some historians of medieval science to speak of fourteenth-century natural philosophy as a “natural philosophy without nature.” On this topic, see especially J. E. Murdoch, “The Analytical Character of Late Medieval Learning: Natural Philosophy without Nature,” in L.D. Roberts (ed.), Approaches to Nature in the Middle Ages: Papers of the Tenth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies (Binghampton, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1982) 171–213. 5  Determinism has been defined in many different ways. G. E. M. Anscombe, in her famous paper “Causality and Determination,” in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind. The Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981, 113) gives the following formula for determinism: “If an effect occurs in one case and a similar effect does not occur in an apparently similar case, there must be a relevant further difference.” 6  For a synthesis of the Mutakallimun’s view on causation, see J. Marenbon, “The Medievals,” in H.  Beebee, C.  Hitchock, and P.  Menzies (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Causation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 40–53.

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Avicenna’s view, often described as “necessitarian,” is based on a special connection between causality and modalities.7 Avicenna explains the idea of necessity in terms of causality. Avicenna believes that what exists is divided into two kinds: the necessary being in itself and the possible being in itself. By definition, a necessary being in itself has no cause.8 By contrast, anything that is possible in itself exists in virtue of being caused by something else.9 Avicenna shows that there can be only one being that is necessary in itself. All other beings exist because of it. For this model of causality to be operative, Avicenna distinguishes two notions of efficient cause: an efficient cause productive of motion (physical, corresponding to Aristotle’s efficient cause as it appears in the Physics) and an efficient cause productive of being (metaphysical).10 By so doing, Avicenna incorporates divine c­ ausality into Aristotle’s account of the four causes.11 Avicenna drew other distinctions that are recurring characters in later accounts of divine efficient causality: the distinction between accidental and essential causes of being and between helping and essential causes of being. They figure in several late medieval arguments for God’s existence and for the common theological claim that God maintains all things in being.12 Avicenna seems to endorse necessitarianism.13 However, he weakens it by saying that, while the action of causes is always necessary, the production of effects may 7  See E.  Marmura, “The Metaphysics of Efficient Causality in Avicenna,” in E.  Marmura (ed.), Islamic Theology and Philosophy. Studies in Honor of George F. Hourani (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984) 172–187. See also K. Richardson, “Avicenna’s Conception of the Efficient Cause,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21:2 (2013), 220–239. For a synthesis, see K. Richardson, “Efficient Causation from Ibn Sīnā to Ockham” in T.  Schmaltz (ed.), Oxford Philosophical Concepts: Efficient Causation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 105–131. 8  Avicenna, The Metaphysics of the Healing, transl. M. Marmura, 1.6.2-6. [now abridged in Met.]. 9  Avicenna, Met. 4.1.8-11: “Hence, with the existence of the cause, the existence of every effect is necessary; and the existence of its cause necessitates the existence of the effect.” 10  Avicenna, Met. 6.1.2: “Metaphysical philosophers do not mean by ‘efficient cause’ only the principle of motion, as the naturalists mean, but the principle and giver of existence, as in the case of God with respect to the world. As for the natural efficient cause, it does not bestow any existence other than motion in one of the forms of motion. Thus, in the natural sciences, that which bestows existence is a principle of motion.” 11  The importance of this account of efficient causality for late medieval philosophy was highlighted by Etienne Gilson. See E. Gilson, “Avicenne et les origines de la notion de cause efficiente,” in Atti del XII Congresso Internazionale di Filosofia IX (Firenze: Sansoni, Firenze) 1961, 121–130; E. Gilson, “Notes pour l’histoire de la cause efficiente,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 37 (1962), 7–31. 12  See S. Menn, “Metaphysics: God and Being,” in McGrade (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 147–170, for some aspects of Avicenna’s influence on later proofs for God’s existence, both in the Islamic world and in the Christian West. T.A. Druart, “Avicenna’s Influence on Duns Scotus’s Proof for the Existence of God in the Lectura,” in J. Janssens (ed.), Avicenna and his Heritage (Leuven: Leuven University Press) 2002, 253–266, traces the similarities between Scotus’s distinction between essentially and accidentally ordered series of causes (see below for this concept) and Avicenna’s discussion of essential and accidental causes of being. 13  Avicenna, Met. 4.1.10-11: “The effect would then proceed necessarily, regardless of whether [the differentiating state] is an act of will, appetite, or anger, or something originated, natural or other-

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be considered in different ways. Each effect is necessary with respect to its cause, but it is contingent in itself, given that it can be prevented from coming into existence by impediments. This idea had a major influence on Latin thinkers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, according to whom the relation between cause and effect is necessary, but can only conditionally be realized. Ghazali was a strong opponent of the Avicennian doctrine which, he believes, rules out the possibility or miracles.14 His discussion of causality in Problem 17 of the Tahafut al-Falasifah (The Incoherence of the Philosophers) finds its starting point is his determination to preserve the possibility of divine interventions.15 Ghazali claims that there is no absolute necessity: God could have chosen to create and maintain some other order of things.16 Moreover, a miracle is always possible. Ghazali is also opposed to Avicenna’s view that God and the world are coeternal. In his defense of creation in time, Ghazali lays the ground for the view that God’s selfdetermining will is the source of contingency in the natural world.17 Ghazali’s critique of Avicennian necessitarianism had a major influence on Latin medieval philosophy. Late medieval thinkers tend to agree with Ghazali that when cotton is in contact with fire and all conditions required for cotton to burn are met, God could nevertheless prevent the burning.18 Ash’arite occasionalism goes into the same direction. Its doctrine was accessible through the critical account given of it by the Jewish philosopher Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed.19 Against occasionwise, or some external thing. […] Hence, with the existence of the cause, the existence of every effect is necessary; and the existence of its cause necessitates the existence of the effect.” For a study of the debate between Averroes and Avicenna on that subject, see especially C. Belo, Chance and Determinism in Avicenna and Averroes (Leiden: Brill, 2007); B. S. Kogan, Averroes and the Metaphysics of Causation (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985). 14  Ghazali was not the first to attack necessitarianism. In the ninth and tenth centuries, a theological reaction emerged against the rationalism and deterministic elements of ancient Greek philosophy. The Mutakallimun rejected the view that nature is eternal and subject to causal determinism. They developed a metaphysics grounded on atomism and emphasizing divine omnipotence. All natural events are caused directly by God, the only being with real causal efficacy. For the impact of this theological movement on the Latin West, see especially W. Courtenay, “The Critique of Natural Causality in the Mutakallimun and Nominalism,” Harvard Theological Review 66 (1973), 77–94. 15  Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Problem 17, “Refutation of Their Belief in the Impossibility of a Departure from the Natural Course of Events.” 16  Ghazali provides several other arguments to undermine the view that natural things have active power. From observed concomitance, one cannot derive the existence of a relation of causality (Tahafut 7.5). He also claims that bodies lack features needed to ground active powers (Tahafut 7.5). Ghazali’s arguments have given rise to contrasting interpretations. See especially S. Nadler’s controversial paper “No Necessary Connection: The Medieval Roots of the Occasionalist Roots of Hume,” The Monist 79:3 (1996), 448–466. 17  Ghazali, Tahafut, 1.46. 18  See, for instance, Scotus, Ord. I, d. 8, pars 2, q. unica, n. 306 (ed. Vat. 4), 328: “[…] as fire, in itself, cannot not heat, yet it can absolutely not heat if God does not co-operate with it.” 19  Islamic occasionalism seems to have emerged when the theologians of the Ash’arite school of kalām (Islamic doctrinal theology) began to consider the implications of the integration of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism that occurred within the Islamic intellectual world in the tenth and eleventh centuries. See P. Adamson, P. & R.C. Taylor, (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to

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alism but also necessitarianism, a standard position prevailed in the Latin West, according to which causes necessitate their effects, but only conditionally.20 Roughly speaking, this means that a cause C is a necessitating cause of an effect E when, if C occurs, E necessarily follows unless something prevents it. Let us consider Aquinas’s position in order to gain a more precise understanding of the state of the question at the end of the thirteenth century.21 Aquinas uses the two concepts of primary cause and secondary cause to explain God's relation to the causality of created beings. The central question is how God contributes to natural causal processes. Unlike Avicenna, Aquinas makes a distinction between causation and creation.22 He rejects Avicenna’s idea that God is the first cause in a chain of causation in which a being at an upper level brings about a being at a lower level by necessity. God is a free agent who is in no way necessitated to create the way he does. Moreover, God is omnipotent, i.e., able to bring about whatever is possible absolutely.23 Natural causal processes involve both divine and created causes co­operating. More precisely, God cooperates with the so-called secondary causes as an immediate cause: “God is within each created thing as a co-cause alongside the created power.”24 However, Aquinas holds against the occasionalists that, though all natural causal processes involve the operation of the divine will, secondary causes do have the power to bring about natural effects. Here Aquinas offers a view that Dominik Perler and Ulrich Rudolph, in their study of medieval and early modern occasionalism, have labelled “causal compatibilism.”25 After Aquinas, the Arabic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 2005, 4–6. Among these Islamic occasionalists, al-Ash’ari (873–935), the founder of Ash’arite school, appears to have been particularly influential. See F. Griffel, “Al-Ghazālī,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2007 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = 20  Aquinas’s view on causality is the only view from the Latin Middle Ages that has been the object of extensive study. For more references on Aquinas’s view on causality, see S. L. Brock, “Causality and Necessity in Thomas Aquinas,” Quaestio 2 (2002), 217–240. 21  Aquinas includes his criticisms of occasionalism in a chapter of his Summa Contra Gentiles entitled “Against those who deprive natural things of the actions that belong to them.” See Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III, 9 [abridged in SCG]. For an analysis of this text, see D. Perler and U.  Rudolph, Occasionalismus. Theorien der Kausalität im arabisch-islamischen und im europäischen Denken (Göttigen: Vandenhoeck& Ruprecht, 2000), 131–145. Except for the commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, all Aquinas’ works have appeared in the critical Leonine edition, which is the one that I shall cite: Sancti Thomae Aquinatis doctoris angelici Opera omnia iussu Leonis XIII P.M. edita, cura et studio fratrumpraedicatorum, ex typographiapolyglotta et al. (Romae, 1882ss). 22  Aquinas, De potentia, q. 3, a. 4. Creation is defined in Summa Theologiae [abridged in ST] I, q. 45, a. 1 as the “emanation of the whole of what exists from the universal cause.” 23  Aquinas, ST I, q. 25, a. 3, c; Sent. d. 42, q. 2, a. 2. 24  Aquinas, De Potentia, q. 3, a. 8, ad. 1 & ad 2; ST I, q. 105, a. 5 and ad. 3. 25  See Perler and Rudolph, 2000, 154. Durandus of Saint Pourçain later protested that Thomas’s response to the occasionalists deprives creatures of their causal power. He claimed that occasionalism can be refuted only if God’s contribution to natural causal processes is restricted to the creation and conservation of secondary causes. Durandus’s “mere conservationism,” as Freddoso has called it, was widely rejected in later scholasticism. For the references, see the following note.

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co-operation between first and secondary causes in a causal process became a major issue in late medieval debates on the nature of causation.26 In answer to both occasionalism and necessitarianism, Aquinas defends a kind of providential determinism. Effects in the created world are contingent relatively to the first cause27 but necessary relatively to their causes. More precisely, in natural things, the necessity is twofold. First, there is the necessity derived from the form of the things, which determines their end. Thus, given the efficient cause, “the natural thing necessarily tends to its end in accordance with the power of its form.”28 As a result, “every agent which acts by natural necessity is determined to one effect.”29 Following Aristotle, Aquinas mentions “gravity” as an example of formal causality, and not as an instance of efficient causality.30 Second, there is a necessity that Aquinas calls “natural.”31 It accounts for the uniform behavior of natural things.32 By saying that “all natural things happen in the same way,” Aquinas means that natural causal processes are regulated by a kind of principle of uniformity, according to which things belonging to the same kind act similarly in similar circumstances.33 By relating efficient causality to natural necessity, Aquinas holds a view representative of thirteenth-century conceptions of causality.34

 For more on this subject, see the classic papers by A. Freddoso, “Medieval Aristotelianism and the Case against Secondary Causation in Nature,” in T. V. Morris (ed.), Divine and Human Action. Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism (Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 75–118; id., “God’s General Concurrence with Secondary Causes: Why Conservation is not Enough,” Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991), 553–585; id., “God’s General Concurrence with Secondary Causes: Pitfalls and Prospects,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1994), 131–156. 27  Aquinas, In XII libros Metaphysicorum expositio, lib. V, lect. 1, §749 and lect. 6, §827: “a cause is that from which something else necessarily follows.” [abridged in Met.] 28  Aquinas, SCG II, 42, 5. 29  Aquinas, SCG II, 23.2. See especially SCG II, 30 for how absolute necessity arises in creation. 30  Aquinas, SCG II, 30, 15. 31  The notion of natural necessity is defined as follows in ST III.14.2 co.: “Another necessity, moreover, is natural necessity, which follows from the principles of nature, as for example it is necessary for fire to heat from its form.” Only the necessity that arises from material causes, efficient causes, and formal causes is called “natural.” Aquinas distinguishes between necessitas absoluta ex causa priori, which depends on material, formal, and efficient causes, and necessitas ex conditione vel suppositione ex causa posteriori, which depends on final cause. For this distinction, see In Phys. II, lect. 15, n. 270 and P. Porro’s paper, “Lex necessitatis vel contingentiae. Necessità, contingenza e provvidenza nell’universo di Tommaso d’Aquino,” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 96 (2002), 401–450. 32  Aquinas, SCG II, 23.2: “[…] the power of every agent which acts by natural necessity is determined to one effect; that is why all natural things happen in the same way, unless there be an obstacle; while voluntary things do not.” 33  In Met. VI, lect. 3, Aquinas explains that Avicenna’s determinist view is right, if the condition “unless there is an obstacle” is added. See the previous note and Met. VI, lect. 3. 34  On the debate about the idea of a necessary relation between cause and effect from Siger of Brabant and Aquinas to Scotus, see P. Porro, “Contingenza e impedibilità delle cause. Presupposti e implicazioni di un dibattito scolastico,” Rivista di storiadellafilosofia 68 (2013), 113–147. 26

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Aquinas’s metaphysics of causation is based on a metaphysics of modalities that depends on God.35 Aquinas defines contingency and differentiates it from necessity when he answers the question whether God’s will makes the things that He wills necessary. He claims that God wills that some things be done necessarily and others contingently. Things are necessary if they have unfailing causes, while things are contingent if they have fallible causes.36 Causes are contingent if they are indeterminate with regard to their outcome. To summarize Aquinas’s picture of modality, we can say that it is because of differences in causal efficacy that the two kinds of possible being, i.e., necessary beings and contingent beings, arise. Necessary causes always produce their effects, whereas contingent causes are fallible and indeterminate with regard to their outcomes. In the natural world. Contingency arises because a particular contingent cause may have more than one outcome.37 However, the outcomes that result are those that God intends as part of his ordered design.38 Aquinas thus claims that God’s direct causal activity in creating and sustaining the world functions perfectly, and thus necessarily and not contingently.

3.2.2  New Directions in Causation and Modal Theories Aquinas’ conclusion was inacceptable to Scotus and other Franciscan thinkers. Scotus is famous for his modal theory, which he elaborates against the Thomist model based on the Aristotelian idea that contingency arises at the level of secondary proximate causes through a failure in causal efficacy. In his modal theory, Scotus puts an emphasis on logical possibility and impossibility. His main aim is to defend the claim that contingency and logical possibility must both characterize God’s will.39 In order to account for contingency, Scotus argues, the first cause must itself  On this subject, see especially Sent. I, d. 43, q. 2. For an analysis, see J.F. Wippel’s paper, “Divine Knowledge, Divine Power and Human Freedom in Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent,” in T.  Rudavsky (ed.), Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence in Medieval Philosophy (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), 213–41. 36  See especially Expositio libri Peryermeneias, I, 14, Leon., ed., 78–79, l. 437–461. This is dependent on Aquinas’s famous doctrine of “triplex gradus causarum” (Met. VI, 3), according to which there is one cause that is immutable and incorruptible (God), there are causes that are mutable and incorruptible (the celestial bodies), and there are causes that are mutable and corruptible. 37  See especially SCG III, 92, n. 2668. 38  The central text on this subject is Met. VI, lect. 3, n. 1216. 39  For an overview, see S. Knuuttila, “Modal Logic,” in N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny, J. Pinborg (ed.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 342–382. The reference work on the subject is H. Goodenough Gelber, It Could Have Been Otherwise. Contingency and Necessity in Dominican Theology at Oxford, 1300–1350 (LeidenBoston: Brill, 2004). For Scotus, see 152 ff. See also the classic study by C. Normore, “Scotus, Modality, Instants of Nature and the Contingency of the Present”; in L. Honnefelder, R Wood and M. Dreyer (ed.), John Duns Scotus, Metaphysics and Ethics (Leiden-New York, Köln: Brill, 1996), 161–174. 35

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be contingent.40 Contingency could not arise at the level of secondary causes unless contingent first causes caused them. In other words, contingency arises directly in the divine will. To make his point, Scotus develops a theory of the will as a simultaneous capacity for opposites.41 He defines contingency as the logical possibility of something being the case and not being the case at some indexed moment of time. To confirm his point, Scotus appeals to our experience of free choice.42 Scotus’s reassessment of the relations between causality and modality is central. Since it is always possible for God to break a causal chain, the created causal order as a whole is contingent.43 Thus, all natural causality is at most necessary secundum quid. Secundum quid necessity is a kind of logical possibility, since it is always possible for God to do the opposite of what He does at an instant. This view was the dominant one in Oxford in the early fourteenth century.44 This new modal theory is at the heart of Scotus’s cosmological argument for God as a first cause. Scotus’s distinctive contribution to this argument was an analysis of essentially ordered causes.45 Scotus defined essentially ordered causes as a series of simulta On this subject, see especially M. Sylwanowicz, Contingent Causality and the Foundations of Duns Scotus’ Metaphysics, (Leiden – Köln – New York: Brill, 1996). 41  Scotus, De primo principio, 4.15, transl. Wolter, 83: “Likewise, something causes contingently. Therefore the first cause causes contingently; consequently it causes voluntarily. Proof of the first implication: Every secondary cause causes insofar as it is moved by the first cause. If the first cause moves necessarily, then every other cause is moved necessarily and everything is necessarily caused. Proof of the second implication: The only source of contingent action is either the will or something accompanied by the will. Every other cause acts by a necessity of its nature and consequently not contingently.” 42  See Ord I, d. 38, p. 2 and d. 39, q. 1–5, n. 13–16, Vat. ed. VI, 414–419. Distinction 39 of the first book of the Lectura has been translated into English. See John Duns Scotus, Contingency and Freedom. Lectura I 39 trans. with commentary Vos, A Jaczn, A.  Veldhuis, A.  H. LoomanGraaskamp, E. Dekker, and N. W. den Bok (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994). 43  Scotus, Ord, I, d. 8, pars 2, q. unica, transl. Gelber, “It Could Have Been Otherwise,” 137: “there is no simply necessary natural connection of cause and effect in creatures, nor does any secondary cause cause simply naturally or simply necessarily, but only under a condition [secundum quid]. The first statement is apparent because every effect depends on the first cause. Similarly, no second cause causes its effect unless the first cause acts causally with it, and this happens naturally before the proximate cause causes. The first cause only causes contingently, however, therefore the second cause causes simply contingently, because it depends on the causal action of the first, which is simply contingent. The second statement, concerning secundum quid necessity, is evident because many natural causes cannot in themselves not cause their effects, and therefore there is necessity secundum quid, in regard to them, and not simply: as fire, in itself, cannot not heat, yet it can absolutely not heat if God does not co-operate with it, as is evident, and as appeared in the case of the three boys in the furnace.” 44  This topic was treated in relation with future contingents. For an overview of the relation between modalities and future contingents, see C.  Normore, “Future Contingents,” in N.  Kretzmann, A. Kenny, J. Pinborg (ed.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 367–369; id. “Divine Omniscience, Omnipotence and Future Contingents: An Overview,” in T.  Rudavsky (ed.), Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence in Medieval Philosophy (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), 3–22. 45  For an introduction to Scotus’s proof, see T.  O’Connor, “Scotus on the Existence of a First Efficient Cause,” Philosophy of Religion 33 (1993), 17–32. 40

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neously concurring causes, which belong to different species, where prior causes are more perfect than posterior causes and posterior causes depend on prior causes. Scotus contrasts essentially ordered causes with accidentally ordered causes, such as a series of fathers and sons.46 The main question is whether there is a first cause, i.e., a cause which is prior to any other cause.47 Scotus argues that an infinite regress is possible in accidentally ordered series of efficient causes. In such a series, members exercise their causality successively and independently from one another. An example of it is the series of fathers and sons. By contrast, an infinite regress is not possible in essentially ordered series of efficient causes: essentially ordered causes act simultaneously, and they depend on one another in causing. An example of essentially ordered causes is the matter and the forms of a composite substance. If essentially ordered causes were infinite, a created actual infinite would exist, which is unacceptable. In a word, the totality of an infinite series of accidentally ordered causes requires a cause of its coming into existence, and this cause is nothing other than the first cause, i.e., God. In his argument for the existence of God, Scotus understands the causal influence exerted by a superior cause on an inferior one as transmitted efficacy.48 By saying  Scotus provides three criteria for distinguishing essentially ordered causes from accidentally ordered causes. Cf. Scotus, De primo principio, transl. Wolter, 47: “Per se or essentially ordered causes differ from accidentally ordered causes in three respects. The first difference is that in essentially ordered causes; the second depends upon the first precisely in the act of causing. In accidentally ordered causes this is not the case, although the second may depend upon the first for its existence or in some other way. The second difference is that in essentially ordered causes the causality is of another nature and order, inasmuch as the higher cause is the more perfect, which is not the case with accidentally ordered causes. This second difference is a consequence of the first, since no cause in the exercise of its causality is essentially dependent upon a cause of the same nature as itself, for to produce anything one cause of a given kind suffices. A third difference follows, viz. That all essentially ordered causes are simultaneously required to cause the effect, for otherwise some causality essential to the effect would be wanting. In accidentally ordered causes this simultaneity is not required.” (See also Ord, I, d. 2, pars 1, q. 1–2, num. 48–51, Vat. ed. II, p. 154–155.) For an analysis of this distinction, see J. C. Flores, “Accidental and Essential Causality in John Duns Scotus’ Treatise On the First Principle,” Rercherches de Théologie et de Philosophie Médiévale 67 (2000), 96–113. 47  Scotus, De primo principio, transl. Wolter, 49: “A son may beget a child just as well whether his father be dead or alive. But an infinite succession of such causes is impossible unless it exists in virtue of some nature of infinite duration from which the whole succession and every part thereof depends. For no change of form is perpetuated save in virtue of something permanent which is not part of that succession, since everything of this succession which is in flux is of the same nature. Something essentially prior to the series, then exists, for everything that is part of the succession depends upon it, and this dependence is of a different order from that by which it depends upon the immediately preceding cause where the latter is a part of the succession.” For an analysis of causation in the De primo Principio, see especially F.-X. Putallaz, “Efficience et finalité dans le Traité du premier principe de Jean Duns Scot,” Revue de théologie et de philosophie 116 (1984), 131–146. 48  Scotus, Ord. IV, d. 1, q. 1, n. 34, ed. Wadding VIII, 55, my transl.: “The influence, here, is the determinate order that holds between these causes when they produces a common effect.” See also Scotus, Ord. IV, d. 12, q. 3, n. 5, ed. Wadding VIII, 741: “The influence that an inferior agent receives from a superior agent is not a form thus caused, but is only the determinate order that holds between the causes when they cause together.” 46

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this, Scotus opposes Aquinas, who claims that posterior causes are merely moved by prior causes. This influence is not an accident, an entity or something physical such as energy transfer; it is nothing other than a determinate order of causes working together to produce the effect.49 It is thus a metaphysical notion which is distinct from the physical notion of power or disposition. The relationship between first and second causes was at the heart of the debate on the nature of causality, as it appeared in Ockham, to whom I now turn.

3.2.3  Ockham’s Criticism of Scotus The reception of Scotus’s ground-breaking views on causality and contingency was shaped by Ockham’s criticism.50 Ockham does not reject Scotus’s cosmological proof for the existence of God; he merely argues that the first cause need not be outside the series of essentially ordered causes itself.51 Another important criticism regards the shape of God’s cooperation in any causal process. Indeed, the heart of his criticism is dedicated to defending against Scotus God’s immediate causal contribution in every natural causal process.52 Ockham made an important contribution to the discussion over Scotus’s doctrine by asking what essentially ordered causes are.53 What is at stake is the causal contribution of essentially ordered causes.54 Can they be considered as partial causes together with accidentally ordered causes of the same effect55? Scotus’ first defenders, with thinkers such as Antonius Andreas, do not, like some later Scotists, equate essentially ordered causes with partial causes. They contend that an effect has a total cause in both the essentially ordered series of causes and the accidentally ordered series of causes. Indeed, there may be more than one total cause of a given effect,  Scotus, De primo principio, 3.11, transl. Wolter 46–47.  My account is dependent on R.  Wood, “Ockham on Essentially Ordered Causes: Logic Misapplied,” in W. Vossenkuhl and R. Schoenberger (ed.), Die Gegenwart Ockhams (Weinheim: VCH Actahumaniora, 1990), 25–50. 51  Ockham, Quaest. Phys. 135, OPh VI, 766–767, transl. Adams, “Was Ockham a Humean?”, 46: “the whole multitude [of both essentially ordered and accidentally ordered causes] is caused. But it is not caused by any one thing that is part of the multitude. Rather one is caused by one member and another by another and so on to infinity. Nor can the opposite be adequately proved from production. And in that case, it does not follow that one and the same thing is a cause of itself, since no one thing is the cause of everything.” 52  Ockham, Rep. II, q. 3–4, OTh V, 62, my transl: “God is the immediate cause of any effect. God is the first cause by a primacy of perfection and unlimitedness, but not by a primacy of duration, because at the same instant when God acts, the secondary cause acts too.” 53  Ockham offers three alternative interpretations of the dependency criterion in Ord, d. 2, q. 10, OTh II, 347–354. 54  For an example of a reading of Scotus’s view in the Scottish school, see G. J. Etzkorn, “John Reading on the Existence and Unicity of God, Efficient and Final Causality,” Franciscan Studies 26 (1964), 287–301. 55  Ockham, Quaest. Phys. 132–133, OPh VI, 754–759. 49 50

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provided that the causes belong to different orders. Ockham cannot make sense of this idea: either Scotus accepts the possibility for an overdetermination of causes or not, but he cannot accept ad hoc distinctions. After Ockham, there was a strong tendency to view essentially ordered causes as partial causes, not as hierarchically related inferior and superior causes. In answer, Ockham contends that all genuine efficient causes are immediate causes. Only something which directly produces an effect is a true cause.56 A remote cause is a cause in an improper sense.57 God is not only a partial cause of the effects that he produces by means of secondary causes but also the principal cause.58 In other words, God is an immediate partial cause of each and every effect, while the created cause is also an immediate partial cause of the same effect.59 This has important consequences for the conception of God as a causal agent. Ockham disagrees with Scotus on how to understand the conditional necessity between a cause and its effect. What is at stake here is the concept of contingency and how to relate it to the possibility for an effect to have been caused by another cause than the one that actually caused it. Ockham denies “that the same effect can be produced by two natural causes” acting simultaneously, when the causes are each a total cause of the effect. He contends that “every naturally producible effect by its very nature determines itself to be produced by one efficient cause and not another.”60 The relation between an effect and its total natural cause is necessary in such a way that it cannot have been caused by another cause than the one that caused it de facto. Once an effect has been produced, it cannot have been otherwise, even by God’s absolute power.

 Ockham, Ord, d, 45, q. un., OTh IV, 665, my transl.: “Every cause properly speaking is an immediate cause. For that which is such that, whether or not it is posited, the effect follows in the nature of things and when it is posited and everything else is left aside, the effect does not follow, cannot be shown to be a cause.” 57  Ockham, Rep. II, q. 3–4, OTh V, 61, my transl.: “A remote cause is not a cause because the effect does not attend its presence. Otherwise Adam could be said to be a cause of me, which is not true, since what is not a being cannot be a cause of being.” 58  Ockham, Rep. II, q. 3–4, OTh V, 60–63. 59  Ockham, Rep. II, q. 3–4, OTh V, 66; Quaest. Phys. 132 and 133 OPh VI, 756–758. 60  Ockham, Rep. II, q. 12–13, OTh V, 288–289, my transl.: “Every naturally producible effect by its very nature determines itself to be produced by one efficient cause and not another, just as it determines itself to be produced in one matter and not another. For if this were so, it follows that the same effect would be produced in different matters by different agents, which is impossible. The assumption is clear: suppose there were two agents, say two equally intense heats and two equally disposed matters of the same kind, and just as close to one as to the other in every respect, and this at the same instant. This is indeed possible. Then, according to your claim – that the heat to be produced does not determine itself to be produced by either of these agents – the heat will either at one and the same time be produced in the two matters by both agents, or neither will produce the heat. For each is a natural agent close to the patient, and there is no obstacle. Given that the effect is no more determined to one than to the other, and each matter is equally close to both, either the same effect will be produced by each agent in each matter or in none. Each consequence is awkward. Therefore, it is necessary that an effect determine itself to one agent of the same kind and not to the other in such a way that it can be produced by one and not by the other.” 56

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It is in this context that the status of the famous distinction between God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power can be understood. God’s absolute power designates His power to do whatever does not include a contradiction, while His ordained power designates His contribution following the order that He established during the creation of the world.61 The dialectic between the two aspects of divine power came to play a central role in philosophy and theology after the condemnations of 1277.62 In a classic study, William Courtenay explains that two interpretations of God’s absolute power existed at the beginning of the fourteenth century63: the traditional interpretation following the theological tradition, which treated God’s absolute power as what He could have done otherwise, and the juridical interpretation of the canonists and adopted by philosophers such as Scotus, according to which God’s absolute power is what He can still do otherwise.64 On the first view, God’s absolute power describes only what could have been otherwise, while on the second view, God’s absolute power is a form of direct action in the world. Both Scotus and Ockham follow the first view and hold that God’s absolute power is to be understood in counterfactual terms, which means that God is not bound to follow the laws that He created.65 For both Scotus and Ockham, God’s absolute power only works in conjunction with His ordained power, never separately as an independent mode of action in the world. The relevant difference between Scotus and Ockham does not depend on their understanding of the distinction between the two powers of God but on the way to define the respective contributions of first and second causes in any causal process.

 For a good overview, see Gelber, It could have been otherwise, 306–307.  On this subject, see W. J. Courtenay, “The Dialectic of Omnipotence in the High and Late Middle Ages,” in T.  Rudavsky (ed.), Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence in Medieval Philosophy (London: Dordrecht, 1984b), 247. In that year, the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, condemned 219 propositions that various members of the philosophical community at the University of Paris had espoused. See R. Hissette, Enquête sur les 219 articles condamnés à Paris le 7 mars 1277 (Louvain-Paris: Publications Universitaires-Vander-Oyez, 1977). The classic study on God’s absolute and ordained power is E. Randi, Il sovrano e l’orologiaio. Due immagini di Dio nel dibattito sulla potentia absoluta fra XIII e XIV secolo (Firenze: La nuova Italia, 1987). 63  W. J. Courtenay, Capacity and Volition. A History of the Distinction of Absolute and Ordained Power (Bergamo: Lubrina, 1990), 102. 64  Scotus, Ord, d. 44, q. un., Vat. ed. VI, 363. 65  Ockham, Quodl. VI, q. 1, trans. Freddoso-Kelley, 491–492: “God is able to do certain things by his ordained power and certain things by his absolute power. This distinction should not be understood to mean that in God there are really two powers, one of which is ordained and the other of which is absolute. For with respect to things outside himself there is in God a single power, which in every way is God himself. Nor should the distinction be understood to mean that God is able to do certain things ordinately and certain things absolutely and not ordinately. For God can do anything inordinately. Instead, the distinction should be understood to mean that ‘power to do something’ is sometimes taken as ‘power to do something in accordance with the laws that have been ordained and instituted by God,’ and God is said to be able to do these things by his ordained power. In an alternative sense, ‘power’ is taken as ‘power to do anything that its being does not involve a contradiction,’ regardless of whether or not God has ordained that he will do it.” 61 62

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The question is then whether God has motivations to substitute one cause for another by means of His absolute power. This question had a major impact on the epistemological aspect of medieval theories of causation, which is the topic of the second part of this paper.

3.3  Causality and Induction 3.3.1  Knowledge of Causal Principles At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Scotus elaborated the philosophical apparatus for defending the non-Aristotelian idea that there can be scientific knowledge of contingent objects, which resulted in a shift in the way of conceiving the first principles of science.66 Aristotle claims that we come to know indemonstrable principles through induction.67 The indemonstrable principles about which he speaks in the Posterior Analytics seem to be restricted to mathematical and metaphysical truths. From Scotus onward, it is emphasized that some of the so-called first principles are causal in nature, such as “fire causes heat” and “a certain herb results in the reduction of fever.” These are the principles known through induction. They are often opposed to the principles known per se, such as “a whole is greater than its part” or the principle of contradiction. This classification no longer corresponds to the standard Aristotelian division of first principles of science into two groups, namely theses and axioms.68 The starting point of this development is Scotus’s treatment of the problem of skepticism that he found in his predecessor Henry of Ghent. Against Henry, he argues that evident knowledge can derive directly from experience through induction.69 What is at stake is finding a method to be applied to the discovery of the effect

 This shift is highlighted by Anneliese Maier, who claims that one of the most significant results of fourteenth-century natural philosophy is the ongoing discussion of induction as scientific method as such and the quest for proving that it can be the basis of evident knowledge. See A. Maier, “Das Problem der Evidenz in der Philosophie des 14. Jahrhunderts,” in ead., Ausgehendes Mittelalter (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1967), vol. II, 367–418. 67  Aristotle, Analytics Posterior II, 19. 68  Aristotle, A. Post. 72a15. An instance of axiom is the principle of noncontradiction. Thesis is subdivided into two kinds, hypotheses and definitions. For the medieval re-elaboration of Aristotle’s classification, see especially J.M.M.H.  Thijssen, “John Buridan and Nicholas of Autrecourt on Causality and Induction,” Traditio 43 (1987), 238–255. 69  Scotus, Ord., d. 3, pars 1, q. 4, OTh III, 141, transl. Wolter, “Philosophical Writings,” 110: “That such an effect occurs frequently through such a cause is a fact gathered from experience. For once we find such a nature associated at one time with this accident and at another with that, we have discovered that despite the accidental differences, such an effect invariably follows from this nature. Hence, such an effect is not the result of what is merely incidental to such a nature but is rather the effect of this nature as such.” 66

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of a given cause.70 Scotus appeals to a special principle to establish the truth of inductive generalization. He maintains that the proposition “whatever occurs in a great many instances by a cause that is not free, is the natural effect of that cause” is self-evident.71 This is often called a “principle of the uniformity of nature.” The basic idea is that natural causes cannot produce effects other than what it is their nature to produce.72 Almost all scholastic philosophers after Scotus adopt his position. For instance, Ockham is no less confident than Scotus in the possibility of inductive knowledge of causal processes. Ockham endorses the principle of the uniformity of nature that “causes of the same kind have effects of the same kind,”73 or more precisely that “all agents of the same most specific species are able to bring about effects of the same kind.”74 He calls it the extrinsic mean of a formal inference,75 which means that Ockham must regard it as an a priori and necessary truth. Ockham insists that we can have evident knowledge of causal claims on the basis of experience and contends that we use them as premises in inferring the indemonstrable first principles of demonstration. The singular proposition “this herb strengthened 70  On medieval views of induction, see J. Weinberg, Abstraction, Relation, and Induction: Three Essays in the History of Thought (Madison and Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965) 121–153; E.  Serene, “Robert Grosseteste on Induction and Demonstrative Science,” Synthese 40 (1979), 97–115; S. Marrone, “Robert Grosseteste on the Certitude of Induction,” in C. Wenin (ed.), L’homme et son univers au Moyen Age. Actes du septième congrès international de philosophie médievale (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1986), 481–499; E. P. Bos, “A Contribution to the History of Theories of Induction in the Middle Ages,” in K. Jacobi (ed.), Argumentationstheorie: ScholastischeForschunge zu den logischen und semantischen Regeln korrekten Folgerns (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 553–576. For an overview of Scotus’s contribution, see Gelber, It Could Have been Otherwise, 268. For the fourteenth-century developments, see M.  Roques, “Logique de la découverte et rationalité des conduites pré-scientifiques. Induction et uniformité de la nature d’après Jean Buridan,” in C.  Grellard (ed.), Mélanges offerts à Joël Biard, Paris, Vrin, 2017, 253–270. 71  Scotus, Ord., d. 3, pars 1, q. 4, OTh III, 141, transl. Wolter, “Philosophical Writings,” 109: “As for what is known by experience, I have this to say. Even though a person does not experience every single individual, but only a great many, nor does he experience them at all times, but only frequently, still he knows infallibly that it is always this way and holds for all instances. He knows this in virtue of this proposition reposing in his soul: ‘Whatever occurs in a great many instances by a cause that is not free, is the natural effect of that cause.’ This proposition is known to the intellect even if the terms are derived from erring senses, because a cause that does not act freely cannot in most instances produce an effect that is the very opposite of what it is ordained by its form to produce.” 72  Scotus, Ord., I, d. 3, pars 1, q. 4, OTh III, 142, transl. Wolter, “Philosophical Writings,” 110: “A cause that does not act freely cannot in most instances produce an effect that is the very opposite of what it is ordained by its form to produce. The chance cause, however, is ordained either to produce or not produce the opposite of the chance effect. Consequently, if the effect occurs frequently it is not produced by chance and its cause therefore will be a natural cause if it is not a free agent. But this effect occurs through such a cause. Therefore, since the latter produced by chance and its cause therefore will be a natural cause if it is not a free agent.” 73  Ockham, Ord,, Prol, q. 1, OTh I, 42. 74  Ockham, Ord., Prol, q. 2, OTh I, 87 and 90–96. 75  Ockham, Ord., Prol. q. 2, OTh I, 91–92. On this subject, see the classical study by Adams, “Was Ockham a Humean?”.

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this person who was feverish” together with the principle of the uniformity of nature entails the universal proposition “every herb of this species strengthens someone with a fever.”76 The discussion goes on during the fourteenth century. One of the main representative positions is Buridan’s. Buridan defends it in answer to the skeptical scenarios of Nicholas of Autrecourt.77 Autrecourt denies that we have experience of causal relations. It is always possible for God to take the place of secondary causes, which implies that induction cannot yield certain knowledge. Repetition of these experiences may provoke a conjectural habit (habitus conjecturativus), which is the expectation that in the future the same conjunction will be observed. But this expectation yields nothing more than probable knowledge.78 In response to Autrecourt’s skeptical scenario, Buridan appeals to the principle of the common course of nature, which allows him to set aside the possibility of God’s intervention into natural causal processes.79 The principle of the common course of nature grounds Buridan’s idea of a natural inclination of the intellect toward truth.80 On this basis, he describes induction as the generalization of a singular judgment of experience about some-

76  Ockham, Ord., Prol., q. 2, OTh I, 94–95, transl. Adams, “Was Ockham a Humean?”, 33: “For example, suppose that ‘every herb of this species strengthens someone with a fever’ is a first principle. This proposition cannot be proved syllogistically from any better known propositions. Rather knowledge of it is derived from intuitive cognition, perhaps of many [instances]. For since he saw that after such an herb is eaten, health follows in the person with the fewer, and since he removed all other causes of the person’s health, he had evident knowledge that this herb was the cause of health, and then had experience regarding the singular [proposition]. But it is known to him that all individuals of the same species have the same kind of effect in an equally disposed patient. Therefore, he derives evident knowledge of the principle that every such herb strengthens someone with a fewer.” See also Ord., Prol., q. 2, OTh I, 87. 77  See especially J.  Zupko, “Buridan and Skepticism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 31 (1993), 191–207. 78  For more on this subject, see the references given in the introduction. 79  For more on Buridan’s use of the common course of nature principles, see P.  King, “Jean Buridan’s Philosophy of Science,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 18 (1987), 109–132. 80  Buridan, Quaest. Anal. Post., I, 2, transl. Economicos, 167: “Although induction, or inductive experience, does not conclude on account of its form, nevertheless, when the intellect repeatedly perceives something to be the case and cannot discover a counterexample, nor does there seem to be a reason why it ought to be otherwise in other cases, the intellect through its natural inclination toward truth grants that a universal principle is known.” See also Buridan, Quaest. Anal. Post., II, 11, transl. Economicos, 424: “the intellect […] from its natural inclination toward the truth, forms a universal principle and assents to it as known, namely, that every fire is hot.” The translation of Buridan’s Questions on the Posterior Analytics comes from A.  Economicos, Intellectus and Induction: Three Aristotelian Commentators on the Cognition of First Principles, including an original Translation of John Buridan’s Questiones in duos Aristotelis libros posteriorum analyticorum, unpublished PhD dissertation, Fordham University, 2009. For Buridan’s text, see H. Hubien (ed.), Iohannis Buridani Quaestiones in duos libros Aristotelis Posteriorum Analyticorum, unpublished typescript.

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thing not sensed.81 Consequently, empirical truths acquired by induction can be said to be evident. However, this evidence is not absolute but qualified.82 Buridan’s appeal to evidentia secundum quid is based on a long tradition. It can be found in Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham.83 It has two main functions. First, it helps satisfy the theological requirement that there must be room for miracles. Second, it expresses the Aristotelian idea that natural effects take place ut in pluribus, that is, that they take place on the assumption of the common course of nature. Thus, Scotus, Ockham, and Buridan believe that something can be learned from induction. Inductive reasoning is based on the acceptance of a principle of the uniformity of nature which holds that specifically the same causes always have specifically the same effect unless there is some impediment. The principle of uniformity cannot justify induction unless it is grounded in nonempirical truths. Otherwise inductive reasoning would be circular, since the principle of uniformity would itself be the result of an induction. The question is then how to justify the principle. From Scotus onward, a key question was then how we could gain knowledge of a cause’s connection to an effect.84

 Buridan, Quaest. Anal. Post., II, 11, transl. Economicos, 423: “Therefore, for the acceptance of principles of this second mode by the intellect, sense, memory and experience are prerequisite, in such a way that first you learn from sense that this fire is hot and immediately the intellect consequently judges that fire is hot, and thus many instances are possessed by the memory that these were hot, and then if you encounter another fire, which you do not sense, because of the memory of the previous ones, you will judge this to be hot, and this is now a judgment of experience about something not sensed. Finally, it must be noted that the intellect, noticing that things were in the same way in many instances, and that no diverse circumstances prevented them from doing so.” 82  Buridan, Quaest. Anal. Post., I, 2, transl. Economicos, 163–164: “In a second sense, something is called ‘evident’ because it is apparent to someone and without any reasoning it could appear otherwise. Natural principles and natural conclusions are evident in this sense. Let us note that this kind of evidentness is not properly called ‘evident,’ because the intellect can be deceived about such evident principles by a supernatural cause. Since God can make a fire without heat, and can produce and maintain a sensible species in my senses without any object, and though such evidence, one would form judgments as though the object were present, and would judge falsely. However, this natural evidentness is correctly called ‘natural’ since a person cannot be deceived about it [as long as] he remains within the common course of nature, although he may be deceived by a supernatural cause. This type of evidentness is sufficient for natural knowledge.” See also In Met. II, q. 1, transcribed in A. Maier, “Das Problem der Evidenz,” 298. For an analysis, see J. Biard, Science et nature. La théorie buridanienne du savoir (Paris: Vrin, 2012), 17–38. 83  On this subject, see especially A. Maier, “Notwendigkeit, Kontingenz und Zufall,” in ead.,Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1962), 219–250 and L. M. de Rijk, “John Buridan on Man’s Capability to Grasping the Truth,” in I. Kraemer-Rugenberg and A. Speer (ed.), Scientia und Ars im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter (Berlin-New York, De Gruyter: 1994) vol. I, 282–303. 84  In The Emergence of Probability (London & New  York, Cambridge. University Press, 1975, 180–181), I. Hacking claims that that skepticism concerning induction could never arise within the context of medieval theories of demonstration and causation. In light of the developments that I have described, it is clear that this interpretation must be revised. 81

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3.3.2  Ockham’s Rule for Causal Determination On this issue, Ockham’s scruples lay the ground for the subsequent developments in the fourteenth century.85 Ockham defends the idea that causation cannot be perceived and that the cognition of a thing cannot be the cause of the cognition of another thing.86 To know that something is a cause presupposes that one knows another thing which is its effect.87 But since God can always take the place of a second cause, the appearances being equal, it is impossible to obtain such a knowledge. Ockham nuances his claims by saying that secondary causes are not superfluous, because in the common cases God never acts as much as his power allows.88 However, this argument has as a consequence that it can never be demonstrated that a given effect is produced by a secondary cause, for such facts are contingent.89 How, then, can we have knowledge of natural causal processes? Ockham makes frequent appeal to correlation as a criterion for identifying what is a natural efficient cause of what.90 As noted by Marilyn McCord Adams, Ockham suggests that to know that Xs are efficient causes of Ys, it is sufficient to observe that, ceteris paribus, when See M.  McCord Adams, “Was Ockham a Humean about Efficient Causality?”, Franciscan Studies 37 (1979), 5–48: ead., William Ockham (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), c. 18, 746–758. See also A.  Robert, “L’explication causale selon Guillaume d’Ockham,” Quaestio 2 (2002), 241–267. Here I closely follow Adams’s classical studies on this topic. 86  Ockham, Ord., Prol., q. 9, OTh I, 241, my transl.: “Non-complex knowledge of a thing does not cause non-complex knowledge of another thing. This is made clear first by an argument from experience, because anyone experiences in himself that even if he cognizes something intuitively and perfectly, by means of this knowledge he never cognizes another thing unless he had the knowledge of this other thing beforehand.” 87  Ockham, Ord., Prol., q. 9, OTh I, 244, my transl.: “to cognize a cause under the aspect of a cause presupposes the knowledge of the thing that is the effect.” 88  Ockham, Rep. II, q. 3–4, OTh V, p. 72. 89  Ockham, Rep. II, q. 3–4, OTh V, 72–73, transl. Adams “Was Ockham a Humean?”, 26: “It follows from this that it cannot be demonstrated that any effect is produced by a secondary cause. For even though when fire is close to combustible material, combustion always follows, this fact is, nevertheless, consistent with fire’s not being the cause of it. For God could have ordained that whenever fire is present to a close-by patient, the sun would cause combustion in the patient; just as He ordained with the Church that when certain words are spoken, grace is produced in the soul. Thus, there is no effect through which it can be proved that anyone is a human being – especially through no effect that is clear to us. For an angel can produce in a body everything that we see in a human being – e.g. eating, drinking, and the like. This is clear from the case of the angel in the book of Tobit. Therefore it is not surprising if it is impossible to demonstrate that anything is a cause.” 90  Ockham, Ord., d. 45, q. un., OTh IV, 664–665, transl. mine: “although I do not intend to say in general what an immediate cause is, nevertheless I hold that the following is sufficient for something to be an immediate cause, viz. that when that absolute thing is posited, the effect is posited, and when it is not posited and all other concurrent conditions and dispositions remain the same, the effect is not posited. Thus, whatever is related to something this way is its cause, although perhaps not vice versa. Moreover, it seems obvious that this is sufficient for something’s being an immediate cause of another thing.” See Adams “Was Ockham a Humean?”, 16–17. 85

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ever Xs are posited, Ys are posited or that whenever Xs are not posited, Ys are not posited, or both. His main argument in defense of this idea is an argument from indispensability, which states that if the rule is not accepted, it will be impossible to identify the cause of any effect.91 But such correlations do not provide a definition of efficient causation. They only serve as our criterion for identifying the causes of a given causal process.92 However, it should be noted that this criterion is insufficient because of the ceteris paribus clause: it involves an indefinite number of factors. The criterion is valid for an ideal situation in which any other causal factor has been removed. It does not state a genetic connection but an invariable coincidence. The criterion says nothing about the active and productive nature usually attributed to causal powers. Let us come now to this virtue or causal power that is not grasped through experience.

3.3.3  Power and Sacraments It is on the occasion of his discussion of sacramental causality that Ockham gives his most extensive account of the nature of causality.93 The problem has to do with the causal contribution of the sacraments, such as baptism, to grace. Since Augustine, theologians have claimed that the new-law sacraments differ from old-law sacraments on the grounds that the former “effect what they figure.” New-law sacraments are causes of what they signify. This theological idea was given different philosophical justifications. Aquinas contends that if new-law sacraments would only result from a pact between God and men, God alone would be responsible for the production of grace. Sacraments would be useless. Aquinas’s view is that sacraments do possess genuine causal power: they have an instrumental causality that enables them to effect grace directly, in virtue of a special power that God gave them. Aquinas’s solution was heavily criticized, especially in the Franciscan order.94 Ockham follows Scotus and defines sacrament as an “efficacious sign of God’s

 Ockham, Ord., d. 45, q. un., OTh IV, p. 665, my transl. : “For if it were not, every way of knowing that one thing is the cause of another thing would perish. For if it did not follow from the fact that when this is posited the effect follows and when it is not posited the effect does not follow that it is the cause of that effect, there is no way in which it can be known that fire is the cause of heat in wood. For one can say that there is some other cause of heat, which nevertheless acts only in the presence of fire.” 92  Ockham states this criterion several times. See especially Rep. II, q. 12–13, OTh V, 276, my transl.: “that which, when it is posited, another thing can be posited, everything else being equal, and which, when it is not posited, another thing cannot be posited, is naturally the cause of it.” 93  For the background of the whole issue, see W. J. Courtenay, Covenant and Causality in Medieval Thought (London, Variorum Reprints, 1984a). 94  See especially L. O. Nielsen, “Signification, Likeness, and Causality. The Sacraments as Signs by Divine Imposition in John Duns Scotus, Durand of St. Pourçain, and Peter Auriol,” in C. Marmo (ed.), Vestigia, imagines, verba. Semiotics and Logic in Medieval Theological Texts (XIIth–XIVth Century) (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), 223–254. 91

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gratuitous effect.”95 Ockham puts a strong emphasis on God’s voluntary institution of the sacraments. He refuses to provide a natural explanation of the operation of the sacraments. But this leads to a problem. A sacrament fulfills the criterion for stating that a relation of causality exists between two things: if a sacrament is given, grace is given; and if the sacrament is not given, grace is not given.96 However, Ockham claims that sacraments are not genuine causes.97 They are sine qua non causes.98 How then to distinguish genuine causes from mere sine qua non causes? Ockham answers that causality operates ex natura rei, while sacraments operate only because of God’s will.99 In other words, a genuine efficient cause is a thing endowed with causal powers in virtue of which it acts according to its nature. A power is usually characterized by a natural inclination, i.e., its being toward something. When it comes to the nature of a causal power, Ockham defends a radical view and argues that what is called natural inclination is nothing other than the agent acting according to natural necessity. Hence a causal power is not an accident but the thing itself acting. Whenever the causal process is obstructed by an impediment, the natural agent is still acting. For example, a heavy object in equilibrium above the ground is not at rest but is actively pushing toward the ground.100 By reducing natural inclination to the exercise of a causal power, Ockham reverses the traditional explanatory priority of the final cause over the efficient cause. As Ockham says, “You might ask: why does the fire heat the wood rather than cool it? I reply that such is its nature”.101 It is in virtue of its nature that fire heats, not because its end is to heat.  Ockham, Rep. IV, q. 1, OTh VII, 5.  Ockham, Rep. IV, q. 1, OTh VII, 3, transl. Adams, “Was Ockham a Humean?”, 27: “For that which when it is posited another is posited, is the cause of that thing. This is clear from what the Philosopher says in Metaphysics, Book V: a cause is that at whose existence another follows.” But when the sacrament is posited, grace is posited, and when the sacrament is removed, grace is removed.” 97  On this subject, see especially A.  Goddu, “William of Ockham’s Distinction Between Real Efficient Causes and Strictly Sine Qua Non Causes,” The Monist 79 (1996), 357–367; M. McCord Adams, “Powerless Causes. The Case of Sacramental Causality,” in G. Machamer (ed.), Thinking About Causes. From Greek Philosophy to Modern Physics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 47–77. 98  Ockham, Rep. IV, q. 1, OTh VII, 17, transl. Adams, “Was Ockham a Humean?”, 28: “[…] ..’a cause is that upon whose existence another follows’ can be taken in two ways: One way, when by the nature of the thing [ex natura rei], at the existence and presence of one, the existence of the other follows naturally. Another way when at the existence and presence of one the other follows, not by the nature of the thing [ex natura rei] but by the divine will to institute something. And this way we maintain that a meritorious act is called a cause of rewards by divine volition alone. And a sine qua non cause is said to be a cause the second way. In the first way, I say that the sacraments are not the cause of grace. […].” 99  Ockham, Rep. IV, q. 1, OTh VII, 17, transl. Adams,” Was Ockham a Humean?”, 28: “[…] it pertains to the notion of cause [ratione causae] that it could by its own power [virtute propria] be followed by the effect, by the nature of the thing [ex natura rei] and naturally.” 100  Ockham, Quodl. III, q. 22, trans. Freddoso, 241. 101  Ockham, Quodl. II.2, trans. Freddoso, 99. 95 96

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In this understanding of the metaphysics of causal powers, what is the nature and status of final causality?

3.4  The Partial End of Teleological Explanations 3.4.1  The Psychologization of Final Causality Aristotle famously defends the teleological claim that nature acts for an end, that is, that there are natural processes that are done for the sake of something.102 The priority of final causes over efficient causes is still defended in the thirteenth century.103 It was called into question in the fourteenth century. In a classical study, Anneliese Maier describes a gradual process during which, under the influence of Avicenna, it has become accepted that there are no final causes in nature.104 On the Avicennian model, final causality is possible only in virtue of the mind that grasps the end in question. Avicenna distinguishes between the end as it exists in reality and the end as it exists in the soul. Only when it exists in the soul is an end of a cause. From this point of view, “it is the cause of the causes, whereas from another point of view, it is the effect of the causes.”105 By the end of the thirteenth century, Avicenna’s account had become a major reference. Thus, Aquinas says that “for something to be done for the sake of an end, some sort of cognition of the end is required.”106 This kind of psychologization of final causality helped to solve the main problem related to final causation, namely, the way in which a final cause can be a cause. This question was widely debated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The problem has to do with the temporal order between cause and effect. It is commonly assumed that the cause is temporally prior to or at least simulta Aristotle, Physics II, 9, 199a20–30.  As reflected, for instance, in Aquinas’s claim (De principiis naturae, cap. 4) that “the end is the cause of the causality of the efficient cause, because it makes the efficient cause be an efficient cause. Similarly, it makes matter be matter and form be form, since the matter would not receive a form except through an end and the form would not perfect the matter except through an end. Hence it is said that the end is the cause of causes, since it is the cause of the causality of all the causes.” 104  A. Maier, “Finalkausalität und Naturgesetz,” in ead., Metaphysische Hintergrunde der spätscholastischen Naturphilosophie (Rome: Edizione di Storia e letteratura Rome, 1955), 271–335. For a critical evaluation of Maier’s interpretation, see C. Trifogli, “Thomas Wylton on Final Causality,” in A.  Fidora and M.  Lutz-Bachmann (ed.), Erfahrung und Beweis. Die Wissenschaften von der Natur im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert, (Berlin: Akademie Verlag Berlin 2007), 249–264. I follow Trifogli’s paper, as well as the classical study by R. Pasnau, “Intentionality and Final Causes,” in D. Perler (ed.), Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality (Leiden: Brill 2001), 301–323. 105  Avicenna, Met. VI, 5. 106  Aquinas, ST IaIIae, 6.1c. All causal processes are dependent on God’s will. See, for instance, Aquinas, De veritate, 22.1c: “All natural things are inclined toward their ends through a certain natural inclination from the first mover, which is God, and consequently that toward which a thing is naturally inclined must be that which is willed or intended by God.” 102 103

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neous with the effect. The doctrine of final causes seems to reverse the order of priority between cause and effect, since the end, although temporally posterior to the effect, is said to be its cause. In answer to this worry, Scotus claims that the causality of the end consists in its being loved or desired by an efficient cause.107 Ends move only metaphorically by virtue of being loved by the agent.108 For this account to work, Scotus holds that final and efficient causes are essentially ordered to one another in the production of their common effect. Thus, the efficient cause depends on the end, not for its real existence, but in causing: the final cause explains why the efficient cause acts, but not vice versa.109 As Scotus says, “the end moves metaphorically insofar as it is loved, so that for this reason the efficient cause gives form to matter.”110 Moreover, Scotus calls into question the status of final causality in natural explanations. Scotus remarks that it is less obvious that natural agents act for the sake of an end than that intelligent voluntary agents do. Given that natural agents act by natural necessity, they would act the same way whether they acted for an end or not. He concludes that, if natural agents act for the sake of an end, this is because a voluntary agent has ordered them to it.111 Ockham’s account of the causality of the end is similar to Scotus’s: he holds that the causality of the end consists in “nothing other than its being loved and desired efficaciously by an agent, so that the effect is brought about because of the thing that is loved.”112 Indeed, when tackling the problem of the posteriority of the final cause with respect to its effect, Ockham says that the distinctive property of a final cause

 Scotus, Quaest. Met., V, q. 1, n. 77, transl. Pasnau “Intentionality and Final Causes,” 306: “Embracing the first path, then, that an end is a cause inasmuch as it exists in the thoughts of the agent, we should note that it exists there in the sense that it has objective and formal existence. Objective existence is real existence, and formal existence is that in virtue of which it is now thought of, and this is to exist in thought. For example: if I consider an existing rose, and the object of the intellect is the thing, the species exists objectively and formally in the intellect.” See also Quaest. Met., q. 1, n. 20, OPh III, 30. For an analysis of this text, see M. Adams, “Final Causality and Explanation in Scotus’s De Primo Principio,” in C.  Koyama (ed.), Nature in Medieval Thought. Some Approaches East and West (Leiden-Boston-Köln: Brill), 2000, 153–183. 108  Scotus, De Primo Principio II, sec. 2.21, transl. Wolter, 22: “The causation of the end consists in this that by being loved it moves metaphorically.” See also Quaest. Met. V, q. 1, n. 39. 109  Scotus, Quaest. Met. V, q. 1, n. 3. 110  Scotus, De primo principio II, sec. 2.11, transl. Wolter, 16. 111  Scotus, Ord, d. 2, p. 1, qq. 1–2, n. 76, Vatican ed. III, 52. 112  Ockham, Quodl. IV, q. 1, a. 1, transl. Freddoso, 245–246. See also Ockham, Quodl. IV, q. 1, transl. Freddoso, 245, and Summula II, 6, OPh VI, 229, my transl.: “an end is ‘something intended or desired or loved for the sake of which an agent acts’.” For final causality in Ockham, see H.  Klocker, “Ockham and Finality,” The Modern Schoolman 43 (1966), 233–247; M.  Adams, “Ockham on Final Causality: Muddying the Waters,” Franciscan Studies 56 (1998), 1–46; S. Brown, “Ockham and Final Causality,” in J. Wippel (ed.), Studies in Medieval Philosophy 17 (1987), 249–272. 107

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is that it is able to cause when it does not exist.113 But, for Ockham, this view faces many objections: on final cause “there is greater doubt.”114 The most important one is close to the contemporary “problem of mental causation.”115 The consensus view states that an end as conceived by the mind can be realized by the body, although this production is said to be metaphorical.116 To solve the problem, Ockham contrasts Avicenna’s view that an end moves “in virtue of the existence that it has in the soul” with Averroes’ view that “a final cause moves as a final cause in virtue of the existence that it has outside the soul.”117 Ockham favors Averroes. The final cause, in his view, is the external object toward which an action is directed, not the thing as it exists in the agent’s thoughts.118 Ockham is sometimes ambiguous about this but, as Robert Pasnau has pointed out, it is probably the best interpretation of his view.119

3.4.2  Banishing Ends from Nature The process of psychologization of final causality led to a second innovation in fourteenth-century natural philosophy: the banishing of final causality from nature and its restriction to voluntary free agents. Aquinas states that “it makes no difference whether that which tends to an end is knowing or not, for just as the target is  Ockham, Quodl. IV, q. 1, transl. Freddoso, 245–246: “Sometimes an end is a cause when it does not exist, since sometimes an end is desired when it does not exist. […] Hence, it is distinctive of a final cause that it is able to cause when it does not exist…You might object that that which does not exist is not a cause of anything. I reply that this is false. Rather, one must add that the thing in question does not exist and is neither loved nor desired, and then indeed it follows that it is not a cause.” 114  This question is dealt with especially in De Fine (Quaest. Var. 4), in which Ockham asks whether it follows from the fact that something moves as an end that it has any real extra-mental being. 115  For an overview of the current account of this problem, see J. Heil and A. Mele, A. (ed.), Mental Causation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 116  Ockham, Quodl. IV, q. 1, transl. Freddoso, 293: “Nothing is really acquired from it or comes from it, and so it follows that this movement of the end is not real, but metaphorical.” See also Quaest. Var. 4, OTh VIII, 107–108; Summula II, 4, OPh VI, 221. 117  Ockham, Quaest. Var. 4, OTh VIII, 113–114. 118  Ockham, Quaest. Var. 4, OTh VIII, 116, transl. Pasnau, “Intentionality and Final Causes,” 313: “An end moves an agent to act in virtue of its reality outside the soul.” For a more detailed explanation, see R. Pasnau, “Intentionality and Final Causes,” in D. Perler (ed.), Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 301–324. 119  Ockham, Quaest. Var. 4, OTh VIII, 115, transl. R. Pasnau, “Intentionality and Final Causes,” 313–314: “an end’s moving an agent to act is an end’s being loved and the agent’s acting for the sake of that end, as loved. But an end is loved by an agent in virtue of its reality outside the soul and the agent acts for the love of that end as it is external. For walking is not for the sake of health as it has existence in the soul alone, not because I love health or life in virtue of its existence in the soul, but because I love health and life in virtue of its real being outside the soul. And it is for the sake of such loved being that I walk and abstain and do such things.” 113

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the end for the archer, so is it the end for the motion of the arrow.”120 To Ockham and Buridan, the example of the arrow shows that natural agents only appear to act for ends: the end for the motion of the arrow comes from the will of the archer.121 Both Ockham and Buridan explicitly deny that natural agents act for ends. Only agents who act intentionally and spontaneously (a proposito et sponte) act for an end.122 You do not have to stipulate that it is the end of fire to heat wood in order to explain that wood is heated by fire. You only have to stipulate that it is because of its nature that the fire capable of heating wood.123 There is no longer any need for final explanations in natural philosophy. As Ockham claims, there is no way to prove philosophically that every effect has a final cause.124 In the Brief Summa of the Physics, Ockham takes over the arguments put forward by the ancient materialists in favor of the view that all beings either exist by chance or by natural necessity and not for the sake of an end. The first two arguments prove that final causes do not have any explanatory value. First, something that happens for an end would happen even if no end were intended. Second, if the same thing can act for the sake of two contrary ends, then it acts for the sake of neither. The last argument states that anything that does not deliberate cannot seek an end because it cannot know it.125 When we speak of final causality in nature, we use a metaphor to speak of the determinism that rules the natural order.126 Final causality is thus  Aquinas, SCG 3.1.2.  See Buridan, Quaest. Phys. II, q. 13 and Ockham, Quodl. IV, q. 1. transl. Freddoso, 245–250. 122  Ockham, Summula II, 6, OPh VI, 226: “What has been said about the final cause is to be understood of an agent that acts because of a purpose and spontaneously [a proposito et sponte] […].” 123  Ockham, Quodl., II, q. 2, OTh 115–116, transl. Freddoso: “But merely natural causes that are determined by their nature to a certain effect and not to another, do not require anyone to foreknow and direct them – at least natural reason does not conclude that this is required. For example, fire close to wood heats it, whether or not a knower intends this. If you ask why fire heats rather than cools, I reply that it is its nature to do so […].” 124  Ockham, Quodl. IV, q. 2, a. 1, transl. Freddoso, 251: “It cannot be sufficiently demonstrated or known either through principles known per se or through experience, that a thing that acts by a necessity of nature acts because of a final cause fixed beforehand by a will. And this is because the action of such an agent never varies without a change either in the agent or in the patient or in something that concurs with the action. Instead the action always follows in the same way. And so it cannot be proved that such an agent acts because of an end.” See also Quodl. IV, 1 transl. Freddoso, 249: “someone strictly following reason would say that the question ‘for the sake of what’ (propter quid) has no place in natural actions, because he would say that there is no question to ask, ‘fire is generated for the sake of what?’, but that this has a place only in voluntary actions.” Ockham, Quodl. IV, q. 1, transl. Freddoso, 246: “For it cannot be proved that every effect has a final cause.” There is however a debate about this point in Ockham. For an introduction to this debate, see R. Pasnau, “Intentionality and Final Causes.” 125  Ockham, Brevis Summa, II, 6, OPh VI, 36–39. 126  Ockham, Summula II, 6, OPh VI, 229–230, transl. Pasnau, “Intentionality and Final Causes,” 310: “In another way, the end or the final cause is taken as that which follows from the operation of another according to the common course of nature, if not impeded – following just as if it were foreknown or desired by an agent. It is in this way that an end is found in things without souls, even supposing that they were directed or moved by no cognitive being. This is how the Philosopher speaks about final causality, at the end of Physics II.” 120 121

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restricted to voluntary agents.127 Buridan, for instance, claims that common sense recognizes final causality only or principally in voluntary agents.128 This new way of conceiving of final causality had an immediate impact on the two Aristotelian concepts of chance and fortune. Aquinas states that chance is a cause that has a result praeter intentionem.129 “Intentio” here means any active tendency toward something. The act of an agent might result in an end other than the intended one, for instance, because of a side effect. By contrast with chance, fortune is restricted to voluntary agents. There is only conditional necessity in voluntary agents130: voluntary agents are only necessitated by the end that they freely chose. But often the chosen end can be realized in different ways.131 The conditional necessity proper to voluntary agents does not determine which particular action will follow from the choice of the agent.132 Thus, fortune is the result of a voluntary act that was not intended by the agent. Ockham argues that chance presupposes the activity of voluntary agents: chance “can occur immediately because of the causal influence of natural causes, but it nonetheless always occurs mediately and partially because of a free agent.”133 In the case of chance, the act of a free agent concurs with a natural causal process. By contrast, in the case of fortune, it concurs with the act of another free agent. Indeed, Ockham defines fortune as that which occurs “by reason of the fact that an effect that falls outside the intention of the free agent is brought

 Ockham, Quodl. IV, q. 1, transl. Freddoso 249: “Someone who is just following natural reason would claim that the question ‘for what reason?’ is inappropriate in the case of natural actions. For he would maintain that it is no real question to ask for what reason a fire is generated; rather, this question is appropriate only in the case of voluntary actions…Natural agents proceed anew from rest into action at the moment when an impediment is removed. For instance, a fire is now close to the wood and previously was not. On the other hand, a free agent proceeds anew into action because he begins to intend an end.” 128  Buridan, Quaest. Phys., II, 7, fol. 35ra, transl. Pasnau, “Intentionality and Final Causes,” 316: “It seems to me that everybody by a natural impulse, as if determined by nature, accepts that an end is the cause of our operations. For example, if you ask a little old lady why she goes to church or to the market, she will say to you that she goes for the sake of hearing a mass or for the sake of buying a tunic, and if you asked why you go to school, you will reply: for the sake of learning. Claims accepted in this way by everyone should not be entirely dismissed, because nothing more plausible and accepted could be brought forward to prove the opposite, as Aristotle says in Ethics VII.” On this subject, see especially S. Knuuttila, “Necessities in Buridan’s Natural Philosophy,” in J.M.M.H. Thijssen and J. Zupko (ed.) The Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy of John Buridan, (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 65–76; J. Biard, Science et nature. La théorie buridanienne du savoir (Paris: Vrin, 2012), Chap. 3, “La science de la nature,” 309–367. 129  Aquinas, In II Phys., lect. 7–10. See also Sent. I, d. 43, q. 2, a. 1, c: “chance is nothing other than nature that acts beside the intention, as it is said in Physics II.” 130  Aquinas distinguishes two kinds of possible: the possible that depends on irrational potencies and the possible that depends on rational potencies (In Met. IX, lect. 4). 131  Aquinas, ST IaIIae, 13, 1c. 132  Aquinas, SCG II, 30, 15: “in another way, necessity from the end as posterior in actual being; and such necessity is not absolute but conditional. Thus, we say that a saw will have to be made of iron if it is to do the work of a saw.” 133  Ockham, Quodl. I, q. 17, transl. Freddoso, 78. 127

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about by a natural cause and a free cause or by two free causes.”134 In both cases of chance and fortune, a free agent introduces contingency into a deterministic chain of events. Teleological explanations are restricted to things that are the product of human activity.135 Thus, Ockham’s view is far from the standard Aristotelian picture, prevalent in the thirteenth century, according to which chance is a failure in a teleological process.

3.4.3  Providence and Laws of Nature Aristotle’s theory of the four causes as it is explained in Physics II does not provide an account of the causal functioning of the universe as a whole. To find a principle of unity between causal chains, theologians of the Late Middle Ages appealed to God.136 Aquinas’s famous proofs for the existence of God aim at proving the existence of a providential first cause, which is the ultimate ground of any physical explanation.137 Aquinas defines “providence” as God’s cognition of things in the world insofar as they are ordered to an end.138 He develops an argument from design, proving that God’s providential intellect introduces an order teleologically oriented toward what is best.139 The key premise is that what does not have cognitive faculties cannot tend to an end without being ordered to that end by someone who can think. This view of the unification of causal processes by means of a providential God was widely recognized as one of the most central doctrines until the end of the Middle Ages.140 It was not restricted to theologians. Some philosophers developed in their commentaries on the Physics some key elements of natural theology to account for the unification of causal processes in the universe. For instance, Buridan accepts the doctrine that God designs the universe.141 He believes that God created  Ockham, Quodl. I, q. 17, transl. Freddoso, 78.  Ockham, Quodl. II, q. 2, transl. Freddoso, 99. 136  On this subject, see especially M. Adams, “Powers Versus Laws: God and the Order of the world According to Some Late Medieval Aristotelians” in E. Watkins (ed.), The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature: Historical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3–26. 137  Aquinas, ST I, q. 3, a. 2, c. 138  Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 5, a. 1, c and q. 5, a. 2, c. 139  Aquinas, Sent. I, d. 43, q. 2, a. 1, c. 140  Not everybody agreed to speak of God as a lawgiver in nature. For Scotus, laws govern only voluntary agents, not natural agents. There is no law that fire should heat combustibles. Scotus reserves the term “natural law” for practical principles that are necessarily true and self-evident (Ord. III, suppl. d. 17, English transl. in A. Wolter, Duns Scotus on Will and Morality, 198–207). He recognizes only one natural law, namely, “if God exists, God alone must be loved” (Ord. III, suppl. d. 37, English transl. in A. Wolter, Duns Scotus on Will and Morality, 176). 141  Buridan, QPhysII, 7, ed. Paris, 35rab, transl. Pasnau “Intentionality and Final Causes,” p. 316: “It seems to me that by a natural impulse, as if determined by nature, everyone accepts that an end 134 135

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an order of natural ends.142 God is the only free agent in the most proper sense of the term, because only God can decide by himself which ends he wants to realize. However, human beings can be said to be free insofar as they can at least partly decide which ends they want to realize.143 Ockham develops a distinctive stance on natural theology. Natural reason cannot prove that there is only one first cause or that the heavenly bodies and separate substances are not sufficient to cause generable and corruptible things.144 Nor can it demonstrate that God is an immediate partial cause of all things145, that God is intensively infinite146, and that the first cause is contingent because free acts of human will are contingent.147 Only an argument from indispensability can be advanced: “He would be needlessly posited if He could not effectively cause anything in the universe.”148 Ockham goes further and claims that it cannot be proved that God is the final cause of any effect: natural agents could act of necessity as they do whether they would be ordered to an end or not.149 Just as there could be many first causes in the order of efficiency, so there could be many final causes. Indeed, is the cause of our operations. So if you ask a little old lady [vetula] why [propter quam causam] she goes to church or to the market, she will say to you that she goes for the sake of buying a tunic. And if you are asked why you go to school, you will reply: for the sake of learning. Claims accepted in this way by everyone should not be entirely dismissed, because (as Aristotle says in Ethics VII) nothing more plausible and accepted could be brought forward to prove the opposite.” 142  See especially J. Biard, “The Natural Order in John Buridan,” in J. M. M. H. Thijssen & J. Zupko (ed.), The Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy of John Buridan (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 77–95. 143  Buridan, Quaest. Ethicorum X, q. 2, fol. ccvrb, transl. H. Lagerlund, “The Unity of Efficient and Final Causality,” 598: “An agent is said to act freely by freedom of final ordering if it acts by chief purpose for its own sake [sui ipsius gratia principali intentione] and is said to act like a slave if it acts for the sake of another. Hence God alone acts simply and entirely freely in this way, and in relation to God all other agents act like slaves, because all things that exist and act both exist and act for God’s sake; and hence we too ought to be God’s slaves – and every external thing God produces and conserves is produced and conserved in its primary and chief purpose for God’s own sake, for all existing things are ‘finally ordered’ to God. Yet despite this, a particular agent is said to act freely if it acts for its own sake more chiefly than for the sake of any other particular end which does not ‘finally contain’ it according to the natural connection and order of ends.” 144  Ockham, Quodl. II, q. 1, transl. Freddoso, 93. 145  Ockham, Ord., d. 45, q. 1, OTh IX, 668; Rep. II, q. 3–4, OTh V, 60–66. 146  Ockham, Quodl. II, q. 2, Freddoso, 96. In particular, Ockham rejects Scotus’ attempts to prove that God is intensively infinite (Quodl. III, q. 1, transl. Freddoso, 169; VII, q. 11, transl. Freddoso, 629). 147  Ockham, Ord., d. 43, a. 1, OTh IV, 632–633. 148  Ockham, Quodl. II, 1, transl. Freddoso, 93. 149  Ockham, Quod IV, q. 2, transl. Freddoso, 255: “I say that it cannot be proved that the ends from which natural causes operate are known or intended by some agent. This is true only in the case of those things which can be moved differently to one end or another and are not determined by their very natures to one certain effect. It is only because their ends are known and that they are directed thereto that they can be moved more toward one end than toward another. Merely natural causes, on the other hand, because they are by their very natures determined to a certain effect, do not require foreknowledge in an agent. At least reason alone cannot conclude that such is required.”

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“it cannot be sufficiently proved that God is the final cause of the second intelligence either in itself or in its effects.”150 Ockham seems to be willing to work with a non-intelligent universe ruled by a causal determinism that points to nothing beyond itself.

3.5  Conclusion In the fourteenth century, the causal problem is twofold. First, there is the ontological problem of causality, i.e., the answer to the question what is causation. The belief in some form of causal determinism was widely held. This causal determinism was commonly seen as conditional, which left room for contingency in causal processes. The major shift between Aquinas and Buridan came from the fact that contingency was no longer seen as a negative product of secondary causation. In Scotus, it is seen as a positive characteristic of the first cause. The created order as a whole was seen as contingent: God could have decided to create the world otherwise. Moreover, Ockham insisted that God is not only an immediate cause of any natural causal process, but it can also take the place of any cause in any natural causal process. For this reason, it became difficult if not impossible to argue for the demonstrability of particular causal sequences in the strict sense. However, skeptical scenarios did not prevent most late medieval thinkers from asserting the general validity of a conditional form of causal determinism: under the assumption that God does not take the place of secondary causes, causal sequences are necessary. Second, from Scotus onward, a new interest emerges in the methodological problem of causality. In the fourteenth century, some thinkers began to ask whether causation is a purely epistemological category belonging solely to our description of experience. From Scotus onward, the question was raised how general causal principles such as “fire burns a combustible material whenever it is appropriately close to it” were cognized. In the fourteenth century, the problem of induction had two sides. First, how do we pass from a particular statement about an observed causal process to a general statement? The main characteristic of fourteenth-century reflections on the problem of induction was the acceptance of the principle of the uniformity of nature. Second, how do we know particular statements about causal processes? Some thinkers such as Ockham and Autrecourt challenged the view that causality is perceived. The main reason was that, all appearances being conserved, God could have taken the place of secondary causes. Once again, the new epistemological status given to contingency in causal processes was at the forefront of the reflections on causality. Finally, under the influence of Avicenna’s view of final causation, an important shift away from teleology took place among later medieval philosophers. Final causality is psychologized. Teleological explanations are progressively restricted to voluntary agents. This shift is complete with William of Ockham. Chance and for150

 Ockham, Quodl. IV, q. 2, transl. Freddoso, p. 251.

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tune are both seen as dependent upon the activity of free agents. However, final causality does keep an important place in the explanation of God’s providential order, both in theology and in natural theology. On this topic, Ockham must be set apart from his contemporaries. He maintained that God’s providence is not a necessary requisite to explain the nature and status of causation in natural events. Even Buridan did not go so far. In this sense, Ockham’s view is probably one of the most distinctive among late medieval theories of causality.

Bibliography Primary Averroes (Ibn Rushd). 1930. Tahāfut al-Tahāfut, ed. by M. Bouyges. Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique. ———. 1961. The Incoherence of the Incoherence, transl. by S. van den Bergh, 2 vols. Cambridge: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust 2008, first. ed. 1961. Averroes. 1962. Destructio Destructionum Philosophiae Algazelis in the Latin Version of Calo Calonymos, ed. with an introd. by B. H. Zedler. Milwaukee: The Marquette University Press. Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā). 2005. The Metaphysics of ‘The Healing’. Trans. (with parallel Arabic text) by M. E. Marmura. Provo: Brigham Young University Press. ———. 1960. Al-Shifā’: Al-Ilāhiyyāt, vol. 1, ed. G.C.  Anawati and S.  Zayed; vol. 2. ed. M.Y.  Moussa, S.  Dunya, and S.  Zayed. Cairo: Organisation Générale des Imprimeries Gouvernementales. Ghazālī. 2000. The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Trans. (with parallel Arabic text) M.  E. Marmura. Provo, Ut.: Brigham Young University Press. ———. 1927. Tahāfut al-Falāsifah, ed. M. Bouyges. Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique. John Buridan. 1964a. Subtilissimae Quaestiones super octo Physicorum libros Aristotelis (Paris, 1509), reprinted as Kommentar zur Aristotelischen Physik. Frankfurt: Minerva. ———. 1968. Quaestiones super decem libros Ethicorum Aristoteles ad Nicomachum (Paris 1513), reprinted as Super decem libros Ethicorum. Frankfurt: Minerva. ———. 1964b. In Metaphysicen Aristotelis Questiones argutissimae. Paris, 1518, reprinted 1964 as Kommentar zur Aristotelischen Metaphysik. Frankfurt a. M.: Minerva. John Buridan, Quaestiones in duos libros Aristotelis Posteriorum Analyticorum, ed. H. Hubien, unpublished typescript. John Duns Scotus. 1639. Opera Omnia. Lyon, 1639, reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1968. [“The Wadding edition”] ———. 1950–2013. Opera Omnia. Civitas Vaticana: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis. [critical edition of The Ordinatio (vol. I–XIV) and Lectura (vol. XVI–21)]. ———. 1997a. Quaestiones super libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis, Opera Philosophica, vol. III and IV. St. Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute. ———. 1997b. On the Will and Morality, selected and translated by A. B. Wolter. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. ———. 1966. A Treatise on God as First Principle. Trans. and ed. with commentary by A. B. Wolter. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press. ———. 1987. Philosophical Writings. Trans. A. B. Wolter. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 1994. Contingency and Freedom. Lectura I 39. Trans. with commentary Vos, A Jaczn, A. Veldhuis, A. H. Looman-Graaskamp, E. Dekker, and N. W. den Bok. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 1997–1998. Questions on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. Trans. G. J. Etzkorn, and A. B. Wolter. St, 2 vol. Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute.

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Moses Maimonides. 1963. The Guide of the Perplexed. Trans. S. Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nicholas of Autrecourt. 1939. Tractatus Universalis (‘Exigit Ordo’), ed. J.  R. O’Donnell. Mediaeval Studies 1, 179–280. ———. 1994. His Correspondence with Master Giles and Bernard of Arezzo, ed. L. M. De Rijk, with parallel English trans. Leiden: Brill. Nicolas d’Autrécourt. 2001. Correspondance, Articles Condamnés, introd., trad. et notes C. Grellard, texte latin établi par L. M. de Rijk. Paris: Vrin. Thomas Aquinas, Sancti Thomae Aquinatis doctoris angelic iOpera omnia iussu Leonis XIII P.M. edita, cura et studio fratrum praedicatorum, ex typographia polyglotta et al. (Rome, 1882ss). ———. 1964a. In duodecim libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis expositio, ed. M. R. Cathala and R. M. Spiazzi, 2nd edn. Turin: Marietti. ———. 1962. Summa theologiae, Latin text and English translation, introductions, notes, appendices, and glossaries, general. ed. T. Gilby. London: Blackfriars. ———. 1975. Summa contra Gentiles. Trans. A. C. Pegis et al. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. ———. 1932–1934. On the Power of God. Trans. Dominicans of the English Province. London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne. ———. 1964b. Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. Trans. J. P. Rowan, 2 vols. Chicago: Regnery; reprinted with revisions as Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Aristotelian Commentary Series. Notre Dame: Dumb Ox Books, 1995. William of Ockham. 1967–1988. Opera philosophica et theologica, ed. Gedeon Gál et  alii, 17 vols. St. Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute. ———. 1991. Quodlibets. Trans. A. Freddoso and F. Kelley, 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1989. Ockham on Aristotl’'s Physics: A Translation of Ockham’s Brevis Summa Libri Physicorum. Trans. J. Davies. St. Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute.

Secondary Adams, M. McCord. 1979. Was Ockham a Humean about Efficient Causality? Franciscan Studies 37: 5–48. ———. 1987. William Ockham. Vol. 2. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. ———. 1995. Duns Scotus on the Will as Rational Power. In Via Scoti: Methodologica Ad Mentem Joannis Duns Scoti, ed. L. Sileo, 839–854. Roma: PAA-Edizioni Antonianum. ———. 1998. Ockham on Final Causality: Muddying the Waters. Franciscan Studies 56: 1–46. ———. 2000. Final Causality and Explanation in Scotus’s De Primo Principio. In Nature in Medieval Thought. Some Approaches East and West, ed. C. Koyama, 153–183. Leiden/Boston/ Köln: Brill. ———. 2013. Powers Versus Laws: God and the Order of the world according to some Late Medieval Aristotelians. In The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature: Historical Perspectives, ed. E. Watkins, 3–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anscombe, G.E.M. 1993. Causality and Determination. In Causation, ed. E. Sosa and M. Tooley, 88–104. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Belo, C. 2007. Chance and Determinism in Avicenna and Averroes. Leiden: Brill. Biard, J. 1997. Le système des causes dans la philosophie naturelle de Jean Buridan. In Perspectives arabes et médiévales sur la tradition scientifique et philosophique grecque. Actes du colloque de la SIHSPAI Paris, 31 mars  – 3 avril 1993, ed. A.  Hasnawi, A.  Elamrani-Jamal, and M. Aouad, 491–504. Paris/Leuven: Peteers – Institut du Monde Arabe. ———. 2000. The Natural Order in John Buridan. In The Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy of John Buridan, ed. J.M.M.H. Thijssen and Jack Zupko, 77–95. Leiden: Brill.

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Chapter 4

Monsters, Laws of Nature, and Teleology in Late Scholastic Textbooks Silvia Manzo

By revealing the precariousness of the stability to which life has habituated us -yes, merely habituated, even though we have turned this habit into a law —themonster bestows upon the repetition of species, upon morphological regularity, and upon successful structuration a value all the more eminent in that we can now grasp their contingency. Canguilhem (2008) 135

In the period of emergence of early modern science, “monsters” or individuals with physical congenital anomalies were considered as rare events which required special explanations entailing assumptions about the laws of nature. This concern with monsters was shared by representatives of the new science and Late Scholastic authors of university textbooks. This paper will reconstruct the main theses of the treatment of monsters in Late Scholastic textbooks, by focusing on the question as to how their accounts conceived nature’s regularity and teleology. It shows that they developed a naturalistic teratology in which, in contrast to the naturalistic explanations usually offered by the new science, finality was at central stage. This general point does not impede our noticing that some authors were closer to the views emerging in the Scientific Revolution insofar as they conceived nature as relatively autonomous from God and gave a relevant place to efficient secondary causation. In this connection, this paper suggests that the concept of the laws of nature developed by the new science – as exception less regularities–transferred to nature’s regularity the “strong” character that Late Scholasticism attributed to finality and that the decline of the Late Scholastic view of finality played as an important concomitant factor permitting the transformation of the concept of laws of nature.

S. Manzo (*) Universidad Nacional de La Plata, IdHICS - CONICET, La Plata, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. D. Omodeo, R. Garau (eds.), Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 332, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67378-3_4

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4.1  Introduction Western reflection upon monsters originated in ancient times, maintained its relevance throughout the Middle Ages, and flourished in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The Aristotelian “scientific” and “naturalist” teratological tradition was integral to the heyday of literature about monsters in the Renaissance and early modern periods. It dealt with monsters as natural events to be explained by natural philosophy or physics.1 However, scarce scholarly attention has been given to the treatment of monsters provided by Late Scholastic textbooks, which were the main vehicles of the Aristotelian doctrines at that time.2 As is well known, Late Scholasticism was an eclectic and widespread manifestation of Aristotelianism that dominated university education particularly in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, acting as the backdrop against which some developments of the new science and philosophy by central figures like Descartes, Galileo, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Newton, and others took place.3 While departing from the Aristotelian framework, Late Scholastic treatments of monsters also made use of a wide range of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance sources such as Themistius, Simplicius, Pliny, Plutarch, Cicero, Galen, Augustine, Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, Averroes, Johann Boehme, Marsilio Ficino, Ambroise Paré, and Martin Weinrich, among others. They were typically not reduced to the Aristotelian framework, but varied and altered it, introducing further elements, different emphases, and new notions. As a result, this literature reassessed, modified, and systematized some of the concepts around which monsters were discussed at the time and continued to be discussed for the next two centuries: the ends and the fallibility of nature; the contrast between supernatural, contranatural, and preternatural; the notions of impeded and impeding natures; the relation between particular and universal natures; and the role of chance and divine providence. However, though sharing this common background, Late Scholastic claims about monsters did not constitute a completely homogeneous body of knowledge: they evolved across several subtly different veins and differed in emphases. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the main theses about monsters in some Protestant and Catholic Late Scholastic textbooks, by focusing on the question as to how their accounts conceived nature’s regularity and teleology. While previous studies had noted the ways in which nature’s regularity and teleology were thought in the late sixteenth century, this paper points out that both notions were strongly intertwined in the Late Scholastic view of nature in general and of teratology in particular. Hence, teratology constitutes a fecund case study to analyze how the laws and the ends of nature were thought at the time. By exploring this scarcely studied topic in these influential texts, this study seeks, on the one hand, to contribute to our knowledge of Late Scholastic views on monsters and, by these means, to  Céard (1996); Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park (1998).  Exceptions can be found in Des Chene (1996, 21–22, 203–210) and Guidi (2012). 3  Reif (1964, 1969) 17–32 and Schmitt (1983a). 1 2

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help us understand more fully sixteenth- and seventeenth-century teratology. On the other hand, this study sheds some light on the history of the early modern concept(s) of laws of nature, in analyzing the way in which Late Scholasticism conceived exceptions to nature’s regularity within a teleological framework. A better understanding of Late Scholastic views on nature’s regularity and teleology will contribute (in further studies) to the more accurate delineation of the innovations introduced by modern concepts of the laws of nature which comprised, on the one hand, different ideas of regularity and, on the other, challenges to teleology. This paper will show that Late Scholastic manuals endorsed a naturalistic approach that, in contrast to the naturalistic explanations usually offered by the new science, gave a prominent place to finality as a necessary component of the casual account of monsters. Certainly, most manuals left aside the portentous account of monsters like the newer teratology did. However, unlike the latter, the rejection of the portentous interpretation of monsters did not led Late Scholastic authors to exclude goals from their explanations. This general point does not impede to remark some differences among the Late Scholastic corpus. Some authors, like Toledo, Pereira, and Burgersdijck, were closer to the views emerging in the Scientific Revolution insofar as they conceived nature as relatively more autonomous from God’s control and gave a relevant place to efficient secondary causation. To a certain extent, the role they conceded to secondary efficient causation collided with the strong teleological pattern of nature characteristic of the Late Scholastic overall view of nature. Precisely tensions inside the Late Scholastic account at least in part motivated the abandonment of teleology, or at least of the “strong” finality endorsed by it. In this connection, I will suggest that the concept of the laws of nature – as exceptionless regularities–developed by the new science transferred to nature’s regularity the “strong” character formerly attributed to finality. By this move, the laws of nature were transformed from “weak” to “strong” regularities. This paper is organized into seven sections. After the introductory first section, in the second section I provide a brief justification and an account of the contexts and authors of the textbooks selected for this study. In the following section, I offer a short description of the broad metaphysical views concerning regularity and teleology with respect to monsters assumed by this literature. There, I introduce into the definitions of weak regularity and strong teleology, which I will use in my interpretation. Section four discusses the characterization of monsters as nature’s mistakes and preternatural events admitted by what I call “weak” laws of nature. In the fifth section, I show the different strategies developed to make the existence of monsters compatible with what I consider to be a notion of nature’s “strong” finality, by means of conceptual tools such as particular and universal natures, impeded and impending natures, and different sorts of ends. The next section deals with the views of our authors about the interpretation of monsters as portents. The last section addresses the question of the accidental character of monsters and their relation to chance and God’s providence. In the conclusion, I draw some general remarks about how nature’s regularity and teleology were conceived by the textbooks and suggest in rough terms how they are related to more modern views.

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4.2  The Textbooks: Authors and Contexts This study will explore the natural philosophy manuals widely read in arts and medicine faculties of Post-Reformation universities in which the treatment of monsters is more deeply developed.4 The influence of Catholic commentaries was pervasive in Protestant textbook authors, and they shared many views.5 Not surprisingly, the treatment of monsters in Catholic manuals here selected (mainly those by Toledo and the Coimbrans) was read attentively and much of the time followed by Protestant authors. This broad agreement in large part stemmed from the fact that the notions involved in their discussions on teratology did not touch any point linked to the Post-Reformation theological controversies. As for the Catholic representatives, our survey will consider, on the one hand, textbooks by Jesuit authors, which were primarily intended for use at the colleges and universities linked to the Society of Jesus. The general orientation of the Society was a modified Thomistic Aristotelianism, which exerted great influence across European Catholic and Protestant universities.6 The earliest Jesuit texts of our selection were composed by Francisco Toledo (1532–1596) and Benito Pereira (1535– 1610), the most influential professors at the early Collegio Romano. Before becoming a Jesuit, Toledo studied at Salamanca under the Spanish Dominican Domingo de Soto (1494–1560). Besides the Thomist penchant, his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics (1573) – which combines summaries of Aristotle’s texts with quaestiones – also took into consideration the ancient commentaries and the Arab tradition. Pereira published in 1576 De communibus omnium rerum naturalium principiis et affectionibus, a textbook organized in 15 books which covers systematically Aristotle’s natural philosophy.7 He had studied at the Collegio Romano and became professor there in 1556. His exposition favored the Thomist interpretation over the Greek and Latin traditions but did not exclude nominalist and Scotist views. In addition, he was more sympathetic to Averroism than other Jesuits from the Collegio Romano. In his textbook Pereira is intending to give a naturalistic account of the “principles” of nature, which are thought to be the real causes of things.8 Probably, the most influential Jesuit textbooks were those composed by the Portuguese College of Arts at Coimbra, which commented on several of Aristotle’s works and produced a philosophical course encompassing logic, physics, biology, and ethics. These manuals became the reference works of Late Scholasticism during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries not only in Europe but also in South 4  It goes without saying that it is far beyond the scope of this paper to exhaust the huge amount of natural philosophy textbooks circulating at that time. It is hoped that the textbooks discussed here can be considered to be representative of the whole. 5  Reif (1964) ch. 1; Schmitt (1983a) 149. 6  Ariew (2003) 162–169. 7  Most bibliographies have established that De communibus came out first in 1562, but recently Blum (2006) 280, 295 n. 3, has challenged this date by arguing that it first appeared in 1576. 8  On Pereira’s relation to Averroism, see Blum (2006) 280–284. See Wallace (2000) 228–229; Blum (2006) passim; Lohr (2000) 606–609.

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America and China. Compared to their colleagues from the Collegio Romano, the Coimbrans were more conservative.9 The commentary on Physics (1592) was written by Manuel de Góis (1543–97), who studied at the Jesuit College of Montego. The most important issues of each chapter are subsequently discussed in long series of quaestiones which offer a detailed and insightful account of precedent and contemporary interpretations, making ample use of a very wide range of ancient, medieval, and contemporary sources.10 The commentary on the Physics (1605) by the Spanish Jesuit Antonio Rubio (1548–1615) is very much indebted to the Coimbran and Toledo’s commentaries. Rubio, who had studied at Alcalá and entered the Society in 1659, taught from 1576 to 1599 in the Jesuit Province of Nueva España (Mexico) and produced commentaries on several of Aristotle’s works, later published in Europe, and read in several universities.11 Another source followed by Rubio in his treatment of monsters is the Disputationes Metaphysicae (1597) of the Jesuit Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), a widely read commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which incidentally dealt with some questions related to monsters.12 On the other hand, a different Catholic approach is to be found in Eustachius a Sancto Paulo (1573–1640), who had studied at the Sorbonne and became professor there, before entering the Cistercian congregation of the Feuillants. Eustachius was an influential figure of the French Catholic revival, whom Descartes held in high esteem. As other authors educated at Paris at the time, Eustachius was more inclined toward Scotist positions. His work Summa philosophiae quatripartita de rebus dialecticis, moralibus, physicis, et metaphysicis (1609) was widely read both in Catholic and Protestant circles. It is a systematic exposition covering the whole philosophy and excluding mathematics. Unlike the Jesuit textbooks above mentioned, this manual contains few discussions of precedent contemporary interpretations.13 As for the Protestant textbooks, this essay will deal with works by Bartholomeus Keckermann (1571–1609), Johannes Magirus (d. 1596), Franco Burgersdijck (1590–1635), and John Case (1540–1600). Both Keckermann and Magirus were educated at Protestant universities, typically inspired by the Philippist educational program initiated at the University of Wittenberg. While the first Protestant textbooks were composed at Wittenberg by an early supporter of Luther’s revolt, Johannes Velcurio (1490–1534), it was Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) who became the leading intellectual figure of Lutheran reformed universities.14 Keckermann belonged to a later Protestant generation and was one of the most read textbook authors across Europe. Born to a Danzig Calvinist family, in 1590 he  Wallace (2000) 229.  de Carvalho (2011) 1–13. 11  Osorio Romero (1988) 9–34. 12  On Suarez, see Lohr (2000) 611–617. 13  Ariew (2003) 164–169. 14  Kusukawa (2008) 111. On the fate of Velcurio’s works and his influence on the Lutheran world, see ead. (1995) 109–112. 9

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entered the University of Wittenberg, where he was introduced to the Aristotelian philosophy through the interpretation and method of Paduan Aristotelianism as developed by Jacopo Zabarella (1533–89). When Calvinist students were expelled from Saxon universities, he moved to Heidelberg. As professor at Heidelberg and Danzig, Keckermann became a convinced Aristotelian very much engaged with a pedagogical reform. He developed a new method of exposition of Aristotle’s thesis, which was applied to the whole range of disciplines in a 3-year course. His treatment of natural philosophical issues appears in Systema physicum (1610).15 A similar mix of Zabarellian and Protestant education was received by Johannes Magirus, who in 1591 became professor of natural philosophy, after having studied at Padua under Zabarella. Later, he received a doctoral degree in medicine at the Philippist University of Marburg (1585). His natural philosophical work, Physiologia peripatetica, posthumously published in 1597, was read not only in Marburg but also in Cambridge and Harvard. It is a compact exposition which roughly follows the usual order of topics, like Keckermann’s. Between 1605, when the University of Marburg was converted to Calvinism, and 1624, when it came back to Lutheran orthodoxy, Magirus’s textbooks took part in the conciliatory attitude toward philosophical and theological issues, which characterized this institution under the influence of Rudolph Goclenius (1547–1628).16 Another influential Protestant figure, particularly in Northern Europe, was the Dutch Franco Burgersdijck (or Burgersdijk), who studied at the University of Leiden and the Protestant Academy of Saumur in France. He was appointed professor in Leiden to fill one of the vacancies produced by the anti-Arminian purge promoted by the Synod of Dort. As professor, he transformed the teaching of philosophy into a discipline independent from theology and philology. His textbooks on natural philosophy, Idea philosophiae naturalis (1622) and Collegium physicum (1632), were widely used in Protestant universities until the end of the seventeenth century. The first one is an epitome of Aristotle’s Physics which selects definitions and controversies from expositions by Zabarella, Toledo, Pereira, and the Coimbrans, with the aim of simplifying the learning of physics. The second one is a longer and more original exposition organized in disputationes on several selected topics.17 What Burgersdijck represented for Dutch universities, John Case represented for the British scene. Case took his BA (1567), MA (1572), and MD (1589) from Saint John’s College (Oxford) and was a fellow there between 1572 and 1574. Though he had been accused of being a secret Catholic, more recent studies suggest that is not possible to align him with a particular religion. Moreover, Case was equally attached both to loyal Anglican theologians and to recusants.18 This paper, however, will show that Case endorsed a staunch providentialism, akin to that found in English  Freedmann (1997); Hotson (2002) 43–47 and (2007) 136–156; Mack (2011) 186–92.  Rogers (1988) 10 and Flower (1988) 23; Wallace (2000) 230; Kusukawa (2008) 117; Maclean (2012) 275 n. 56. 17  Rüstow (1973) 14–33; Krop (2011) 60–62. 18  Schmitt (1983b) 114–116 and n. 41. See Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992) 124, and in general 121–126. 15 16

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Protestantism, and, accordingly, a commitment to the interpretation of monsters as portents –exceptional as compared to the rest of authors of our corpus. Educated in Humanism and Scholasticism, Case developed an open-minded and eclectic Aristotelianism. He composed several pedagogical works on several matters. Two of his works, Ancilla philosophiae and Lapis philosophicus – both printed in Oxford in 1599 – were meant to provide expositions of Aristotle’s Physics: the first one as a very brief introduction for beginners and the second one as a more original and detailed exposition, including discussions of commentaries by Toledo, Pereira, and the Coimbrans.19

4.3  T  he Metaphysical Assumptions: Weak Regularity and Strong Finality The notions of regularity and teleology assumed by the selected manuals in their thought on monsters can be traced back to doctrines originally introduced in Aristotle’s loci classici on the issue. The classification of biological heredity presented in Generation of Animals places monsters in the class of offspring who do not resemble their parents. In monstrous births, the natural process does not follow its regular course. Aristotle points out specific circumstances to explain why monsters are born: the motions proceeding from the male are not dominant; the space available in the uterus is insufficient; the material contributed by the mother is deficient; etc.20 In addition, he establishes that monsters are exceptional beings παρὰ φύσιν (i.e., contrary to nature or beyond nature),21 but he also makes it clear that they do not go against all kinds of nature, but only against a certain kind of nature (i.e., against the nature of the specific form of the parents). Moreover, he claims that even that which is contrary to nature is in a certain sense in accordance with nature, since monsters arise whenever the “formal” cause fails to dominate the “material” cause.22 This situation can take place only among those things which occur for the most part and which may occur contrary to that, but not in those things which occur always and by necessity.23 This last point is essential to understand the medieval and Late Scholastic approaches. Like Aquinas, the textbooks conceive that sublunary nature admits exceptions to its regular course, since its regularity consists in what happens always or for the most part (aut semper aut plerunque).24 This way of characterizing the regular course of nature – which refers to nature as process – is what for brevity’s  Schmitt (1983b) 74–76; 152–153; 156–159.  Aristotle (2000) IV, 3–4, 769 b10-770b27. 21  As for the different interpretations and translations received by the expression παρὰ φύσιν, see p. 10 of the pdf manuscript (there is no page number in proof). 22  Aristotle (2000) IV, 4, 770b15–17. See Rossi (2011) 268. 23  Aristotle (2000) IV 4, 770b10–18. 24  Daston and Park (1998) 120–122. See Aquinas (1975), lib. 3, ch. 99, n. 9. 19 20

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sake I will call the “weak” sense of regularity: a view according to which the regular course of nature can be interrupted and admits exceptions.25 On the other hand, in Physics Aristotle refers to monsters when dealing with final causes and defines them as mistakes of nature in the attainment of its end.26 To Aristotle the issue of teleology was directly related to nature’s regularity: what occurs always or for the most part must occur on account of some end. If the natural world were disordered, every natural occurrence would be a consequence of chance. Hence, acts which fall short of their ends look like anomalies to the omnipresent finality reflected by the weak regularity of nature’s order: they appear to be counterexamples which require ad hoc explanation.27 Unlike the Aristotelian biological description of monstrosity in Generation of Animals, which did not challenge Christian tenets, the definition provided in Physics did entail a conflict with them. From the Physics definition – which refers to nature as producer –28 there follows a notion of nature as fallible, which not only puts at risk the conviction that nature always, not just for the most part, acts on account of an end. This notion also goes against the figure of the Christian God governing and controlling nature, which the textbook authors – regardless of their religious affiliation – aimed at defending. What for brevity’s sake I will call “strong” finality is the standard view that everything in nature occurs on account of an end, so that every natural change is a directed change.29 This does not entail, however, that regular ends in nature are by themselves inescapable. In fact, monsters are precisely the sort of events showing that sometimes regular and primary ends are not attained. In fact, as we shall see, textbook authors explained monstrous generation by claiming that since the regular end of generation is unattained, another end replaced it. The sense in which finality can be qualified as strong refers, therefore, to the idea that, after all, nature always acts toward one (regular and frequent) end or another (irregular and rare) end. It comes as little surprise, then, that all the textbook treatments dwell on the question “whether nature intends monsters.”30

 Daston and Park (1998) 14, 110, had referred to this kind of regularity in terms of “habits” or “customs” of nature. See also Maclean (2000) 233–235; id. (2007) 268–271; id. (2008) 33–36. On customs and laws of nature, see also Steinle (2001) 77–98; Daston (2004). 26  Aristotle (1998) II, 8, 199b4. 27  On the idea of monsters as counterexamples, see Des Chene (1996) 172. 28  The hermeneutical distinction between nature as process and nature as producer is inspired by Maclean (2007) 247. 29  See Des Chene (1996) ch. 6. 30  This concern with teleology was commonplace in Late Renaissance literature on monsters inspired in Aristotle. See, for instance, Hanafi (2000) 27–33. 25

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4.4  N  ature’s Mistakes, the Preternatural, and “Weak” Laws of Nature The image of monsters as mistakes of nature, along with the assumption that nature is fallible and deviates from its ordinary course, made its way throughout the Middle Ages at least until the eighteenth century.31 The textbooks furthered this note by associating the existence of monsters with nature’s liability to error. Pereira puts this idea very clearly: “it is necessary that what is fallible (defectibile) sometimes fails; hence exist the reason and the origin of monsters.”32 In other words, as Rubio says, something is called “monster” for being a “defect.”33 This association became an essential mark of monstrosity in the standard definition of monsters (apparently of Jesuit origin) across Catholic and Protestant textbooks: a monster is a natural effect that degenerates from the correct and habitual disposition which is consonant with the species (“naturalis effectus a recta et solita secundum speciem dispositione degenerans”).34 Along the same line, Magirus defines monsters as “deviations and flaws” of the nature of an individual that deviates from its end through the intervention of an impediment.35 In addition, in Protestant textbooks are to be found definitions which describe monsters as bodies whose defective arrangement indicate some kind of irregularity in their figure. Thus, Velcurio writes that monsters are “natural bodies that do not have their members correctly set, nor do they have the usual proportion between their parts.”36 Similarly, Keckermann defines them as “living natural bodies” that have some peculiar defect, a certain flaw (peccatum) or an immense deviation (aberratio enormis) from nature.37 In the same vein, Burgersdijck says that a monster is a “living body much degenerating from the lawful and natural conformation of its members.” As we shall later, these Protestant definitions do not entail that the

 Daston and Park (1998) 201–214; Bates (2005a) 142; Guidi (2012) 61–108; Davies (2013) 49–75. 32  Pereira (1585) lib. 9, ca. x, 528. 33  Rubio (1629) lib. 2, ca. ix, qu. unica, 284. 34  The definition was apparently coined by Toledo (1580) lib. 2, ca. ix, qu. xiii, fol. 76r. It appears later – sometimes with slight variations– in Conimbricenses (1594) lib. 2, ca. ix, qu. v, art. I, 339; Burgersdijck (1645) dis. III, thesis 13, 17; Eustachius a Sancto Paulo (1647) Pars Physica, trac. ii, qu. ii, 147; Rubio (1629) lib. 2, ca, ix, qu. unica, 283; Keckermann (1623) lib. 5, ca. iii, 595; Case (1600) lib. 2, ca. viii, 345. In some cases, the genus of the definition is not “natural effect” but “natural birth” (partus naturalis) or “natural living being” (vivens naturale). See also Chauvin (1692) sub voce. Some authors held more or less explicitly that monsters occur only in living beings (plants and animals) as contrasted with unanimated beings. See Pereira (1585) lib. 9, ca. x, 529. 35  Magirus (1646) lib. 1, ca. iii, 55. 36  Velcurio (1558) lib. I, ca. x, 39: “corpora naturalia, quae non habent iustum situm membrorum, neque consuetam Naturae proportionem partium.” The same definition is provided by Goclenius (1613) 708. 37  Keckermann (1623) lib. 5, ca. iii, 594. 31

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irregularity visible in the bodies of the offspring points out an irregularity of their formal causes, since what is defective is only the individual body.38 Rather than as pure and simple effects, monsters were thought of as defects for which nature is solely responsible. From a Christian perspective, it was impossible to claim that God is the cause of a defect. As the Coimbran explanation of the standard definition argues, monsters are not supernatural events produced by God and should not be confused with divine miracles. Even if occasionally the effects produced by man that defy the rules of a particular art are called “monsters,” this term is only applied to them in analogy with nature. In sum, the sole cause of monsters is nature, and, accordingly, they are said to be natural.39 Nonetheless, insofar as monsters are not usual but rare events, they are more specifically conceived as preternatural effects. This reading draws on a passage from Generation of Animals, where Aristotle presents monsters as παρὰ φύσιν individuals,40 a Greek expression that can be translated as “contrary to nature” (contra naturam) or as “beyond nature” (praeter naturam).41 Certainly, Christian readers of Aristotle were reluctant to accept that generation could be contrary to nature, since nature was the work of God and nothing could operate against his power and will. The thirteenth-century first Latin translation of Generation of Animals by William of Moerbecke renders παρὰ φύσιν as praeter naturam.42 This tendency remained in later Renaissance translators,43 like Theodore Gaza, responsible for the most widespread Latin version of Aristotle’s treatises in natural history at that time, probably consulted by the textbook authors.44 Against this background, John Case, for instance, characterizes monsters as errors qua effects. But, at the same time, he emphasizes the fact that in monsters the error lies in the particular nature qua cause.45 They constitute “imperfect acts,” resulting from  Burgersdijck (1643) dis. XXIV, a. 2, i., 261; ib., q. xi, 249.  Conimbricenses (1594) lib. 2, ca. ix, qu. v, art. ii, 339. The Coimbran commentary draws on Toledo’s explanation of the standard definition, Toledo (1580) lib. 2, ca. ix, qu. xiii, fol. 76r. 40  Aristotle (2000) IV, 4, 770b10–18. 41  Maclean (2007) 252–256 notes that expressions like “praeter naturam,” “contra naturam,” and “secundum naturam” were intended in different ways in Renaissance medical discourse. The same goes, I would suggest, for the literature explored in this paper. 42  Aristotle (2000) IV, 4, 770b10–17; Aristoteles Latinus (1966) 135. 43  As far as I know the only exception appears in Michael Scotus’ thirteenth-century Latin translation of the Arabic Kitāb al-Hayawān (“Book of Animals”) which contains parts of De generatione animalium. Peck’s English translation of 778a 5–9 says: “things occurring contrary to Nature (παρὰ φύσιν).” Scotus’ translation of this passage: “res contra naturam.” (Aristotle, 1992, 481– 483, my italics). 44  Editio princeps: Aristotle (1476). Reprinted in the monumental Giunta edition, Aristotelis Opera cum Averrois commentariis (Aristotle, 1560) IV. Gaza’s reading of De generatione animalium, IV, 4, 770b10–18 says: “monstrosum est enim res praeter naturam. Sed praeter eam, quae magna ex parte sit, nam praeter eam, quae semper et necesario est, nihil fit.”, Aristotelis Stagiritae libri omnes ad animalium cognitionem attinentes, cum Averrois Cordubensis variis in eosdem (Aristotle, 1962) VI, fol. 243r. On the Latin translations of Aristotle’s biological treatises and the high impact of Gaza’s translation, see Beullens and Gotthelf (2007) and Perfetti (2000) 12–28. 45  On the notion of particular nature, see p. 13 of the pdf manuscript proof. There are no page numbers in the proof. 38 39

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the “preternatural potency” of matter. In turn, they are distinguished from “violent acts,” that is, acts “against nature,” which are caused by an external cause which deprives the nature of the thing of its own potency and leads it to corruption.46 As it can be seen here and in other authors like Pereira, etc., matter’s recalcitrance was often alleged as one cause, often the principal cause, of the generation of monsters. This very idea comes back to Aristotle’s view that monsters arise whenever the “formal” cause fails to dominate the “material” cause. How are these preternatural events related to nature’s taxonomy? Do they constitute species on their own? Or are they just individual cases? Textbook authors maintain that monsters are exceptional cases within a species, but do not constitute species by themselves. Each species has a disposition and a conformation of its members. When individuals are born that do not follow this rule, the result is a monster which can be associated with a certain species. In monstrosities, the degeneration of the species is only partial, since an offspring resembles its parents to some degree: an olive is not generated from a man, neither is an animal generated from a plant.47 Monstrosities are derivatives upon a preexistent order against which they can be recognized and measured as aberrations. Otherwise, aberrations would not be possible at all, since there would be no given standard to which to be compared.48 Hence, since not every “irregularity” constitutes a monstrosity, it is extremely important to observe carefully how far individuals deviate from the preexisting order. The treatment by Keckermann is particularly insightful on this point. His exposition on monsters is included in book V, devoted to living bodies. After establishing that living bodies can be regular or irregular, he claims that irregularity is a matter of degrees, depending on how far a body moves away from “nature’s order and perfection.” While the “less irregular” remissions or intensions of nature (remissio et intensio) are not monstrous – as in the cases of women, giants, and pygmies – the “more irregular” and greater deviations (aberrationes) are monstrous, such as a two-­headed animal.49 Given their endorsement to the idea of weak regularity, though some textbooks talk about the regularity and order of nature in terms of “laws” or “rules,” they do not regard them as exception less.50 The Coimbran commentary explains that a monster is “a deviation from the order and law that an end prescribes to the operations of nature and in accordance to which nature itself operates” (“deflexio aliqua ab ordine ac lege, quam naturae operibus praescribit finis, propter quem natura ipsa ­operatur”). In other words, it is a defect which digresses “from a law of nature”51 or  Case (1600b) ca. v, 34.  Toledo (1580) lib. 2, ca. ix, qu. xiii, fol. 76r. 48  On the normative character of regularity in Late Scholastics philosophy, see Des Chene (1996) 21–22. 49  Keckermann (1623) lib. 5, ca. iii, 595–600. On the status of giants and dwarfs in this regard, see Conimbricenses (1594) lib 2, ca. ix, qu. v, art. ii, 339–340; Burgersdijck (1643) dis. XXV, 265; Rubio (1629) lib. 2, ca. ix, qu. unica, 283; Case (1600a) lib. 2, ca. viii, 345. 50  The same can be found in medical texts of the sixteenth century. See Bates (2005b) 14–15. 51  Conimbricenses (1594) lib. 2, ca. ix, qu. v, art. ii, 339; 342. 46 47

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is “beyond its common course or rule [regula].”52 Rubio makes the same point. A natural effect is called a monster insofar as it fails to achieve the perfection that would have occurred in accordance with the usual laws (consuetas leges) that nature keeps in its actions. In his opinion, giants and pygmies are not monsters, because they are not generated “beyond the laws of nature, but in accordance with them,” being effects of the peculiar physical properties – extreme fecundity and sterility, respectively – of the land where they were born.53 When monsters are born, Case writes, we become astonished because second causes invert the usual order and shake the laws (legibusque concussis).54 Within this worldview, preternatural fallibility is possible insofar as nature has purposes: only what has a purpose can fail in the accomplishment of it. A fortiori, the fallibility derived from the purposive character of nature, entails that there is no guarantee that the regular course of nature is always maintained. The weak regularity of nature is therefore possible only if nature’s fallibility and hence its purposiveness are assumed. This entails, in addition, that, being fragile, the laws of nature lack necessity and permit exceptions. Indeed, when a preternatural deviation from the ordinary course of nature occurs, the law is not violated strictu sensu, since the deviation is a possibility envisaged by the very notion of law. Rather than violations, monstrous deviations are exceptions: irregular outcomes perfectly admissible in the course of nature.

4.5  “Strong” Finality and Diversity of Ends The textbooks devised different ways to argue that, albeit errors, monsters are compatible with nature’s omnipresent teleology, so nature maintains its purposive character. The authors deployed a number of conceptual tools to help deal with this dilemma. They included the sheer number of teleologies in nature, a distinction between universal and particular natures, and a distinction between “impeding” and “impeded” natures (also called impeding and impeded causes). As for the diversity of ends, first it should be noted that Late Scholasticism thought of the immediate ends of nature as changes in two different senses. On the one hand, an end is an intended state, the terminus ad quem of one operation, the attainment of which coincides with the cessation of change. On the other hand, an end is the beneficiary of the operation, that is, the thing for whose benefit the change occurs, which may or may not be the subject of the intended state. If someone takes a pill to restore her health, the condition to be achieved is the health, and the ­beneficiary is the person. Both are ends of the same change in different respects. As we shall see, the textbooks agree that monsters are ends, since they are termini ad  Keckermann (1623) lib. 1, ca. i, 4.  Rubio (1629) lib. 2, ca. ix, qu. unica, 284; ib., ca. viii, qu. unica, 281 he talks of “regulae consuetae.” 54  Case (1600a) lib. 2, ca, viii, 346. 52 53

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quem of some generative processes but diverge on determining what or who the beneficiaries of such generation are. In so doing they appeal to different kinds of ends which become unified by subsumption: individual ends, collective ends, and cosmic ends are subsumed to one another, and all subsumed to the ultimate end, God.55 Behind this hierarchy of ends, one way or another the time-honored maxim keeps valid: nature always acts toward an end. Such a maxim was entangled with the conviction that a beneficiary always corresponds with the intended states of natural changes. Both claims were at the core of strong finality. Besides assuming several senses and kinds of ends, the manuals appealed to the distinction between causa universalis or natura universalis, which had several senses depending on the context.56 Usually the plural form causae/naturae universales referred to the celestial virtues (heavenly substances) in contrast with causae/naturae particulares, which embraced all sublunary agents submitted to them. However, the singular form causa/natura universalis exceptionally meant God as the first cause, the universe, or the species of sublunary particular agents – generally in biological and medical texts.57 As we shall see, in the causal explanation of monsters by “universal causes,” the manuals usually intended the heavens and, by “particular causes,” the parents or the species, of which monsters are effects. Another conceptual distinction was related to the idea that in monstrous generation the regular end of generation is obstructed by some kind of impediment.58 This very idea was derived from Aristotle’s view that in sublunary nature things occur regularly “if nothing impedes it.”59 Accordingly, to explain monsters in terms of impediments, Late Scholastic authors called “impeding” nature (or cause) the nature that impedes the attainment of the regular end (for instance, small uterus, excess of matter, etc.) and “impeded” nature (or cause) the agent of the generation (usually the parents) which is obstructed by such impediment in the attainment of its purpose. All such concepts played a crucial role in explaining the teleological sense of monsters. All of them – by implication at least– would agree that ultimately all the ends pursued in monstrous generation are subsumed to God’s ends. Particularly in Magirus is found an emphasis on the supremacy of God’s ends in monstrous births. He maintains that nature does not have the intention of producing “new and unusual forms,” which is to say something alien and distorted. The end of everything in  Des Chene (1996) 171–177. See, for instance, the classification of ends offered by Rubio (1629) lib. 2, ca. viii, qu. unica, 280. 56  Recent studies show that the origin of this distinction dates back to Avicenna and was adopted in several ways by Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, etc., to give account of the generation of monsters, the rejection of void, etc. See Weill-Parot (2012) 15–38, Panti (2013) 101–130, and Manzo (2013). 57  See Des Chene (1996) 143, n. 30; Mac Lean (2007) 236–247. 58  This approach has, of course, medieval antecedents. See, for instance, Aquinas (1975) lib. 3, ca. 154, n. 11. 59  Aristotle (1998) II 8, 199a9–11, b18, 25–26. The sense of this formula is very similar with the sense of παρὰ φύσιν with respect to monstrosities in Generation of Animals, II 6, 745b9–11 (“unless something contrary to nature [παρὰ φύσιν] occurs”); IV 8, 776a19–20. 55

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nature is God’s glory, which is the highest and universal end, for the sake of which everything is done.60 Like him, Eustachius claims that God seeks his glory, when he concurs with the cause that impedes the attainment of the regular end of generation. He argues that while monsters are beyond the intention of the impeded cause, they are not so with regard to the impeding cause, let alone regarding the intention of God, the supreme cause which commands the errors of nature for his greater glory.61 Behind the claim that defective offspring involve God’s glory is the principle of plenitude, a world including the whole variety of regular and irregular beings can only be the work of the highest almighty creator. Nonetheless, some manuals claim explicitly that when monsters are born, the world (understood as individuals, species, or the whole universe) is the beneficiary.62 Burgersdijck’s strong naturalism goes along this line. He began by asking: since nature always acts toward an end, why should it not be so when it generates monsters? In ordinary generation, individuals tend to produce an effect like themselves aiming to preserve their species. In spite of this, when they are impeded in attaining that state, they intend by a secondary intention to produce an offspring completely resembling their form or soul, and as much as possible resembling their body or matter.63 Only the material aspect of the monstrous offspring is dissimilar to its progenitors. While its soul is like its parents’ soul (formal cause), its body is not. Accordingly, when nature makes monsters, it “does not frustrate its entire end […], but only a part of it.”64 Now, Burgersdijck seems to suggest that, say, a two-­ headed horse, regardless of having a defective body, is still a horse because it has a horse’s form. Hence, to a certain extent the species horse as a whole is benefited by this state pursued by the secondary intention, for its form is maintained. Keckermann seems to follow the same line, in admitting that nature only in part fails to obtain its ends in monstrous generation. When nature strives for generating natural bodies, it searches for perfect bodies, and not for aberrations or defects. But monsters cannot be themselves the ends of generation, because they are imperfect creatures. That leads him to the conclusion that when monsters are generated, nature only tends to what is perfect in them, but not to what is defective.65 Similarly, Rubio appeals to secondary intentions to argue that monstrous generation does good to nature. When the primary intention of particular causes cannot be achieved, secondary intentions are sought. He opposes the opinion of Suárez, according to which although with respect to particular causes monsters are causal effects, with respect to universal causes – that is, the heavens– monsters are  Magirus (1646) lib. 1, ca. iii, 50–51; 55. It follows Velcurio (1538) sine folio [G8r?].  Eustachius (1647) trac. ii, dis. iii, qu. ii, 147. 62  I follow the terminology of the textbooks in using the singular “nature” to design different things: individuals (like the parents, the impeding nature, the impeded nature, etc.), the species (man, horse, etc.), and the whole of nature (sometimes identified as “the world,” “the universe,” and even metonymically the “heavens” to which the entire nature is submitted). 63  The resort to the concept of “secondary intention” has medieval antecedents, for instance, in Roger Bacon. See Panti (2013) 116–117. 64  Burgersdijck (1643) dis. XXIV, a. 2, i, 264–266. Cf. dis. XXIV, q. x, 350–351. 65  Keckermann (1623) lib.5, ca. iii, 595. 60 61

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intended per se. That is because, Rubio explains, while particular causes tend toward one certain goal and cannot tend per se toward contingent goals deviating from it, universal causes have a “larger extent and intention” (“maiorem ambitum, atque intentionem habentes”). On that basis, Rubio adds, Suárez’s thesis claims that “what cannot be intended per se by particular causes is intended by universal causes, under which the virtue of particular causes is contained.”66 Against Suárez, Rubio holds that monsters are intended not only by the universal causes but also by the particular causes concurring in the generation, albeit they pursue them by secondary intention. In Rubio’s account, we can observe that the individual primary end of the impeding cause (defective matter, small uterus, etc.), along with the collective ordinary end of parents, who strive for the preservation of the form of their species, are subsumed to the cosmic end pursued by the heavens which affects nature as whole. It is hard to imagine what might be the end pursued by impeding causes according to the Late Scholastics world image. Neither Rubio nor other commentators provide a positive answer to this question. We only find a negative answer: they do not seek a bad or defective effect by itself (in fact, no cause at all seeks for such effects). Although Rubio does not explain what could be the benefit provided by monsters to nature as a whole, as we shall see, both he and Suárez argue that this cosmic end ultimately is warranted by God’s “consequent will.” God’s consequent will is what he wants for creatures in relation to their capacity, while God’s antecedent will is what he wants for creatures as far as he is concerned.67 Moreover, Suárez admits both alternatives that God wants to allow second causes to exert the motion that they are capable of (so they can achieve their individual or collective purposes) or wants to enhance the beauty of the universe through the diversity of creatures (in which case a cosmic end is desired).68 Pereira’s stance approaches Suárez’s last option by endorsing the principle of plenitude: God may have wanted monsters to exist so that the world would be complete by housing all kinds of beings, the necessary ones along with the contingent.69 On occasion, supporters of the position that the world is the beneficiary of monstrosities disputed their aesthetic value. Whereas some authors of the textbooks considered variety and plenitude as amounting to the world’s beauty, others claimed that, being ugly deformities and defects, monsters by no means could contribute to increased beauty. A case in point is Toledo, who holds that the diversity of things yields to beauty only if such diversity consists of perfect effects. Besides, he provides

 Rubio (1629) lib. 2, ca. ix, qu. unica, 284. Cf. Suárez (1961) dis. XIX, sectio 12, n. 4. Rubio’s explanation of Suárez’ rationale omits the main point made in this passage, which ultimately supports Suárez’ claim concerning monsters: with respect to God, there are no casual effects in the universe. 67  This widespread distinction and terminology dates back to John Damascene (676–749). See Damascene (1955) II c. 29- PG 94, 969; 160. A similar distinction with another terminology is attributed to John Chrysostom (347–407). 68  Suárez (1961) dis. XXIII, Section 10, n. 11. 69  Pereira (1585) lib. 9, ca. x, 532. 66

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a teleological explanation in terms of impeding and impeded causes. Although the proximate efficient cause does not intend the monster as such, the impeding cause and the universal causes do intend it, since they produce that from which a monster necessarily ensues. In addition, divine concurrence is needed to attain the whole operation. God concurs with the strong causes strongly and with the weak causes weakly so that the concurrence with some causes is impeded by the concurrence with the other causes “not from the side of the concurrence but from the side of the causes.”70 A revealing illustrative example proposed by Toledo reflects the way in which the existence of monsters was interpreted as a type of internal conflict within nature, which reflects a conflict of ends. If an emperor has several subordinate kings who ask him for weapons which he gives them according to the condition of each one, then the weakest will be the one to fall in war. In this way, God, the supreme principal which sustains everything, gives operative virtues to all things and helps them to act in accordance with their own virtues. Of course, his goals play a role here, since God has given to all things a nature by which they are led unerringly to the God’s goals, even without foreseeing them. If the ends of both weak and strong causes respond to the providential plan of the divine ruler, God’s concurrence – accommodated as it is to their unequal powers – simply accomplishes his plan. In other words, this concurrence allowing the occurrence of defective effects “fully corresponds to God’s providence.”71 Such a view is also in line with Suárez’s first alternative: God wants to benefit not the whole universe but individual agents by allowing them to exert their virtues. Like Toledo’s, the Coimbra commentary also offers a sophisticated explanation of the way in which impediments intervene in monstrous generation. However, it differs considerably in its account of the beneficiary of the change and in maintaining that they provide variety and increase the world’s beauty. If, for example, a two-­ headed horse is born, the impeded cause would be the parents, who try to engender a regular horse, whereas the impeding nature could be the excess of matter. Besides, the Coimbran commentary distinguishes three more components: the equine nature, the proximate ground (fundamentum proximum) of the deformity and the deformity itself or monstrosity. The impeded cause alone does not intend the monster: it is like a tradesman who desires to finish the work he is planning but is impeded from doing so. Neither is it intended by the impeding cause alone, since in the gestation of a monster there should necessarily be an impeded cause. That nature intends some effect means that it is inclined toward the realization of the effect that it produces. Since from the conjunction of the impeded and the impeding causes a monster is produced, then both causes as a whole (total cause) are directed toward the monstrosity as proximate ground of the deformity. Like Toledo, the Coimbrans appeal to God’s concurrence to complete this explanation. God intends monsters, not ­immediately but through second causes (the impeded and the impeding causes)

70 71

 Toledo (1580) lib. 2, ca. iv, qu. xiii, fols. 76v–77r.  Ibid., qu. xiii, fols. 75v–77r.

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insofar as he concurs with them. The world as a whole is benefited by this deviated effect, since it becomes ornamented by diversity.72

4.6  For the Benefit of Human Souls: Monsters as Portents The rationale provided by Case to arguing for the teleological value of monsters challenges Coimbran’s and Toledo’s and introduces the portentous interpretation of monsters to maintain that human souls are the ultimate beneficiary. He wonders how the Coimbrans can “confidently defend” that nature intends monsters on the basis of the distinction between impeded and impeding causes. Considered in relation to God, Case argues, there are neither impeding nor impeded causes, both being simply instruments of his will. Besides, Case rejects what would be Toledo’s stance, by affirming that if it is true that the impeded agent is not directed to a monstrous offspring, the same holds for the impeding cause. And that is because the end product is perfect and not defective with respect to the impeding cause, submitted as it is to God’s command.73 If it is true that Case is not the only author of manuals claiming that natural agents are God’s instruments, he shows nonetheless a remarkable difference of emphasis with respect to this point, by depicting nature as servant of God (ancilla dei) and by insisting on the fact that nature’s actions are determined (certa, fixa) by divine providence. His analysis of monster teleology therefore shifts from nature to God. In Case’s worldview, God rules and bends second causes in accordance with his free will and authority and uses “the truest causes” (verissimae causae) as instruments designed to different ends. Certainly, if these causes work in a way different from the common order of nature, it seems to us that a monster is produced with respect to the particular nature, which tends toward the regular offspring. But with respect to God, who foreknows the causes and commands that these things should happen, this effect is not a monster, nor a bad, evil, or imperfect thing, but a proper piece of his perfect plan. Through things produced beyond the common course and intention of nature, God aims at announcing future evils to exhort human souls to seek for salvation. God does not intend the production of monsters as errors of nature as such but uses them to send moral warnings, messages to exhort human beings to keep divine moral precepts.74 In other words, human beings are the beneficiaries of monstrous births, and monsters are signs which allow individuals to find out traces of the plan that God had designed for them. The pioneering study by Céard maintained that conceptions of portent and wonders evolved together with naturalistic teratological traditions toward the ­naturalization of monsters. Current studies agree that natural philosophers and  Conimbricenses (1594) lib. 2, ca. ix, qu. vi, art. i, 344–45 and art. ii, 346.  Case (1600a) lib. 2, ca. viii, 347–48; 363. 74  Case (1600a) lib. 2, ca. viii, 347–49. Ibid., 349: “potius clementer praemonere contendit de futuris malis, quam monstrum intendere.” Cf. ibid., 346. 72 73

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physicians increasingly eschewed dealing with the moral and theological imports of monstrosities and regarded them simply as preternatural events requiring physical explanation, particularly by the 1670s. However, portentous narratives of monsters persisted in Europe well into the seventeenth century, though in large part dissociated from naturalistic accounts.75 Except for Case’s, most manuals of our survey broadly reflect this attitude: close to the Aristotelian naturalistic framework as they were, they either disregarded or explicitly rejected the interpretation of monsters as signs. Although in principle they did not point out a manifest contradiction between both lines, they intended to delimitate the realm properly belonging to the natural philosophical study of malformed offspring. Such an attitude did not imply that theological matters should be completely excluded from naturalistic explanations. To the contrary, they were included as far as they were thought necessary to complete the account. A fortiori, the resulting causal narratives were developed so as not to collide with the essentials of theology. All the more so when the natural philosophical functions of God as first cause and designer of the world were enough to account for the origin of anomalous offspring, without taking in consideration the eventual moral and spiritual implications that monsters would involve. For Late Scholastics, this cooperation of second and first causes did not involve an unlawful intervention of theology into natural philosophy, but simply expressed the due harmony that they should maintain.76 Therefore, the omission of the portent interpretation from the naturalistic explanations did not entail that they resorted exclusively to secondary efficient and material causation and left aside, at the same time, final causes and divine providence. That is because Late Scholastics were convinced that the explanation of natural and preternatural events would be incomplete if finality were omitted. Now, except for John Case, the finality alleged by our authors to complete their physical explanation did not attribute a portentous import to monstrosities. Concerning this particular point, we find the only remarkable though slight difference among Catholic and Protestant textbooks.77 In the case of Catholic textbooks, the lack of interest for monsters as portents becomes very explicit. Toledo’s exposition clearly expresses the natural philosophical focus in detriment to the interpretation of monsters as signs. While he takes in consideration the Ciceronian etymology of the word monstrum – as signifying to “show” and to “predict” things – he quickly dismisses it, by arguing that it has scarcely anything to do with his aim of explaining the causes of monsters and their relation to nature’s teleology.78 The rest of the Catholic authors do not analyze the portentous meaning at all.  See Céard (1996) 3–7. Daston and Park initially (1981) agreed with Céard’s opinion but later (1998, 173–177) advocated the coexistence of several sensibilities which overlapped across the centuries. Later studies support this last view. See, for instance, Bates (2005b) 132–134. 76  On the causal cooperation, see Witmore (2001) 133. 77  Bates (2005b) 65 and passim ch. 3 had claimed that Protestant narratives were more engaged with the interpretation of monsters as portents than the Catholic accounts. However, his study compares works very different in genre – sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical learned texts and popular literature – and does not analyze the textbook genre considered in this paper. 78  Toledo (1580) lib. 2, ca. ix, qu. xiii, fol. 76r. 75

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Things were different in the Protestant context, since the function of monsters as portents suited perfectly well with Protestant preoccupation with divine providence. Given that Protestantism maintained, on the one hand, that the recovery of human post-lapsarian depravity depended entirely upon divine mercy and, on the other, did not establish intermediaries linking God with the individual souls, Protestant men and women were anxious to learn whether God had chosen them as elect. Thus, the interpretation of the signs of the divine plan in individuals’ lives and in natural events became a central concern and had a wide range of religious, political, and social uses. Within this pattern, rare and extraordinary offspring were regarded as carrying messages concerning individual salvation and collective future.79 Accordingly, Protestant textbooks show a greater concern with the theological meaning of monsters as God’s signs. Yet, we can recognize that even in these cases the interest was increasingly diminishing toward the end of the sixteenth century. This is noticeable in our selected corpus. If by the middle of the sixteenth century both Velcurio and Melanchthon admitted the value of monsters as portents, by the end of the same century only Case adopted a similar view.80 As for Burgersdijck’s long and detailed exposition, he judged it necessary to analyze this line of interpretation – so important and widespread in the Protestant world– and to refute it from a strictly “scientific” point of view supported by the following two reasons: on the one hand, it is not always the case that after the generation of a monster, something unusual occurs; on the other hand, there is no verified “physical” connection, neither of monsters as causes nor of monsters as effects with the events allegedly signified by them.81 Finally, Keckermann’s and Magirus’s sketchier treatments – dealing with the essential points of teratology as they were – do not say anything about monsters as portents. I think that the exceptional position of Case, as compared to the remaining Protestant authors, should be interpreted in the light of peculiarities of the religious, social, and intellectual English background. There, the presence of providentialism was more outstanding than in other Protestant areas, in large part due to the Puritans, which have been called the “hotter sort” of providentialists.82 This context might have influenced Case to assert the portentous meaning of monsters.

 On concepts of providence in early modern Protestantism, see Van der Molen (1978) and Donagan (1981) 385–386. 80  Velcurio (1558) lib. I, ca. v, 21–22; Melanchton (1565) fol. 152v defines monsters as: “Prodigia […] seu species, seu res natas praeter naturae ordinem, quae aliquid significant.” See also fols. 152v–155v. Goclenius’s (1613) 708–709 informed by his irenic attitude as it is, gathers several traditions and presents monsters as preternatural and contranatural facts, much closer to Melanchton’s treatment. 81  Burgersdijck (1643) dis. XXIV, a. 2, i., 261. 82  I quote the expression of Walsham, who adapting a classic formulation of Patrick Collinson claims – against other interpretations – that providentialism was a mark of Protestantism in general, and not exclusively of Puritanism. See Walsham (1999) 3–4, and passim. For an alternative view, see Thomas (1971), ch. 4, esp. 109. On monsters and providence in England, see, for instance, Walsham (1999) passim and Crawford (2005). 79

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4.7  Chance, Second Causes, and Providence Since Aristotle pointed out that monsters are παρὰ φύσιν and accidentally caused, many interpreters drew the conclusion that they are produced by chance. Debates on chance became, therefore, an integral part of teratology at least until the eighteenth century.83 To the textbook authors, this point was of central interest, for if chance could be considered the cause of monsters, this would be interpreted as a limitation of God’s wisdom and power and could even be seen as a suspension of his providence.84 Most manuals reduce chance events to causes per se, in the same vein as Melanchthon or Aquinas had done. Melanchthon is very explicit about this; accidental causes, like chance and fortune, derive from at least six kinds of non-­ accidental (per se) causes: God and angels, evil spirits, temperaments, celestial tendencies, man’s behavior, and matter’s instability.85 While agreeing with the general attitude of reducing the generation of monsters to non-accidental causes which pursue an end, most textbooks show interesting variations of emphasis in explaining how such a reduction operates. An extreme position denies the very existence of chance by arguing that God’s providence makes it impossible and by strongly emphasizing that every natural phenomenon is submitted to God’s plan and rule. No room is given to any level of autonomy in nature’s changes, so that nature becomes a mere assistant to divine goals. No wonder, Case represents this stance. He argues that “if God exists, chance does not exist.” Although philosophers have claimed that many things in nature happen “contingently according to an unfixed law” (incerta lege contingenter), strictly speaking casus et fortuna are no more than names, since they are not “true and real causes.” God’s providence may be “latent and occult,” but it is “a certain, fixed, and determined cause.” Explanations that appeal to chance and fortune are, therefore, spurious and ignorant. Everything acts according to the divine majesty, which had ornamented the world with variety and had “established laws” (legesque sanxit). Thus, he commanded that every individual observe the same order and the law of nature assigned to its species. When a monster is generated, the particular nature makes a mistake, but the universal nature does not. The universal nature, which is singled out by the first cause, is “fixed” by God’s providence. To a Christian philosopher, Case concludes, the only “true and real causes” are God and divine providence, nature being God’s “minister.”86 Albeit his apparent indifference toward Protestantism or Catholicism, Case argues in a way which approaches the Philippist emphasis on providence, aiming at demonstrating that absolutely everything was

 On discussions of chance in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century teratology, see, for instance, Bitbol-Hespéries (2005) and Ibrahim (2005) 169–186. 84  The textbooks talk of fortuna, which is proper to beings which have the capacity to choose, and casus – which corresponds to beings that cannot make choices (to which monsters belong). See Aristotle (1998) II 6, 197a36–198a13. 85  Kusukawa (1995) 155–157; eadem (2008) 112–113. 86  Case (1600b) ca. iii, 20; ca viii, 50–55; id. (1600a) lib. 2, ca. viii, 339, 347; lib. 2, ca. vi, 317. 83

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made and ruled by God.87 Keckermann seems to endorse a similar view with respect to the last point. Provided that nature is “God’s effect or force,” both God and nature direct their actions toward a good, which is its end. By the same token, there is no casual action in nature, but every action aims at a fixed and determined goal.88 Other authors maintain an intermediate and more nuanced position that, without denying that chance is an accidental cause, claims that, with respect to God’s providence, nothing is random. Eustachius defines chance as an accidental cause in those things that happen beyond the intention of the agent and rarely. This is to be considered so only from the human point of view and regarding second causes by themselves. Nonetheless, there is nothing casual with respect to God, who through the straightforward plan of his providence always rules the concurrence of second causes toward the production of their effects. Close to this view, Magirus maintains that sometimes nature is impeded, so that accidentally (by chance) it does not attain the end that it pursues. But again, chance and fortune are accidental causes that must ultimately be reduced to the goals of God’s providence.89 The Coimbra commentary makes a similar point: chance and fortune are accidental causes, but, with respect to God, nothing occurs fortuitously or randomly since nothing escapes the rule of his providence. As for monsters, its explanation distinguishes between the particular intention of the second causes and the universal intention of the first cause. While it can be said that there is an element of chance regarding the impeded cause, as far as the intention of God is concerned, there can be no chance, given that he is provident and foreknows everything. Similarly, Rubio maintains that monsters are random effects only with respect to the primary intention of natural causes but are not so with respect to their secondary intention. Moreover, there is no natural effect which is purely accidental (“pure casualis, vel omnino per accidens”). Finally, if we understand by nature the first cause, which produces, rules, and directs toward the production of their effects both particular and universal causes, “it is true and necessary that monsters are neither accidental nor random, but per se effects.” To support this claim, Rubio – like the Coimbrans and Suárez– appeals to the distinction between God’s antecedent and consequent will.90 When God concurs with the impeded cause, he wants the regular offspring with his “antecedent and inefficient” will, so that he tends toward the production of a perfect outcome. Nonetheless, his concurrence is “accommodated” to the power of second causes. As a result, when there is an impediment which is stronger than the particular cause aiming the perfect offspring, God wants efficiently (efficaciter vult) the generation of the defective outcome with an “absolute and efficient will.”91  On Melanchthon’s view of providence, see Kusukawa (1995)160–162.  Keckermann (1623) lib.1, ca. iv, 18. 89  Eustachius (1647) Pars Physica, trac. ii, dis. iii, qu. ii, 146–47; Magirus (1646) lib. 1, ca. iii, 51, 55–57. 90  On the notions of God’s antecedent and consequent will, see above p. 15 of pdf  91  Conimbricenses (1594) lib. 2, ca. vii, qu. i, art. i, 236–37; Rubio (1629) lib. 2, ca. ix, qu. unica, 286–288. Cf. Suárez (1961) dis. XXIII, sectio 10, n. 11, and Conimbricenses (1594) lib. 2, ca. ix, qu. vi, art. ii, 336. 87 88

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Finally, a third stance – represented by Toledo, Pereira, and Burgersdijck – diverges a little from the last one, by underlining the role of second causes in the whole analysis. This provides the basis for a more autonomous depiction of nature – a bit closer to the new science – within which natural changes are explained in terms of the intrinsic properties of nature.92 Thus, Toledo devotes a long analysis to the notions of chance and fortune and claims that monsters are the result of chance, which is to say that they are effects that accidentally and rarely follow from an “intrinsic natural principle” or “internal cause,” for instance, matter. Chance and fortune are accidental efficient causes, whose effects can be called fortuitous or accidental only with respect to particular causes. Although they are not intended by them, they are foreseen by God, and, if they are natural effects, they are pursued by the universal causes (the heavens). Toledo holds that although monstrosities are random effects of particular causes, they are not random with respect to the “universal generator,” i.e., the heavenly substances and their motors, “since such matter from which monsters are produced is disposed to such monstrous shape” by celestial influence.93 The heavens intend that which is arranged by such a matter, so that from such a matter under certain circumstances, such effect will be necessarily produced. Toledo’s stance shows interesting contrasts with the authors previously considered. In his long treatment of chance and fortune, the words providentia and voluntas do not appear. While he refers very briefly to God’s prescience, the core of his argument lies in the analysis of efficient second causes. He agrees with the above examined authors in claiming that monsters are effects of chance only with respect to particular agents, when he adds that in another sense they are not accidental effects. Nevertheless, he relies on celestial influence (rather than on God’s providence and will) which lies within the natural world in connection with the necessity proper to efficient causation. His closeness to the later natural philosophical development, however, should not be exaggerated, since divine providence indeed maintains a role in Toledo’s depiction of nature. In another question of the same chapter, he endorses the view that everything in nature works for an end and argues that “glorious God” is the one universal and provident cause which has provided to every nature an end.94 Once again, we can see that the views of the textbook authors differ in emphasis rather than in substantial contents. In keeping with this third position, Pereira’s stance on chance in monstrous generation is based on nature’s operations. Not that he denies that everything in nature is ruled and foreknown by God, but his explanation is more related with second efficient causes. Even longer than Toledo, Pereira devotes the whole book nine of his manual to fortune, chance, and contingence. He makes it clear that it is a very “obscure and ambiguous” question whether in sublunary things there could be a  In particular, Jesuits Toledo and Pereira attributed more autonomy to nature with respect to its Creator. For Toledo, see Des Chene (1996) 207–208. For Pereira, see Landucci (2006) ch. 6, esp. 4–84. 93  Toledo (1580) lib. 2, ca. iv, qu. x, fols. 66r–69v. Ibid., fol. 67v. 94  Ibid., fols. 67v; 75v. 92

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natural effect said to occur at random with respect to heavenly substances. After exposing arguments pro and contra, he concludes that if the actual concurrence of the heavens is necessary to produce sublunary effects, nothing in the sublunary world can occur randomly with respect to them. Moreover, with respect to God’s providence, there is nothing caused by chance and fortune. Only with respect to second and particular causes, it can be said that there are fortuitous and random effects. Consequently, Pereira admits that monsters are produced by chance only in a restrictive sense (secundum quid) as they occur rarely and are not intended as such (per se) but accidentally (per accidens), not on account of something but by the necessity and disorder of matter, which prevents nature from following its ordinary course and forces it to generate another outcome. To Pereira, the more acceptable opinion is the one according to which monsters are not caused by chance, but per se on the basis that their causes are “determined per se, fixed and understood by science.” Like Toledo, he maintains that although the causes of monsters are rare, when they are present, the monstrosity necessarily occurs. In fact, once nature is impeded to achieve its end, it turns back all its power and produces monsters. Pereira assumes that every natural effect depends on fixed causes (certae causae) whose time, modes, and other circumstances are prescribed by nature (a natura praefinito constitutae).95 An emphasis on second causes is also found in Burgersdijck, who asserts that nature has “its power from another source and employs it not by chance but by a constant and fixed reason.” As for the “force” by which nature is led to its end, he rejects as a great ignorance the view that attributes it to matter, chance, and fortune. In contrast, he agrees with Aristotle in ascribing to celestial bodies the power of altering, generating, corrupting, and changing inferior natures. Heavenly bodies move in different ways to distribute this power to inferior bodies. However, since nothing is moved by itself, but by others, the causal series of motion requires a start which consists in an unmoved physical principle. On the other hand, as far as the efficient process is concerned, nature does not tend toward the attainment of its end randomly and disorderly, but with order and skill. This being so, the generation of things is able to be referred to chance and fortune only so far, and that it must ultimately be established that nothing in nature is generated by chance. Burgersdijck admits that monsters can seem to be made by a disorderly nature and at random. Nonetheless, he obscurely argues, they are not nature’s intentions, neither can they be attributed to nature as their efficient cause, but by accident. Monsters are works of a nature that is impeded by a hindering force or by matter’s incapacity. This seems to mean that nature as a process does not act randomly: monsters do not originate from chance (non temere) but from a determined and fixed end (destinato ac certo fine).96 Throughout these three general stances concerning this central point of the discussion of the modal character of monsters, we find a range from an extreme providentialist view of nature (Case) – which heavily subordinates secondary causation to God – to views that give a more prominent role to secondary causation 95 96

 Pereira (1585) lib. 9, ca. ii, 511 and ca. iv, 516; ca. ii, 511; ca. x, 531–532.  Burgersdijck (1643) dis. iv, q. x, 40–41; q. xii, 41–42.

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(Toledo, Pereira, and Burgersdijck), passing through an intermediary position in which the cooperation between secondary and primary causation is more equilibrated (Eustachius, Magirus, Rubio, and the Coimbrans).

4.8  F  inal Remarks: From “Weak” to “Strong” Laws of Nature The textbooks show a preoccupation with the relation of monsters to nature’s teleology, but do not express the same concern with their relation to nature’s regularity. In these accounts, monsters do not represent a challenge to nature’s regularity, since the nomological order includes the possibility of exceptions. Transgressions of the “weak” laws of nature – like monsters – are therefore easily admitted in such a metaphysical framework: both the regular course and the exceptions are part of the world order. For this reason, we do not find any differences in the selected texts regarding this issue. In contrast, monsters seem to defy the metaphysical tenet that nature always acts toward an end. Hence, the authors seek for arguments to support the view that ultimately monsters are not counterexamples to nature’s omnipresent finality. Whereas the textbooks here explored agree in this starting point, they elaborate, however, different argumentative strategies to reconcile the existence of monsters with “strong” finality. The alternative solutions given to the issue of teleology cross the broad Protestant-Catholic divide. That will not come as a surprise, given the high influence that certain Catholic manuals exerted over Protestant Late Scholasticism. One must add, however, that in some cases the preeminence that divine providence had played in Protestantism probably contributed toward the endorsement of the portentous interpretation of monsters recognized in the Oxford scholar John Case – curiously suspected of Catholicism– or toward a greater preoccupation with taking a position on this question as manifested by Franco Burgersdijck. I tried to show that the metaphysical background of the Late Scholastic treatment of monsters combined a “weak” sense of nature’s regularity with a “strong” sense of nature’s finality. The main concern of these authors was not so much why monsters are irregular, but what the end pursued by them is. Whereas a weak regularity permits exceptions to the generative process of living beings, a strong finality does not admit unintended products of nature. As a result, the existence of monsters was often thought as the articulation of weak laws of nature with ends which are ultimately inescapable: if under certain circumstances some ends cannot be attained, other ends are achieved instead of them. Being the masterpiece of a divine designer, nature always acts toward an end. Certainly, the assumption of strong finality involved conceptual difficulties for Late Scholastic authors. One symptom of this is the fact that they hardly provide clues about the goals that impeding causes would seek which prevent the completion of regular generation. They only assert that impediments (like anything else in nature) do not tend toward imperfection. Now, if they do not strive for a defective outcome, what do they strive for? Some authors hold that heavens, as universal

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causes, intend monsters. Now, what kind of benefit would defective beings provide to the world? Is diversity/beauty the only good that they can provide? That sounds quite unconvincing, at least to our contemporary eyes. Be that as it may be, it seems that Late Scholastics felt more confident in accounting for the regular ends sought by nature always or for the most part, or even accounting for God’s ends, than explaining what good could be provided by nature’s defects. Another uneasy point regards the apparent sufficiency of efficient causes in exhausting scientific explanation, which would entail that appeals to ends are unnecessary. To most of the authors here considered – except perhaps for Case – efficient causes necessitate their effects. However, they still felt the need to dwell on the issue of the intention behind monstrosity to provide a complete scientific explanation of natural effects. The role ascribed to efficient causes and the attention paid to teleology sometimes show tensions inside their stances, particularly in the case of Toledo, Pereira, Keckermann, the Coimbrans, and Burgersdijck. If generation is described as a complex process combining different efficient causes, the postulation of individual, collective, cosmic, or divine ends pursued in the generation process looks like a rather superfluous or even contrived addition to an already satisfactory explanation. The more so when the ultimate teleological reason claims something quite obvious in an orthodox Christian view: every occurrence in nature – a monster as well as whatever regular production– is intended by God. Nonetheless, even if these authors seem to be to a certain point congenial with the path of efficient causes, it remains true that they did not abandon the path of finality, since, as Des Chene has rightly noted, to them it was inconceivable that natural changes should not have ends.97 Moreover, they designed a sophisticated doctrine of nature’s finality along with a complex hierarchy of ends that could coexist with explanations in terms of efficient causes. Far from assuming a mitigated teleology or no design at all – as Ian Maclean had suggested –98 they were still committed to strong finality by appealing to diversified and multilayered kinds of ends. That this commitment to omnipresent teleology increasingly involved hard hermeneutic problems, as the case of monsters remarkably shows, may be one reason for its later and slow decline. Despite the many changes undergone by natural science and the world picture in the early modern period usually associated with the “Scientific Revolution,” the above-studied topics continued to be present well into the eighteenth century in discussions of monsters. At an early stage, for instance, some of them persisted in one of the branches of Francis Bacon’s natural history, the “history of pretergenerations.” Bacon depicted the facts to be collected in this branch as “the works of nature which have a digression and deflection from the ordinary course of generations, productions, and motions.” He also called such works “errors of nature” for which matter was the main culprit: they occur whenever nature is “quite forced to and ripped from its state by the deformities and rarities of obstinate and rebellious ­matter, and by the violence of impediments.”99 Within the Baconian physical and  Des Chene (1996) 169.  Maclean (2000) 233. 99  Bacon (2000) 63 and (1996) 100. 97 98

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metaphysical framework, the “errors,” “impediments,” and “rebellious matter” reproduce the Late Scholastic terminology indeed but keep only part of their original meaning. A generation later, Descartes defied the Late Scholastic narrative even further. In his Primae cogitationes circa generationem animalium (posthumously published in 1701), he explained the birth of hermaphrodites by resorting to secondary material and efficient causes and remarked that these are not “trivial [levis] causes” but actually the most momentous, “the eternal laws of nature.”100 Similar nomological explanations of teratogeny became more common throughout the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. For instance, Robert Boyle maintained that “when monsters are said to be preternatural things, the expression is to be understood in regard to that particular species from which the monster does enormously deviate, though the causes, that produce that deviation, act but according to the general laws whereby things corporeal are guided.”101 In the same line, Nicolas Malebranche argued that if “a child comes into the world with a malformed head growing from his breast and which makes him wretched (…), it is because [God] has established laws for the communication of motions, of which these effects are necessary consequences.”102 George Berkeley addressed the same issue in holding that “[n]atural productions (…) are not all equally perfect.” Moreover, they are explained by “general rules” from whose “constant observation (…) natural evils will some times unavoidably ensue.”103 The explanations of monsters by Descartes, Boyle, Malebranche, and Berkeley did not share the same metaphysical and theological assumptions about causation and the relation of nature to God, but agreed in subordinating monsters to inviolable laws of nature. Whereas Late Scholastic accounts explained the birth of monsters by claiming that nature’s primary and regular intentions were replaced by secondary ones, modern accounts argued that irregular offspring are explained by a set of inviolable laws, distinct from those which applied to regular offspring. However, despite this new nomological approach, older patterns of thought were still an integral part of early modern teratology. The long and intense discussions maintained at the Parisian Académie des Sciences still debated – as Late Scholastic manuals did– whether monsters were exceptions to God’s laws of nature and, if so, whether they pursued an end.104 Although scholarly studies have shown that there was not a homogeneous view of the laws of nature in early modern natural philosophies,105 beyond their common assumptions, early modern philosophers generally thought that laws of  Descartes (1909) 523–524; cf. Excerpta, ib. 584.  Boyle (1996) section VII, 109. 102  Malebranche (1976) vol. V, 32. I quote the English translation Malebranche (1992) 118. 103  Berkeley (1953) #256, 121–122. On Malebranche and Berkeley, see Adams (2013) and Schmaltz (2013). 104  On the querelle des monstres held in the Académie des Sciences’s during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see, for instance, Roger (1997) 318–336, Monti (2000), and Bitbol-Hespériès (2012). 105  See Roux, (2001); Steinle (1995). 100 101

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nature –being statements that codify regularities observed in nature –106 determined a regularity in nature and were applicable without exceptions.107 In cases where a phenomenon was not explained by a certain law, it could be explained by other laws, which possessed either the same or greater degree of generality, but which might be unknown to us. Such a view entailed new theoretical difficulties: assuming invariable laws raised the problem of the existence of miracles, insofar as they are interruptions of the regular course of nature. Interruptions within nature – which caused debates long into the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries–were not as problematic for late Scholastics. The Late Scholastic assumption of a purposive nature (strong finality) entailed the possibility of preternatural errors (nature’s fallibility) and in large part supported the notion of weak laws of nature admitting exceptions. Hence, one can suggest that the tendency of some relevant trends of the new science to reject the explanatory value of strong view of finality would play as an important concomitant factor, though not the one, permitting the transformation of the concept of laws of nature into exception less regularities. In a program like Descartes’ which – consistently or not– eliminates final causes from the scientific explanation,108 strong finality is no longer taken for granted, and nature’s fallibility does not make sense any more. Against this backdrop, laws of nature may be thought as inviolable and unbreakable. A broader study will be needed to support this point, but bearing in mind the textbook views here explored, one can suggest that the exception less character of the laws of nature proposed by the natural philosophers who were influenced by this background can be interpreted as a displacement of the strength that Late Scholasticism ascribed to teleology toward natural regularity. In other words, early modern laws of nature assume the regularity and order of nature, but at the same time abandon the teleological framework inherited from Late Scholasticism, either by excluding final causes from scientific explanations, or by arguing that God’s ends are beyond the scope of human knowledge, or by suggesting the nonexistence of ends. In this way, the strong character which Late Scholastic textbooks ascribed to teleology was transferred to nature’s regularity.109 The displacement would lead  I follow here John Henry’s interpretation, in Henry (2004) 79.  On the exception less character of the laws of nature, see Maclean (2008) 29 and Roux (2001) and eadem (2008) 200. 108  Descartes (1905) book I # 28, 15. On Descartes’ inconsistencies in his rejection of final causes, see Gaber (1992) 338–339, n. 14. 109  This reading would provide further evidence in support of Lynn Joy’s contentions, which take issue with one of John Milton’s claims in Milton (1998). Joy holds two theses: (1) “Aristotle’s conception of causal explanation—while in many ways incompatible with explanations based on laws of nature and material efficient causes—actually served as the source of certain definitive features of this modern conception of scientific explanation”; (2) “the decline of explanations in terms of the four causes occurred not because the new conception of scientific explanation was shown to be rationally superior to Aristotle’s conception but because the latter had been seriously weakened by the efforts of its early modern defenders to rehabilitate it.” See Joy (2006) 73 (italics in the original). 106 107

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Descartes and others finally to refuse the inherited concept of monsters, by showing that, after all, they are not errors at all, but natural events in accordance with exception less laws of nature. Acknowledgment  I would like to thank Koen Vermeir, John Henry, Jonathan Regier, and Gabriela Rossi for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Chapter 5

Practices and Theories of Contingency in Renaissance Approaches to Nature Pietro Daniel Omodeo

In the Middle Ages, the concept of contingency was thought in connection with practice as a bridge between freedom and providence, indetermination, and necessity. In theology and ethics, natural contingency was seen as the necessary presupposition for free will, human responsibility, and salvation. In the Renaissance, the concept of contingency was transplanted from the ethical and theological fields to ontology and epistemology, in order to support natural and methodological reflection on the practical arts. Owing to advances in technology and the arts, the articulation of theory and practical experience was a theoretical challenge for practitioners with a theoretical predisposition as well as for learned scholars with a practical bias in disciplines as varied as mechanics and medicine. In this context, as I will argue, contingency permitted them to conceptualize the link between experience and theory. The theoretical reflection on practice was even extended to literary theory, especially poetical composition, on the basis of theoretical conceptions crossing heterogeneous realms of human experience, practice, and knowledge. In fact, it was assumed that nature and human activity are a continuum and the creative power of human ingenuity, and skillfulness is akin to forces operating in nature. In this essay, I will show that the Renaissance connection of practice and theory in the discourse on experience and its codification presupposed an ontology and an epistemology of contingency.

This essay is a continuation and expansion of themes discussed in Omodeo and Renn (2015). I am particularly thankful to Jürgen Renn for his valuable suggestions and thorough discussion of the themes of this essay. P. D. Omodeo (*) ERC Endeavor Early Modern Cosmology (GA 725883), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. D. Omodeo, R. Garau (eds.), Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 332, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67378-3_5

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5.1  C  ontingency and Practice in Scholastic and Post-­scholastic Conceptions Contingency can be aptly understood as the twofold relation of an event or an action to its facticity as well as to the spectrum of other (non-actual) possibilities (Luhmann 2013, 40).1 In scholastic logic, the modal category of contingency was commonly defined as “that which is neither impossible nor necessary” (quod est nec impossibile nec necessarium). Applied to ontology, it was redefined in existential terms as “that which is real but not so by necessity” (id, quod est sed potest non esse) (Vogt 2011, 51–59). In the Latin Christianized world, contingency applied to reality as a whole, i.e., to reality as the creation of the Almighty in accordance with his inscrutable will. As John Duns Scotus (1265–1308) put it, “there is contingency in things due to God” (est contingentia in rebus, quia a Deo) (Scotus 1994, 140). This conception would later become common in philosophy, as is clearly witnessed by its centrality in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1646–1716) logico-­ metaphysical speculations, many centuries after Scotus (Schepers 1965). However, contingency did not only refer to reality as a totality but also to events taking place within this totality. In this second sense, it referred to the corruptibility of worldly phenomena, in particular of events occurring in the sublunary sphere. In the realm of “coming to be and passing away” – the peripatetic generatio et corruptio – it was material imperfection and human sin that accounted for deviations from God’s commands. These commands found expression either as natural laws or as moral requirements. In Thomas Aquinas’s (1225–1274) view, absolute necessity or necessitas absoluta pertains only to immaterial beings and heavenly bodies. Drawing on the Aristotelian distinction between superlunary perfection and sublunary corruption, he maintained that the only physical beings that are caused by necessity are those in which the form fulfills all potentialities of their matter. This describes heavenly bodies. In the case of sublunary bodies, their forms are imperfectly realized since matter, as the potentiality to take different forms, is at the origin of their contingency. Matter is the source of the possibility to realize or not to realize inner tendencies prescribed by God (Summa contra Gentiles II 15, cf. Thomas 1982, 32). Additionally, since human will is able to produce effects that are not necessitated, human freedom (liberum arbitrium) is a further source of contingency. It goes without saying that contingency, as expression of freedom and moral choice, was connected with concerns about salvation and redemption from a fallen state of sin. Arguably, the ethical and religious requirement to cope with worldly contingency and the imperative to master it was already crucial to Augustine’s anthropology, although he did not use the expression “contingentia” (Markschies 2016). Aquinas fully articulated this theme in his discussion about the moral tension required to overcome passions. He saw them as natural determinations, especially descending from starry influences (Summa theologiae, pt. 1 question 115, article 4):  Luhmann calls this a “doppelte Referenz von Möglichkeit und Sein.”

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Astrologers are able to foretell the truth in the majority of cases, especially in a general way. But not in particular cases; for nothing prevents man resisting his passions by his free will [per liberum arbitrium]. Wherefore the astrologers themselves are wont to say that “the wise man will master the stars”, forasmuch as, to wit, he conquers his passions.2

The idea that astrology served to master nature and passions found its ultimate source of legitimation in the Ptolemaic views of the Centiloquium.3 A Renaissance admirer of Ptolemy’s astrology such as Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) – himself a translator of the Quadripartitum (Ptolemy 1553)4  – emphasized the Christian character of the conception of Creation as intrinsically contingent as a whole and permeated by contingency in its parts.5 In his eyes, contingency informed a picture of the world that avoided two opposite evils: Stoic fatalism and the Epicurean view that the world is ruled by chance. In fact, contingency suits a vision of God as a wise king prescribing natural and ethical laws to His subjects without necessitating them (Melanchthon 1550, 31r–v). In the chapter “De contingentia” [On contingency] of his and his pupil Paul Eber’s (1511–1569) Initia doctrinae physicae [Introduction to Physics] (1549), he argued that material vagaries and human freedom are the two sources of contingency in nature. They mediate between the perfection of divine laws and material imperfection.6 In the Renaissance, the theme of contingency did not only inform ethics, theology, astrology, and post-Aristotelian natural philosophies but also the emerging mathematical physics. Galileo Galilei’s (1564–1642) discussions on dynamics with his mentor, Guidobaldo del Monte (1545–1607), bear witness to the penetration of the theme of contingency into the conception of nature underlying his research. In a letter to Del Monte (Padua, 29 November 1602) (Galilei 1968, vol. 10, n. 88, 97–100), he addresses the problem of the discrepancy between the mathematical codification of general laws and phenomenal observations, in the context of a defense of his own mathematical investigation of motion: As for your question, I fully agree with your Excellency that abstract geometrical propositions are altered as soon as we conern ourselves with matter, owing to its contingency [per la sua contingenza]. As we cannot have a certain science of these perturbed [propositions] the mathematician is exempted from speculating on them. (Galilei 1968, vol. 10, 100)7 2  “Et ideo astrologi ut in pluribus vera possunt praedicere, et maxime in communi. Non autem in speciali, quia nihil prohibet aliquem hominem per liberum arbitrium passionibus resistere. Unde et ipsi astrologi dicunt quod sapiens homo dominatur astris, inquantum scilicet dominatur suis passionibus.” Quoted from http://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/FP.html (Accessed 18 January 2016), translation slightly revised. 3  Cf. to Vanden Broecke, infra. 4  Melanchthon accomplished the translation of Ptolemy’s astrological work along with Joachim Camerarius. 5  On Melanchthon’s astrology and physics, see Kusukawa (1995). 6  Cf. Omodeo, “Secundum quid and contingentia,” infra. 7  “Perquanto al suo quesito, stimo benissimo quanto ne dice V.S. Ill.ma, e che quando cominciamo a concernere la materia, per la sua contingenza si cominciano ad alterare le proposizioni in astratto dal geometra considerate; delle quali così perturbate siccome non si può assegnare certa scienza, così dalla loro speculazione è assoluto il matematico.”

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This statement, delivered by one of the founding fathers of modern physics, does not imply any skepticism concerning the possibility of a mathematical inquiry into nature. Rather, it is in line with a long tradition regarding nature as the realm of contingency. Galileo denies the necessary occurrence of natural phenomena without renouncing mathematical physics altogether. One has just to bear in mind that material processes cannot accomplish mathematical perfection although they follow geometrical patterns or strive toward their realization. The challenge that Galileo and other innovators were facing was to offer a scientific theory capable of connecting mathematical universality on the one hand and experience on the other (Renn et al. 2001). This problem especially affected the status accorded to the practical arts – mechanics, astrology, and medicine – in which concreteness and experience were fundamental.

5.2  T  he Codification of Experience as a Problem in the Epistemology of Contingency In order to scrutinize the theme of contingency as a theoretical problem arising from the connection of theory and experience in the arts, it will be expedient to look at Renaissance scientist-engineers, for instance, the military engineer Bonaiuto Lorini (1540–1611), on whom I will focus as a typical exponent of his time (cf. Lefèvre 1978, 96). He was the author of an extensive work on military fortifications, Delle fortificazioni [On Fortifications] (1596), outlining the theoretical and practical problems linked to construction and mechanics. In the dedicatory letter, to Philip of Spain, Lorini emphasized that in order to become an accomplished architect, he had complemented mathematical formation (studii delle Matematiche) with practice: I deemed it necessary to integrate learning with practice. For that purpose I decided to visit Flanders and other countries, in particular to study their successes linked to the military art, alongside the various opinions on fortification and the works accomplished in accordance with them. However, I observed so much variety that one could easily believe that the art of fortification has no demonstrable foundation and that such important endeavors are made by chance. (Lorini 1596, A2r)8

In spite of initial doubts relating to the scientificity of architecture, Lorini claimed that he had become a proficient ingegner militare (military engineer) by bringing together mathematical knowledge and mechanical practice. The volume Delle fortificazioni aimed to provide a well-founded and overarching theory of architecture. The fifth book was devoted to the science and practice of mechanics, “in which the mechanical sciences and building practice are explained 8  “Giudicai esser necessario di congiungere con gli studii, la pratica, per la quale volsi veder la Fiandra, et altri paesi, et particolarmente notare quei successi, che alla militia si appartengono: con le varie opinioni che sentivo proporre per fortificare, et dipoi l’opere che venivano fatte: onde viddi tanta diversità, che facilmente si saria potuto credere, che l’arte del fortificare non havesse alcun fondamento dimostrabile, et che una opera di tanta importanza venisse fatta a caso.”

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through very easy demonstrations according to the most certain rules” (dove con facilissime dimostrazioni si dichiarano le scienze delle mecaniche e la pratica di fabricare con le più certe regole). In it, Lorini warned the reader not to neglect practice. He stated that theory alone is not sufficient to realize the works described and explained in his work. As he explained, the application of abstract speculations fails if one does not take into account that the necessity of mathematical demonstrations does not fully apply to reality: Before we continue, it is necessary to stress the difference between the pure and speculative mathematician and the practical mechanic […]. The demonstrations and proportions that can be found among imaginary lines, surfaces and bodies separated from matter, are not as perfect [as in abstract] when they are applied to material things. In other words, the mathematician’s mental conceptions are not affected or altered by hindrances that are always and naturally connected with the matter with which the mechanic deals […] although mathematical demonstrations are necessarily compelling. (Lorini 1596, 172)9

Lorini distinguished between the mathematician’s concepts (concetti del matematico) and the mechanic’s considerations and experience (considerazioni et esperienza del mecanico). Whereas the former person deals with necessary demonstrations, the latter has the capacity to cope with material reality. The opposition, typical of the scholastic, is that between universal necessity and concrete materiality in the framework of an onto-epistemology of contingency. Lorini’s reflection, however, is located outside academia, in that extra-academic sphere that has been aptly called in recent history of science “the artisanal experience of matter and nature” and an “articulation of artisanal experience and epistemology” (Smith 2004). To rest with knowledge of necessary theorems, as Lorini contends, would not help practice: Hence it follows that those who wish to deal with these works do not only need to know mathematics, in order to assess and realize them, but also have to be prudent and experienced mechanics. (Lorini 1596, 172)10

Lorini’s science of architecture and mechanics is no knowledge of necessary truths but of the contingent, as it is the application of general laws to concrete circumstances. From this perspective, contingency looms large in the reflection on the connection between necessity and facticity. In this sense, contingency proves to be the crucial ontological and epistemological category for reflection on knowledge in connection with the practical arts. 9  “Ma prima che più avanti procediamo, sarà necessario avvertire alla differenza che si ritrova tra il puro matematico speculativo et il mecanico pratico […] perché le dimostrazioni, e proporzioni, che si ritrovano tra le linee superficie e corpi imaginari, e separati dalla materia, non rispondono così exquisitamente quando alle cose materiali si applicano, cioè che i concetti mentali del matematico non ricevono né sono sottoposti a quegli impedimenti che di sua natura sempre porta seco congiunti la materia, con che opera il mecanico […] se bene la dimostrazione matematica ne persuade necessariamente […].” The grammar and style of the original sources have been standardized and modernized, in particular punctuation and capitalizations. 10  “Adunque per le cose dette, ricorderò a quelli che si vorranno porre a così fatte imprese nel giudicare, overo comandare la essecutione, di qualsivoglia machina, essersi necessario non solo havere cognitione delle matematiche, ma ancora essere avveduto, e pratico mecanico.”

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The distinction between the theoretical and the empirical parts of architecture is reminiscent of epistemological considerations typical of the most reputed art of the time: medicine. In classical medicine, it was assumed that successful practice required a skillful application of general knowledge to individual cases and a careful blending of empirical observation and philosophy (Temkin 1973, especially Chap. 2). Accordingly, the epistemological problem underlying a field in which demonstrative knowledge and experience were simultaneously at stake was variously treated in Renaissance controversies over the epistemological status of medicine (Mammola 2012, especially Chap. 3). The reputed physician Giovanni Argenterio (1513–1572) addressed the question of whether medicine was a scientia or an ars, thus entering a heated debate especially discussed at the University of Padua. In his commentaries on Galen, he came to the ambiguous conclusion that medicine had an in-between status. On the one hand, it is not as demonstratively compelling as Euclidean geometry, but, on the other hand, it is not purely practical due to the speculative dignity of its natural principles, which were rooted in physics (Argenterio 1566, discussed in Mammola 2012, 185–193). Given this cultural background, it is not surprising that a polymath such as Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576)  – bringing together the qualities of an excellent physician, mathematician, natural thinker, and a practitioner in mechanics and astrology – offered one of the most articulated methodological reflections on the relationship between speculative thought and practice. In his writings, he often stressed the limitations of pure theory disconnected from practice. As one reads in one of his medical aphorisms, the lack of exact quantification, established through practice, leads to failure in therapy: In matters of practice [in negotiis], in contrast to matters of theory [in artibus generis] a vague acquaintance with the subject is not sufficient as it is necessary to know the quantities. One can do good by offering rhubarb to a patient sick with tertian fever even if one does not know the exact quantity, but it is better to keep silent or not to visit a patient if one has not become acquainted with the dose to be employed. (Cardano 1962, 267)11

According to Cardano’s practice-oriented concept of science, speculative and mathematical reasoning is empty if it is not connected with the senses and the experience gained by means of constant exercise and practice. Cardano even believed that the validity of an apparently pure science such as arithmetic is not just rational but also sensible. As one reads in his Artis arithmeticae tractatus de integris [Treatise in the Art of Arithmetic on Integers]: “This art [arithmetic] is indeed the most certain of all, according not only to reason [ratione] but also to the senses. This is why it is the clearest among the mathematics” (Cardano 1663, vol. 10, 117a).12 Furthermore, in an essay on technical inventiveness, De inventione [On Invention],

 Translation revised. Cf. Cardano (1663, 49a): “In negotiis non ut in artibus generis cognitio quidquam iuvat, sed quantitatem scire oportet: Possumus enim prodesse rhabarbarum exhibendo tertiana laboranti, etiamsi nesciamus quantitatem; at melius est tacere, aut non invisere clientem, si modum in actione adhibere nesciveris.” 12  “Est vero hac ars [arithmetica] omnium certissima non tantum ratione, sed et sensu: unde et inter ipsas mathematicas ob hanc causam praeclarissima est.” 11

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Cardano went so far as to defend the superiority of practice over theory, placing ingenuity (inventio) higher than knowledge or wisdom (sapientia): Invention itself is higher than wisdom. In fact, human wisdom is rare owing to life’s brevity and to the many impediments occurring to men even in their happiest times. By contrast, invention satisfies infinite cases at once. For example, he who demonstrates the reason why the angles of a triangle are equal to two rectangles, [demonstrated this] for infinite triangles, no matter how different they might be. The same applies to [demonstrations linked to] universals [species] […]. Although the power of invention is infinite, it is only finitely actualized. Therefore this is the only thing almost capable of connecting finitude with infinity. It makes us resemble gods. (Cardano 1663, vol. 10, 90)13

As one reads, invention is the capacity to devise means for particular goals (inventio medii). The number of the means required depends on the discipline and the field. For instance, “demonstration,” “exercise,” and “instruments” are the three means that are necessary for music and medicine. In fact, an accomplished musician ought first to understand harmony (intelligit unde concordia), second, to be well exercised in his art, and, third, to know how to play his instrument. All three means are indispensable conditions for musical perfection. Similarly, an accomplished physician is able to distinguish between health and disease, to detect illness and establish how to restore health. The wide range of applications of human ingenuity is evinced by the variety of inventions Cardano listed in his autobiography, De vita propria [On His Own Life], in a chapter entitled “Notable discoveries of mine in various disciplines” (Quae in diversis disciplinis digna adinveni). They comprise inventions as various as the reorganization of logic and its application to mathematics, discoveries in arithmetic, especially in algebra, and alleged emendations in physics (e.g., the elimination of fire from the elements, the detection of the causes of many illnesses and their treatment, as well as experiments (experimenta) on rare diseases such as epilepsy, insanity, and blindness). He moreover boasted that he had devised a method to transfer the observation of nature to the arts and the production of works (docui deducere contemplationem rerum naturalium ad artem et opus). Due to his many successes, he was proud of the title “the man of inventions” (vir inventionum) accorded to him by the man of letters, Andrea Alciato (1492–1550) (Cardano 1962, Chap. 44, and 1663, vol. 1, 39b–40a). Cardano’s pride in his own ingenuity and practical skillfulness is not unique in the context of Italian Renaissance, in which greater social and cultural significance was allotted to “fabricated objects and the people who made them” and “the worlds of artisanal practice and the worlds of learning moved closer together” (Long 2011, 30). Cardano’s attitude can be understood against the backdrop of a social environment in which technical and economical advance favored a new class of  “Inventio ipsa sapientia praestantior est: quoniam sapientia humana res est perexigua, tum ob vitae brevitatem, tum ob tot impedimenta, quae hominibus occurrunt etiam in temporibus felicissimis: at inventio infinitis simul satisfacit velut qui de triangulo demonstravit, quoniam tres angulos habet duobus rectis aequales, de infinitis et licet numero tantum differentibus: etiam iuxta species idem continget […]. Itaque inventio potestate quidem infinita actu vero finita: Igitur haec pene sola infinitum cum finito coniungit. Nosque cum Diis continuat.”

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scientist-­engineers, gratified by the recognition for their technical and theoretical expertise (cf. Lefèvre 2001 and Valleriani 2010). In the letter to the reader of the Italian edition of Del Monte’s Le mechaniche [Mechanics] (1581), Filippo Pigafetta (1533–1604) reversed the bad name traditionally attached to practice, ascribing his positive assessment to a classical authority: According to Plutarch, ‘mechanic’ is a much honored term as it is referred to the military profession. It suits the illustrious man who is capable of realizing, with his hands and ingenuity, marvelous works, which are extremely useful and agreeable in life. (Del Monte 1581, Bl. b3r)14

The increased status of Renaissance technicians and practitioners was mirrored in the enhanced status allotted to their disciplines in the system of knowledge of the time. Cardano, for one, developed an epistemology ad hoc, namely, a sensual epistemology according to which knowledge was a process of abstraction from the empirical to the universal: [Knowledge] is […] an understanding threefold in nature. First, there is knowledge gained by my senses through the observing of innumerable things […]. Secondly, there is an understanding of higher things obtained through the examination of their beginnings and pursued by conforming to certain principles. This aspect of knowledge is called proof because it is derived from wider application of the subject under consideration, or to place it in a clearer light or to give a general application from the particular. […] The third stage of my knowledge is that of things intangible and immaterial, and by this I have come wholly as a result of the ministrations of my […] spirit. […] The use of amplification and lucidity of understanding I have acquired partly from practice and partly at the inspiration of my spirit, for I devoted myself persistently to perfecting that intellectual flash of insight for more than forty years before I mastered it. (Cardano 1962, 245–247)15

Cardano’s approach to the sciences was a theory of knowledge in which the senses, observation, and experience are the beginnings of an inductive and generalizing process. This pre-Baconian attitude was not referred to as a science of the necessary but rather as one that is epistemologically located at the intersection of universal necessity and material particularity. Ascribing a scientific status to disciplines connected with practice and experience implied the development of an ­epistemology of contingency that often corresponded to an ontology of contingency. This is the next theme I discuss.

14  “Mechanico è vocabolo honoratissimo, dimostrante, secondo Plutarco, mestiero alla Militia pertinente, et convenevole ad huomo di alto affare, et che sappia con le sue mani et co’l senno mandare ad esecutione opre maravigliose a singulare utilità et diletto del vivere humano.” The same positive judgment can be found in Lorini (1596, 172): “Né sia alcuno, benché Signor grande, che si sdegni se con nome di mecanico venisse nominato, perché, come da Plutarco e da altri grandi autori è stato detto, esso nome è honorato appartenendosi solo a huomini di grande ingegno e valore, e che sappino co’l senno e con la mano ritrovare e mettere a essecuzione opere grandi, e massime alla milizia appartenenti.” On the opposite “prejudice” concerning “vile mechanics,” see among others, Rossi (2001, 15–17). 15  Translation slightly revised.

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5.3  Nature: The Living Art and the Realm of Contingency Before we deal with contingency in Renaissance natural philosophies, it will be expedient to stress the centrality of the epistemological reflection on art in the understanding of nature of the time. On the one hand, geometry was often deemed to offer an insight into the archetypal design of the universe in God’s mind, according to scholars such as Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). On the other hand, artisanal work helped Renaissance thinkers to conceptualize the act of creation by the Almighty and its continuation through nature. Resting on Plato’s Timaeus and Pythagorean influences, Cardano argued that the number of the planets and the proportions of their distances could be detected by inscribing and circumscribing geometrical solids in spherical orbs. This conception, presented in his Encomium geometriae [Eulogy of Geometry] (1553), paved the way to Kepler’s most famous geometrical reconstruction of the geometrical archetypes of the world in the Mysterium cosmographicum [Cosmographic Secret] (1596). As Cardano wrote: It is well known that God, the greatest of all artisans [maximum Opificem], preserved geometrical proportion in the structure of the world. Nothing should be considered more attentively in that construction of his, or better still only that [proportion should be considered]. Perhaps somebody would ask whether the proportion of the seven planets can be grasped once that [cosmological] proportion is unveiled. Yes, indeed! (Cardano 1663, vol. 4, 442a)16

As for the correspondence between artisanal production and the causation of natural phenomena, the medieval adagio “ars imitatur naturam” (art imitates nature) was still widely accepted during the Renaissance. Lorini repeated this topos. In his volume on architecture, he located it in the framework of the humanistic conviction that a structural correspondence exists between the macrocosm and the microcosm, that is, between the world as a whole and man: Many times I reflected on the marvelous order of Nature and I observed that it produces nothing imperfect. Rather, everything is perfect in his own species and genre and is directed towards the comfort and utility of mankind. As man is made in the image and likeness of God and is so-to-say the brother of Nature and the father of Art, I have come to the conclusion that he is forced to imitate Nature and to realize all of his good works through art in order, first, to honor God our Lord and, secondly, for the benefit of his neighbor. Thus, by mastering all other earthly creatures, he has to exceed their perfection inasmuch as his nobility is higher and philosophers called him, as a reasoning creature, ‘microcosm.’ (Lorini 1596, A3r)17  “[…] constat summam Geometriae rationem maximum Opificem in mundi constitutione conservasse: nihilque magis illa in eius constructione, imo et solam illam spectari debere. Sed forsitan quis quaerat, num ex hac ratione aperta septem erraticarum ratio habeatur? Certe sic.” 17  “Avendo più volte fra me stesso considerato l’ordine maraviglioso della Natura, e chiaramente veduto non esser creata cosa alcuna imperfetta, anzi tutte (con forma al genere suo) perfettissime, et affine di apportar commodo et utile all’huomo, il quale essendo fattura et immagine di Dio, e per così dire, fratello della Natura, e padre dell’Arte, mi son mosso a credere che egli sia del tutto obligato ad imitare essa Natura, e con l’arte far tutte l’opere sue buone, e prima ad honore di Dio nostro Signore, e poi a beneficio del prossimo. Perciocché dominando tutte l’altre cose terrene, le deve superare di perfettione tanto più quanto si trova esser maggiore la sua nobiltà, come creatura ragionevole, e da’ Filosofi paragonato ad un picciol mondo.” 16

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According to this Renaissance theme, the artisan’s activity is the continuation of and improvement upon nature. Agostino Ramelli (1531–1600), in Le diverse e artificiose machine [Various Artificial Machines] (1588), furthered this theme by equating human production and natural action. He presented mechanics as a science aimed at producing marvelous effects independently of whether its source was human or natural (Ramelli 1588, 7v).18 The separation between natural and artificial got blurred. It was often assumed that the practitioner ought not to do violence to nature in order to obtain the effects he wishes. Rather, the practitioner has to awake and channel inner natural tendencies. The reputed mathematician Niccolò Tartaglia (1499–1557) pointed out that the action of the practitioner does not produce natural motion but rather gives nature the occasion to unfold its potentialities. He made this point clear in La nova scientia [The New Science] (1558), aimed to elevate ballistics to the rank of a scientia (Valleriani 2013). “It is evident,” he wrote (Tartaglia 1558, 4r), “that the natural motion causes the violent and not the opposite. The violent never causes the natural, which indeed is caused by itself.”19 In this respect, scholars in mechanics followed the same line of thought of practitioners in the “wretched” fields alchemy and magic. For instance, Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim defined magic, in De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum [On the Uncertainty and the Vanity of Sciences] (1527), as an art in the service of nature. It gave nature an “opportunity” to produce its marvelous effects (Agrippa 1584, Chap. 42). The same idea was picked up by Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615) in his 20 books on natural magic (completed in 1589 as an extended reworking of an earlier work, published in 1558). In the section “Quid sit Magia” [What is magic] of this Magia naturalis [Natural Magic], he warned his readers as follows: Hence you, who will be introduced to magic, should know that magical works are nothing but the works of Nature, since the art serves it with great diligence. When it is noted that something is missing from the natural harmony [naturalis cogniatio], this is restored through vapors and elements at the right time, for instance in agriculture Nature generates the herbs and the harvest that the art has prepared. (Della Porta 1650, 3–4)20

Della Porta added that the ancient Egyptians went so far as to identify magic and nature, arguing that the forces that act in the world are the same that magicians channel and use for their purposes (Della Porta 1650, 3).

 “[…] Sì come potrà vedere ciascuno che piglierà piacere di leggere il presente Volume, che io gli appresento, in cui scorgere si puote tutte quelle stupende cose, che la natura, l’arte o lo ingegno humano con tal scienza possa, o sappia fare innanzi a gli occhi de i viventi.” 19  “Per il che egl’è cosa manifesta che dal moto naturale si causa il violente, et non e converso, cioè che dal violente giamai viene causato il naturale, anci si causa per se.” 20  “Unde vos, qui Magiam visuri acceditis, nil aliud Magiae opera credatis, quam Naturae opera, uti ars ministra, et sedula famulatur. Sic ubi enim aliquid naturali cognationi deesse noscit, per vapores et numeros opportunis illud instaurat temporibus, ut in Agicultura ipsa Natura herbas, et segetes parit, ars vero praeparat.” 18

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To mention a similar perspective in alchemy, Benedetto Varchi (1503–1565) in his Questione sull’alchimia [Alchemical Inquiry] (1544) claimed that the transmutation of metals is the fruit of a collaboration between the artisan and nature: It is not the art or the alchemist that generates and produces gold. It is nature. But the latter has to be prepared and helped by the alchemist and [his] art. It is the same as with health which is not restored in a sick body by medicine or the physician but by nature, if it is prepared and helped by the physician and [his] medicine. […] It is hence evident that the art does not make the metals. It is nature. And art is instrumental. (Varchi 1827, 21–22)21

Alongside this naturalization of art, nature was ascribed an artisan-like subjectivity. As Cardano remarked in De subtilitate [On Subtlety] (1550) (Cardano 1663, vol. 2, 360a): “The motion [of the machine] does not originate in a soul [as an external agent]. Rather, it originates in nature itself […]. In fact, that which moves an element is internal.”22 Therefore, nature is not forced to act by an external agent, e.g., the soul of the mechanist. Rather, it is a subject waiting for the right conditions to unfold its potentialities. It should be added that, in this perspective, practitioners’ experience could be seen as an access to the interiority of natural processes. In other words, while art was seen as the improvement upon and continuation of nature ex parte objecti, the action of nature could be understood through artisanal experience, ex parte subjecti. This line of thought informed, among others, the philosophy of mathematics of philosophers such as Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). In his collection of anti-­ Aristotelian theses, Comoeracensis Acrotismus [Chambray Acrotism] (1588), he described Nature (with a capital “N”) as a living art producing all forms and beings out of herself, moved by an internal drive akin to that of the mathematician giving shape to geometrical figures in his mind: NATURE […] is a living art and an intellectual power of the soul that is not alien but proper, not external but inner, not chosen but essential, and that continuously shapes matter. It does not operate from the outside like a sculptor using his discursive faculty and instruments. Rather, it operates just as the geometer moves and shapes his own spirit from the inside when he vividly imagines [geometrical] figures. (Bruno 1962, 80)23

The close link between such a dynamic vision of nature and contingency is clearly expounded by Nicholas Cusanus (1401–1464), who was one of Bruno’s sources (Secchi 2006) and has been praised in intellectual history as one of the most important Renaissance thinkers as far as cosmology is concerned (Cassirer 1927  “Non l’arte, o l’ Archimista genera, e produce l’oro, ma la natura disposta però, et aiutata dall’Archimista, e dall’arte, non altramente che la sanità in un corpo malato non si rende né dalla medicina, né dal medico, ma dalla natura disposta però, e aiutata del medico, e dalla medicina. […] Onde si vede manifestamente, che non l’arte fa i metalli, ma essa natura, se non quanto l’arte è strumento.” 22  “Motus non ab anima sed a natura est […]. Intimum igitur est, quo movetur elementum.” 23  “DE NATURA: […] Ipsa est ars viva et quaedam intellectualis animae potestas, non alienam sed propriam, non extrinsecus sed intrinsecus, non electione tali, sed essentia tali, materia perpetuo figurans: utpote non sicut statuaris externe, cum discursu, et instrumento operatur, sed perinde ut Geometra, dum vehementer quodam affectu figuras imaginatur, spiritum eius intimum imaginatione movet atque figurat.” 21

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and Koyré 1957). In De docta ignorantia [On Learned Ignorance] (1440), Cusanus advanced an ontology based on the modal categories of necessity, possibility, and contingency. He ascribed each of them to one of the three components of the universe: form, matter, and spirit. Taking into account also the divine, the universal modes of being are four: God’s absolute necessity, formal necessity (which he calls necessitas complexionis), material possibility (possibilitas), and the nexus or “connection” of necessity and possibility that generates universal contingency. The latter three modes are inseparably intertwined in nature. By calling the third component of the triad “spirit,” Cusanus stressed the dynamic character of nature. In fact, he defined it as a motion connecting form and matter. It is present everywhere: in the starry heavens, in the planets, and in the earthly sphere. Therefore, everything in this world is the product of a spiritual motion connecting form and matter. Out of this motion universal contingency is produced as the mediation between formal constraint and material indetermination: Form descends, so that it exists contractedly in possibility; that is, while possibility ascends toward actual existence, form descends, so that it limits, and perfects, and terminates possibility. And so, from the ascent and the descent, motion arises and conjoins the two. This motion is the medium-of-union of possibility and actuality. (Cusanus 1988, 88)24

Cusanus also calls this spiritual connection “nature”: Therefore, this spirit, which is called nature, is spread throughout, and contracted by, the entire universe and each of its parts. Hence, nature is the enfolding (so to speak) of all things, which occur through motion. (Cusanus 1988, 88)25

Cusanus’s perspective is significant for our present inquiry insofar as it constituted an example of a philosophy of natural contingency. It extended the immediate experience of the sublunary world to the entire universe. Arguably, it paved the way to the modern principle of cosmological homogeneity, fundamental for Brunian, Cartesian, and later speculations about the unity of the laws of nature. According to Cusanus’s speculative conceptualization of the experience of contingency and more or less explicit treatments by later scholars dealing with the onto-epistemology of practice and the arts, human beings and nature operate as creative subjects contingently producing works and events that are accorded to formal necessity only up to a certain degree.

 Cf. Cusanus (1932, 97): “Forma […] descendit, ut sit contracte in possibilitate; hoc est, ascendente possibilitate versus actu esse descendit forma ut esse finiens, perficiens et terminans possibilitatem. Et ita ex ascensu et descensu motus exoritur conectens utrumque. Qui motus est medium conexionis potentiae et actus.” 25  Cf. Cusanus (1932, 97–98): “Est igitur hic spiritus per totum universum et singulas eius partes diffusus et contractus, qui natura dicitur. Unde natura est quasi complicatio omnium, quae per motum fiunt.” 24

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5.4  D  ivine and Human Creativity: An Access to Worldly Contingency I have so far explored the Renaissance conceptualizations of practice and the arts sub modo contingentiae. An onto-epistemology of contingency, as I said, underpinned the codification of practical knowledge. I have, moreover, pointed to Cusanus’s and Buno’s generalizations of the experience of contingency to the level of a worldview. Most importantly, artisanal experience was recognized as a clue revealing of the action of nature. Along this line, the problem of ποίησις, creativity, and production, received cosmological import. The question of how to conceive of the creative process concerned scientists, engineers, and natural philosophers as much as literary critics. During the Renaissance, in fact, the question of ποίησις was intensely debated among literary critics and theorists concerned with the foundations of the art of poetry, or poetica (Hathaway 1962, Weinberg 1961). Some scholars even claimed for poetics the high status of a science, just like scholars in the arts of medicine, mechanics, architecture, ballistics, and the science of materials struggled to confer to their fields of study the same epistemological dignity. Hence, the concurring efforts to construct a science of poetry and to formalize the experience embedded in craftsmen’s skills were at the same time epistemic and epistemological. The codification of art as a science (with its principles, its laws, the definition of the technical terms, and the systematic interconnection of its elements) was accompanied by legitimating strategies at the meta-level of theory of knowledge. The philosophical justification of the validity of the epistemic status of practical knowledge was a challenging intellectual endeavor. It encompassed discussions on method and on the philosophical foundations of knowledge. Especially in the context of the defense of the scientific dignity of the arts, the problem of the genesis of knowledge came to the forefront. In other words, the processes of the production and acquisition of knowledge through experience became the central epistemological issue at the expenses of epistemologies of the adequatio in the natural sciences and the aesthetics of imitatio in literature and the plastic arts. In his Italian commentary to Aristotle’s Poetics, Lodovico Castelvetro (1505–1571) criticized Aristotle himself when he claimed that the essence of poetry is inventiveness and not imitation: A thief of others’ inventions deserves to be despised and punished. The poet that steals [from other poets should be treated] in this manner. In fact, his essence rests on invention, and without invention he cannot be a poet. (Castelvetro 1978, 289)26

In another standard commentary of the Poetics, Poetices libri septem [Seven Books on Poetics] (1561), Julius Cesar Scaliger (1484–1558) did not renounce imitation as the cornerstone of poetry. However, he closely connected it with creativity,

 “Ma se uno involatore delle ‘nvenzioni altrui dee essere schernito e punito, sì dovrebbe essere il poeta involatore, la cui essenzia consiste nella ‘nventione e senza essa inventione non è poeta.” On Renaissance commentaries to Aristotle’s Poetics, see Kappl (2006) and Schmitt (2002).

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as he stated that poetry imitates nature’s productivity instead of its products. Poetry, he wrote, can be seen as a second nature and the poet as a second God: Only poetry encompasses all [literary genres]. It is the most excellent since the others […] represent things as they are, like a portrait for the ears. By contrast, the poet brings into existence not only a second nature and various destinies but at once makes himself like a second god. In fact, the other sciences are similar to portrayals of that which the Creator has already brought into existence. By contrast, poetry most splendidly produces the species of that which exists or does not exist. Therefore, it does not seem that it presents things as they are like somebody who repeats, as is the case with other disciplines. Rather, it creates them like a god. For this reason, [poets] share their name with [God] not just by a human convention but rather from natural providence. The wise Greeks suitably created the name [of poetry] from the verb ποιεῖν [to create]. (Scaliger 1994, 70–72)27

Discussions on the capacity of concepts or of artistic forms to mirror a given reality had to be accompanied by considerations of scientific and artistic expressivity. Scaliger remarked that a poem could not be understood independently from the creative act, or poesis, that bought it into existence or from its creator, the poet. Similarly, there is no discovery independent from research and researchers: Poem is the work itself, that is to say, the forged matter. Poesis is the rationale and the form of the poem. Therefore there are as many nominalized verbs as names: poema corresponding to πεποίημαι, poesis to πεποίησαι, and poeta to πεποίηται. This is similar to [the triad] εὕρημα, εὕρεσις, εὑρετής. For instance, Iliad is a poem, Homer a poet and the rationale and form out of which Margites is created, poetry [poesis]. Poetics is a science, that is, the capacity to apply the learned precepts to the composition of that, which we call poetry [poesin]. (Scaliger 1994, 88 and 90)28

Scaliger thus emphasized the continuity between literary theory and epistemology. His views emerged from discussions on creativity and the creative power of the artist and the scientist, nature, and, eventually, God the Creator. It should be added that expressiveness is the cornerstone of the literary theory of the most reputed neo-Platonic philosopher of the late sixteenth century, Francesco Patrizi (1529–1597), also known for the natural philosophy and cosmology he developed in Nova de universi philosophia [New Philosophy of the Universe] (1591) (see Rossi 1977, and Seidengart 2006, 116–24). Disputing against the dogma of imitation, he maintained that the essence of poetry is enthusiasm or divine inspi “Sola poesis haec omnia complexa est, tanto quam artes illae excellentius, quod caeterae, ut dicebamus, res ipsas uti sunt repraesentant, veluti aurium pictura quadam. At poeta et naturam alteram et fortunas plures etiam ac demum sese istoc ipso perinde ac deum alterum efficit. Nam quae omnium opifex condidit, eorum reliquae scientiae tamquam actores sunt. Poetica vero, cum et speciosius quae sunt et quae non sunt eorum speciem ponit, videtur sane res ipsas non ut aliae quasi histrio narrare, sed velut alter deus condere, unde cum eo commune nomen ipsi non a consensu hominum, sed a naturae providentia inditum videatur. Quod nomen Graeci sapientes […] commodissime παρὰ τὸ ποιεῖν effinxissent […].” 28  “Poema est opus ipsum, materia, inquam, quae fit. Poesis autem ratio ac forma poematis, ut habeas a tribus verbi personis totidem nomina: poema – πεποίημαι, poesis – πεποίησαι, poeta – πεποίηται, quemadmodum εὕρημα, εὕρεσις, εὑρετής. Est igitur Ilias poema, Homerum poeta, ratio et forma qua Margites facta est poesis. Poetice vero scientia, id est habitus ex dispositione praeceptionum quibus docemur ad conformationem hanc quam poesin appellamus.” 27

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ration, which he called a furore poetico (poetic frenzy). In a letter to a correspondent written in 1552, he discussed the different forms of furore based on Plato’s Phaedrus. First, he assumed that there is a “natural” furore that elevates humankind above the animal kingdom. Second, there is a “divine” furore descending from the heavens, which can be divided into poetic, mystical, prophetic, and loving furores. An accomplished poet needs the poetic furore in addition to an elevated ingenuity. Furore descends from the Muses, that is, from planetary influences. It is a continuation of divine action in the world which pours from the cosmos into the poet’s soul. Depending on the different constellations and planets (here equated with the Muses) presiding over the nativity, an author will have a bias toward various forms of poetical inspiration, e.g., epic, tragic, or amorous. Democritus and Horace thus attribute such ingenuity and such frenzy […] to the excellent poet who is worthy of his name. In the following, we will understand in which manner the two characteristics are present in the poet if we first grasp that a rational and eternal soul rules the entire corporeal universe. Similarly, souls move and excite the low elements. The heaven of the Moon is animated in the same manner. Those of Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and, last but not least, the starry [heavens] have their own rational souls, distinguished from each other. The wise men of our world call the eight souls of the eight celestial spheres ‘Muses.’ They derive this name from the name of ‘music’ and from the very gentle music produced by the heavens moved by the aforementioned souls and by the universal [soul] that rules and tempers all the others. (Patrizi 1971, vol. 3, 449–450)29

In Patrizi’s neo-Platonic philosophy, the human soul is seen as a continuation of the worldly soul as well as of the planets’ souls. From this viewpoint, poetic creation is akin to a divine act of creation. Hence, poetry is a means of illuminating the very essence of nature and reality. Behind natural phenomena, transformations, and celestial geometries, a creative force acts akin to the poets’ μέλος, that is, to their skillful use of words, harmony, and rhythm. Hence, in this very general meaning, ‘poet’ refers to all craftsmen [artefice] and all makers of something unprecedented. In this sense, [Plato] called the maker of the world a ‘poet’, and his great follower Plotin called Providence the ‘worldly poet.’ In fact, the former made the world and the latter continues to make unprecedented things in the world. Hence, ‘poetry’ means creation [the making of such things], ‘poem’ means its product, and ‘poetic’ the art of creation. (Patrizi 1969, Vol. 2, 272)30  “Tale ingegno, adunque, e tal furore […], ricerca Democrito e Horatio in un poeta che voglia esser eccellente e degno di cotanto nome. Ma in che maniera nel poeta e l’uno e l’altro si venga a fare noi nel nostro corso il vedremo, se avertiremo prima che tutto questo universo corporeo è animato e retto da un’anima ragionevole e eterna, et che parimente i bassi elementi sono mossi e agitati da simili anime; et che questo ciel della Luna sia del medesimo modo animato, e ancor quello di Mercurio, e quel di Venere, del Sole, di Marte, di Giove, di Saturno, e finalmente lo Stellato habbiano ciascuno l’anima sua ragionevole, appartata da quella de gli altri. Le quale otto anime delle otto sfere celesti, e quella dell’universo chiamarono gli huomini savi del nostro mondo Muse, prendendo cotal nome dalla musica e dall’armonia soavissima che causano i cieli, mossi dalle predette anime e dall’universale, la quale tutte l’altre governa e tempera […].” 30  “Adunque, per questo così generale significato, poeta sarà ogni artefice e ogni facitor di cosa che non più sia stata, secondo che nel Timeo [Platone] chiamò poeta il facitor del mondo, e Plotino, il grande, suo seguace, poeta mondano chiamò la providenza, perché quelli fece il mondo, e questa tuttavia nel mondo fa cose non state prima. E poesia sarà facitura di cosa tale e poema ogni opera così fatta, e poetica l’arte di farla.” 29

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Patrizi’s case shows the proximity between literary theory and cosmology turning about the concept of ποίησις, a concept whose meaning ranged from making and production to creation and poetical composition. In various ways, scholars such as Cardano, Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo considered natural order and geometries as the mobile expression of inner forces, just as most prominent literary critics such as Patrizi and Scaliger treated the poet’s creativity as the unfolding of inner tendencies akin to those of nature. In other words, poetical creation was explained by analogy with natural and divine creation and vice versa; natural and divine creation was made accessible through the human experience of creativity. Furthermore, the Renaissance reflection on literature emphasized expressiveness, just like the art of mechanics emphasized the processes of production rather than static artificial objects (Omodeo and Renn 2015, 135–137). Art was thus reflected in its dynamics, while nature was regarded as the artistic drive forging and forming the world from the inside according to mathematical proportions. In Kepler’s astronomy, the geometries of planetary orbits are the mobile products of inner forces. According to him, “orbit” refers to the path together with its physical causes, expressed as physical laws (Goldstein and Hon 2005, 76). In this “physicalization of mathematics”31 the shape and the speed of astronomical motions depend on the force emanating from the Sun, that is, on the physical cause of geometrical effects (Wilson 1968). Inquiry into the inner causes of mathematical phenomena in nature was at the basis of Galileo’s writings on dynamics and cosmology. In his experiments on projectile trajectories, he carried out exact measurements in order to demonstrate that such trajectories produce parabolas with the same shape as a hanging chain (Renn et al. 2001). The discrepancy of the measurement with such a theoretical assumption did not induce Galileo to abandon his theory. Rather, he accounted for the discrepancy by referring to what I would call an onto-epistemology of contingency. According to this view, the natural production of mathematical structures is affected by processes in which materiality introduces a deviation from geometrical perfection (Omodeo and Renn 2015, 139–144). The same leitmotif can be found in Galileo’s cosmogony. In his early work De motu [On Motion], Galileo pointed out cosmological contingency, referred to it as a sign of Divine Providence, and contrasted it with chance: Now, so far as I have read, no other reason for the existing arrangement is adduced by the philosophers than that everything must be disposed in some arrangement, and that it has pleased Providence on high to employ this arrangement. […] Yet, if we look at the matter more carefully, surely we shall not have to conclude that nature was under no necessity in this arrangement, and obtained no advantage from it, and that she somehow operated solely according to whim and chance. Since I believed that it was impossible to entertain such a  Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris give important clues about the epistemology underlying the physicalization of mathematics in Early Modernity (Gal and Chen-Morris 2013, Chap. 4). On the move toward a physicalization of mathematics, also see Schuster (2013, 56).

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view about provident nature, I anxiously sought from time to time to think of some cause, if not necessary, at least reasonable and useful. And, in truth I have found that nature chose the existing arrangement with complete justice and with consummate wisdom. (Galilei 1960, 14–15)32

He assumed that the speed of the planets around the Sun was reached after a free fall produced by the divine artifex and that free fall is accelerated, whereas circular motion’s velocity is uniform. Resting on those premises, in the Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo [Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems] (1632), Galileo tried to calculate the height from which God threw the celestial bodies at the moment of the creation of the Copernican system. For his computations, he used Kepler’s planetary periods, derived from the Mysterium cosmographicum, and applied his own law of free fall (Büttner 2001). In spite of the lack of perfect agreement between observation and computation, Galileo was satisfied with the result to the extent that he celebrated his “Platonic” experiment in the Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze [Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences] (1638): Sagredo: […] This conception is truly worthy of Plato; and it is to be all the more highly prized since its underlying principles remained hidden until discovered by our Author who removed from them the mask and poetical dress and set forth the idea in correct historical perspective. In view of the fact that astronomical science furnishes us such complete information concerning the size of the planetary orbits, the distances of these bodies from their centers of revolution, and their velocities, I cannot help thinking that our Author (to whom this idea of Plato was not unknown) had some curiosity to discover whether or not a definite “sublimity” might be assigned to each planet, such that, if it were to start from rest at this particular height and to fall with naturally accelerated motion along a straight line, and were later to change the speed thus acquired into uniform motion, the size of its orbit and its period of revolution would be those actually observed. Salviati: I think I remember his having told me that he once made the computation and found a satisfactory correspondence with observation. But he did not wish to speak of it, lest in view of the odium which his many new discoveries had already brought upon him, this might be adding fuel to the fire. But if any one desires such information he can obtain it for himself from the theory set forth in the present treatment. (Galilei 1914, 261–262)33

 “Huius distributionis non alia, quod legerim, a philosophis affertur causa, nisi quod in aliquem ordinem erant cuncta disponenda, placuit autem Summae Providentiae in hunc distribuere. […] Attamen, si rem accuratius spectemus, non erit profecto existimandum, nullam in tali distributione necessitatem aut utilitatem habuisse naturam, sed solum ad libitum et casu quodammodo operatam esse. Hoc cum provida natura nullo pacto existimari posse perpenderem, interdum anxius fui in excogitanda, nisi necessaria saltem congruente ac utili, aliqua causa: ac profecto, non nisi optimo iure summaque prudentia hunc elegisse ordinem naturam, comperi.” 33  “Sagr. […] Il concetto è veramente degno di Platone; ed è tanto più da stimarsi, quanto i fondamenti taciuti da quello e scoperti dal nostro Autore, con levargli la maschera o sembianza poetica, lo scuoprono in aspetto di verace istoria. E mi pare assai credibile, che avendo noi per le dottrine astronomiche assai competente notizia delle grandezze de gli orbi de i pianeti e delle distanze loro dal centro intorno al quale si raggirano, come ancora delle loro velocità, possa il nostro Autore (al quale il concetto Platonico non era ascosto) aver tal volta per sua curiosità auto pensiero d’andare 32

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Although Galileo boasted he had discovered the truth underlying Plato’s myth, the passage from scientia poetica to a mechanic account of the formation of the solar system keeps the central idea that the phenomena should be explained through their inner causes and that the latter realize their effects in a contingent manner – in both senses of contingency, that is, as refers to the whole and to the parts.

5.5  Conclusion In recent years the attention of scholars of early modern science has been increasingly led by the question about the role in the “Scientific Revolution” of such figures as “scientist-engineers” (Lefèvre 2001 and Valleriani 2010) and “artisan-­ practitioners” (Long 2011), of the “artisanal experience of matter and nature” (Smith 2004) and the various dimensions of “practical knowledge” (Valleriani 2017). In this essay, I have brought into focus the epistemological and ontological conceptions underlying Renaissance conceptualizations of practical knowledge. The attention to practical experience and the juncture of theory and practice in different arts – architecture, mechanics, medicine, and even poetry – led to a dynamic view of nature and knowledge. We could call this early modern perspective on practice and knowledge a “praxeology,” as the cornerstone of such a philosophy of science was contingency, seen as the central category for both an ontology and epistemology taking into account practical experience and generalizing it to the level of a world picture. Medieval authors such as Aquinas and Scotus dealt with natural contingency as the corollary of Christian theology and ethics, namely, an ethics of responsibility and moral improvement. During the Renaissance, the social and epistemological rise of the practical arts led to an enlargement of the medieval discourse on contingency from the theological and ethical realms to the technical, artisanal, and artistic spheres. In many cases, the articulation of practical knowledge and epistemology was germinal and not fully developed, as was the case in writings by authors in architecture and mechanics such as Lorini, Tartaglia, and Del Monte. A liminal scholar such as Cardano, working at the intersection of philosophical literacy and medical and technical practice, developed an articulated reflection on practical knowledge, putting at its center inventiveness and creativity. Similar concerns about the epistemological status of creativity were crucial in Renaissance theories of poetry, for instance, in the works of Scaliger and Patrizi, whose reflection investigando se si potesse assegnare una determinata sublimità, dalla quale partendosi, come da stato di quiete, i corpi de i pianeti, e mossisi per certi spazii di moto retto e naturalmente accelerato, convertendo poi la velocità acquistata in moti equabili, si trovassero corrispondere alle grandezze de gli orbi loro e a i tempi delle loro revoluzioni. Salv. Mi par sovvenire che egli già mi dicesse, aver una volta fatto il computo, ed anco trovatolo assai acconciamente rispondere alle osservazioni, ma non averne voluto parlare, giudicando che le troppe novità da lui scoperte, che lo sdegno di molti gli hanno provocato, non accendessero nuove scintille. Ma se alcuno avrà simil desiderio, potrà per sé stesso, con la dottrina del presente trattato, sodisfare al suo gusto.”

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on poetical composition and inspiration deepened the comprehension of ingenuity and skillfulness as had been developed in connection with other arts. All of these theoretical efforts converged into a praxeology, or an onto-epistemology of contingency, according to which the inner tendencies of nature, its productive forces, and processes are akin to those revealed through experience of the arts. Finally, dynamic conceptions of the world such as the natural philosophies and cosmologies of Cusanus and Bruno brought to a universal level the intuition of contingency. Contingency can be seen as the ontological and epistemological category connecting Renaissance philosophy and practices, science, technology, and the arts, in an age in which classical divides between speculative and practical work and between episteme, technology, and artistic experience were cast into doubt and blurred.

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Scaliger, Iulius Caesar. 1994. In Poetices libri septem: Sieben Bücher über die Dichtkunst, ed. Luc Deitz and Gregor Vogt-Spira, vol. 1. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Scotus, John Duns. 1994. In Contingency and freedom: Lectura I 39, ed. Anthonie Vos Jaczn et al. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Tartaglia, Niccolò. 1558. La nova scientia. Vinegia: per Curtio Troiano. Thomas Aquinas 1982: Thomas von Aquin, Summe gegen die Heiden, 2. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Engl. Trans., Summa contra gentiles, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Varchi, Benedetto. 1827. Varchi, Questione sull’alchimia: Codice inedito. Florence: Stamperia Magheri.

Secondary Büttner, Jochen. 2001. Galileo’s Cosmogony. In Largo campo di filosofare. Eurosymposium Galileo 2001, ed. José Montesinos and Carlos Solís, 391–402. La Orotava: Fundación Canaria Orotava de Historia de la Ciencia. Cassirer, Ernst. 1927. Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner. Gal, Ofer, and Raz Chen-Morris. 2013. Baroque Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Giordano Bruno, Opera latine conscripta, vol. I.1 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1962). Goldstein, Bernard R., and Giora Hon. 2005. Kepler’s Move from Orbs to Orbits: Documenting a Revolutionary Scientific Concept. Perspectives on Science 13 (1): 74–111. Hathaway, Baxter. 1962. The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kappl, Brigitte. 2006. Die Poetik des Aristoteles in der Dichtungstheorie des Cinquecento. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Koyré, Alexandre. 1957. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Kusukawa, Sachiko. 1995. The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lefèvre, Wolfgang. 1978. Naturtheorie und Produktionsweise, Probleme einer materialistischen Wissenschaftsgeschichtsschreibung: Eine Studie zur Genese der neuzeitlichen Naturwissenschaft. Darmstadt-Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand. ———. 2001. Galileo Engineer: Art and Modern Science. In Galileo in Context, ed. Jürgen Renn, 11–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Long, Pamela O. 2011. Artisan/practitioners and the rise of the new science, 1400–1600. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 2013. Kontingenz und Recht: Rechtstheorie im interdisziplinären Zusammenhang. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Mammola, Simone. 2012. La ragione e l’incertezza: Filosofia e medicina nella prima età moderna. Milano: Franco Angeli. Markschies, Christoph. 2016. “Providence leaves no real room to fortuna:” Vom Zufall bei Augustinus. In Contingentia: Transformationen des Zufalls, ed. Hartmut Böhme, Werner Röcke, and Ulrike C.A. Stephan, 39–50. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Omodeo, Pietro Daniel, and Jürgen Renn. 2015. Das Prinzip Kontingenz in der Naturwissenschaft der Renaissance. In Contingentia: Transformationen des Zufalls, ed. Hartmut Böhme, Werner Röcke, and Ulrike Stephan, 115–148. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Renn, Jürgen, Peter Damerow, and Simone Rieger. 2001. Hunting the White Elephant: When and How did Galileo Discover the Law of Fall? In Galileo in Context, ed. Jürgen Renn, 29–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rossi, Paolo. 1977. La negazione delle sfere e l’astrobiologia di Francesco Patrizi. In Il Rinascimento nelle corti padane: Società e cultura, ed. Paolo Rossi, 401–439. Bari: De Donato. ———. 2001. The Birth of Modern Science. Oxford: Blackwell. Schepers, Heinrich. 1965. Zum Problem der Kontingenz bei Leibniz: Die beste der möglichen Welten. In Collegium Philosophicum: Studien Joachim Ritter zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Ernst-­ Wolfgang Böckenförde, 326–350. Basle-Stuttgart: Schwabe. Schmitt, Arbogast. 2002. La Poetica di Aristotele e la sua reinterpretazione nella teoria poetica del Secondo Cinquecento. In La poetica di Aristotele e la sua storia: Atti della giornata internazionale di studio organizzata dal seminario di greco in memoria die Viviana Cessi (Pavia, 22 febbraio 2002), ed. Diego Lanza, 31–44. Pisa: Edizioni ETS. Schuster, John. 2013. Descartes-Agonistes: Physico-mathematics, Method & Corpuscular-­ Mechanism 1618–33. Dordrecht: Springer. Secchi, Pietro. 2006. “Del mar più che del ciel amante:” Bruno e Cusano. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Seidengart, Jean. 2006. Dieu, l’univers et la sphère infinie: Penser l’infinité cosmique à l’aube de la science classique. Paris: Éditions Albin Michel. Smith, Pamela. 2004. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Temkin, Owsei. 1973. Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Valleriani, Matteo. 2010. Galileo Engineer. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2013. Metallurgy, Ballistics and Epistemic Instruments: The Nova scientia of Nicolò Tartaglia. Berlin: Edition Open Access. ———. 2017. Practical Knowledge. Boston: Springer. Vogt, Peter. 2011. Kontingenz und Zufall: Eine Ideen- und Begriffsgeschichte. Berlin: Akademie. Weinberg, Bernard. 1961. A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Wilson, Curtis A. 1968. Kepler’s Derivation of the Elliptical Path. Isis 59 (1): 4–25.

Chapter 6

“Qualis alio modo reperiri non potest.” A Few Words on Copernican Necessity Jonathan N. Regier

I will examine what counts as necessary in the Copernican world, primarily as presented in Book I of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543). In doing so, I will consider how Copernicus offers his system as an idea mundi, such that the intellectual vision of the astronomer converges with the divine vision of necessity. My reading here owes a particular debt to Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514–1574) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and to the astronomical frontispieces of Oronce Fine (1494– 1555). I also ask what necessities Copernican astronomy imposes on material bodies. I argue that Copernicus presents matter as perfect—perfectly incarnating geometry—at the cosmographical-astronomical scale. Material contingency, for him, arises only at smaller scales. My analysis of these issues extends to numerous points within Copernicus’s context and within the sixteenth-century reception of his work.

6.1  Introduction The title of this article comes from Book I of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543). In Chap. 10, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) gives a summary of the new celestial order: the Earth and other planets circle the Sun, which stands immobile at the center of the world. “In this arrangement,” writes Copernicus, “we discover a marvelous symmetry of the universe, and an established harmonious linkage between the motion of the spheres and their size, such as can be found in no other way (qualis alio modo reperiri non potest).”1 This such as can be found in no other  Copernicus (1978, 22). Copernicus (1543, ff. 9v–10r).

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way is perhaps as close as Copernicus comes to a global claim for necessity—a claim for why his ordering of the planets is necessary over and above the others. It might be useful to summarize what he means here. In Ptolemaic mathematical astronomy, the planets were modeled individually. If an astronomer changed the distance of a particular planet from the Earth, he would be under no obligation to adjust any of the other planetary distances.2 In this sense, Mercury could be made the outermost planet, as long as it was also granted extraordinary fleetness. The traditional ordering of the planets, says Copernicus, was assumed according to optical principles: the farther a body from an observer, the slower it seems to move. But if we allow for a moving Earth, he continues, we can establish the planetary order with certainty. He means that, presupposing a moving Earth, the astronomer can calculate planetary distances using the Earth-Sun radius as a common measure3 (the word “symmetria” refers to this network of proportions4). In turn, it can be shown with certainty that the slower a planet, the greater its distance from the center. The agreement of distance and period is that “linkage of harmony” (nexus harmoniae) to which Copernicus refers. Why he felt symmetry and harmony to be a principle advantage of his system has remained open for debate.5 For the moment, we should recall that Book I also presents another necessity: celestial orbs must rotate uniformly. Copernicus is here railing against the equant, the Ptolemaic device for modeling the variable speed of a planet as it turns around its center. Any non uniformity, says Copernicus, would be caused by inconstancy (inconstantia) exerted from within or without the moving body. He flatly concludes that it would be inappropriate (indignum) to impute such inconstancy to the celestial bodies, “objects constituted in the best order.”6 The theme of this volume offers an opportunity to consider what is necessary in Copernican philosophy, by which I mean that amalgam of astronomical and physical speculation laid out in Book I of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. In turn, we can ask what counts as contingency. This line of questioning can give additional perspective on one of the critical issues in Book I, namely, the relationship between mathematical reasoning and physical reasoning. I will argue that Copernicus makes the sweeping eye of the mathematician—of the astronomer and cosmographer— converge with the divine eye of necessity. Copernican appeals to symmetry and  Neugebauer (1975, 146).  Copernicus used parallax for distance calculations. See Swerdlow and Neugebauer (1984, 232– 271). For a discussion of the Copernican distances in light of Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses (of which Copernicus, like all sixteenth-century European astronomers, was unaware), see Ibid., 472–479. 4  According to Giora Hon and Bernard Goldstein, Copernicus used symmetria in the Vitruvian sense, as the fitting proportion between parts and between parts and whole. Hon and Goldstein (2008, 157–163). Mehl prefers to read symmetria as commensurability between celestial motions. Mehl (2016). 5  Robert Westman has made certainty of planetary distances the underlying motivation for Copernicus. For Westman, Copernicus wished to establish such certainty in order to shore up astrology against attacks from Pico della Mirandola. Westman (2011). 6  Copernicus (1978, 11). Copernicus (1543, f. 3r). 2 3

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uniformity are best understood in this sense, as features of the idea mundi. If there is any truly necessary point of physical necessity, it is that matter must coalesce into perfect spheres at the astronomical and cosmographical scale. The operative word here is “scale.” Nature follows its perfect order at large scales, where geometrical form dominates. As one zooms into a landscape, contingencies appear. This is not a question of coarse-graining. Copernicus seems committed to transferring the ancient perfection of celestial matter to the elements, so long as we consider them from the divine perspective. Finally, I will briefly touch upon animism or vitalism in De revolutionibus, since early Copernicans attempted to build a Copernican physics wherein life—the vitality of celestial bodies—was a necessary principle. Throughout the study, I will pay special attention to Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514–1574) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) for help with interpretation.

6.2  Symmetry, Uniformity, and the idea mundi The question of certainty and uncertainty is in the marrow of the Copernican corpus, as well as in the historiography of Copernican astronomy and its reception. Most readers, past and present, take him to believe in the truth of his system. But belief and truth are a matter of degree. And Copernicus was aware that he could not prove the reality of terrestrial movement but only show it plausible and preferable.7 This begs the question of what he wished to accomplish with his physical arguments in Book I. Thomas Kuhn thought that they were a half-hearted attempt to clear space for his astronomy, to show that terrestrial immobility was not necessary and mobility therefore possible.8 More recent appraisals have reconsidered the text both for its internal logic and within its wider context of natural philosophy and mixed mathematics.9 The longest shadow cast over the landscape of Copernican historiography must be Pierre Duhem’s, for it was Duhem who first systematically explored disciplinary tensions in which the Copernican invention appeared. In his Sauver les apparances (1908), he presents a history of astronomy from the Greeks to Galileo driven by tension between two camps we can refer to as instrumentalist and realist.10 The first camp was constituted by thinkers who saw astronomy as a geometrical practice, employing a minimum number of physical principles. Its goal was to “save the 7  As Noel Swerdlow puts it, “He was in the situation—not infrequent in the sciences, in scholarship, in law—of being certain that he was right, but lacking conclusive proof.” Swerdlow and Neugebauer (1984, 21). 8  Ibid., 144–45. 9  For a review of Copernicus’s physical ideas and their Scholastic precedents, see Omodeo (2014, 197–233). For the humanist side of Copernicus’s physical ideas, see Knox (2005). For an overview of Copernicus’s sources, see Goddu (2010). For a comprehensive analysis of the internal logic of Book I, see Szczeciniarz (1998). 10  Duhem (2004 [1908]).

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appearances,” that is, to reproduce the heavenly motions. This position was set out by the Greeks. The second camp insisted that astronomical motions must correspond to real bodies. Members of this latter camp wanted astronomy tied to physics. Sometimes they set astronomy backward, ossifying theory. Sometimes, in thinkers like Kepler and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), they advanced science through their stubbornness, delusion, brilliance, and good luck. Duhem’s own instrumentalism is well known, so it comes as no surprise that he believes the Greeks had it right (so far as he interprets them), and he traces their scientific attitude—their preference for mathematics and physical parsimony—as it is passed from Posidonius to Simplicius, by way of Geminus, Ptolemy, and Proclus.11 In Duhem’s narrative, the correct balance between mathematical invention and physical constraint was then upset by Arabic philosophers, literalists who read Aristotle to the letter. Duhem’s account of Arabic astronomy is the weakest point of the volume and a regrettable piece of Orientalism. In any case, he has medieval Catholic schoolmen in Paris, Aquinas, and Bonaventure, setting things aright. Latin Averroists continued to exert influence into the sixteenth century, however. From their base at the University of Padua, they tried to construct a properly Aristotelian, homocentric astronomy. Duhem places Copernicus as a disciple of these Averroists, demanding that astronomy satisfy homocentricism and uniform motion.12 Duhem has Copernicus first experimenting with the Earth’s movement as a fictitious hypothesis and then adopting it as the truth. This is how Copernicus himself describes his path. By Duhem’s logic, Copernicus only errs when fiction becomes reality. Thanks to recent scholarly work, we know that thoroughgoing instrumentalists or fictionalists (to use what is no doubt a problematic and anachronistic set of terms) were rare among sixteenth-century astronomers.13 Most astronomers took the orbs to be real in some sense, as did Copernicus. But while there is little doubt that Copernicus thought celestial orbs were real, it is difficult to say what exactly they were for him. Noel Swerdlow has made the strongest case for solid spheres. He shows that early on, Copernicus was aware of the geo-heliocentric option (usually referred to as the Tychonic system, after its subsequent champion, Tycho Brahe). In this system, the Earth remains immobile and central. The planets circle the Sun, which in turn circles the Earth. Swedlow argues that Copernicus rejected the Tychonic system because Mars, near its perigee, clips the Sun’s orb, an intersection impossible to reproduce with solid spheres. So, Swedlow concludes, Copernicus adopted the heliocentric system because it was amenable to Peurbach-type orbs.14  Ibid. 89–90.  “Copernic conçoit le problème astronomique comme le conçoivent les physiciens italiens dont il a été l’auditeur ou le condisciple; ce problème consiste à sauver les apparences au moyen d’hypothèses conformes aux principes de la Physique. […].” Ibid., 84. 13  See Barker and Goldstein (1998); Shank (2002); Barker (2011). 14  Swerdlow relies on his discovery of a page of notes, handwritten by Copernicus, in a manuscript held by the Library of Uppsala. As mentioned, these notes show Copernicus working through calculations for what would become the Commentariolus. Swerdlow (1973). 11 12

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In other words, the orbs reflected a physical necessity that set bounds on mathematical possibility.15 Other prominent historians have made equally strong arguments that solid orbs were not a Copernican necessity.16 In a note to the second edition (1621) of the Mysterium cosmographicum, Johannes Kepler says that Copernicus never believed in adamantine spheres (corpulentia adamantina). Not even Ptolemy, he continues, had entertained such a monstrous concept.17 This 1621 note is confusing on the historical front, because it contradicts earlier pronouncements. Twenty years earlier in his Apologia pro Tychone contra Ursum (c. 1600), Kepler had stated that Copernicus had never envisioned a mixed model like Brahe’s: the possibility of the Sun going around the Earth, and the planets around the Sun, would have been unfathomable to Copernicus, who “believed in the reality of the orbs.”18 Likewise, in the Astronomia nova (1609), Kepler had written that Copernicus had required uniform motion because of solid spheres (orbis solidus).19 Had Kepler changed his mind by 1621? Maybe. But what he implies in the 1621 note is that he had always taken Copernicus to posit the spheres as a spatium geometricum orbium.20 The spheres should be just thick enough for all the necessary geometrical demonstrations to fit.21 It would be worth citing  In several articles, Edward Rosen reacted violently against Swerdlow’s argument. For Rosen’s Copernicus, planetary orbs are hollow, mutually penetrable, and intersecting. Rosen (1976, 302). 16  Nicholas Jardine asks how Copernicus’s earth, surrounded by air, could attach to a solid orb. Jardine prefers to see the orbs as impenetrable and non solid. Jardine (1982, 177). Edward Grant has written that there was no explicit rule during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as to the exact qualities of the celestial orbs. Their solidity or fluidity was never a “genuine issue,” although they were certainly corporeal. Copernicus, according to Grant, fits very well within the medieval mold, insofar as he does not present his “explicit opinions about the rigidity or fluidity of the orbs” Grant (1987, 172–173). Grant’s observation seems backed up by the fact that Copernicus never employs the word “solidus” to describe sphaerae or orbes. The celestial spheres were often described as crystalline in medieval philosophy, but according to Goldstein and Barker, “crystalline” was meant primarily to convey that the spheres had crystal’s transparency. Goldstein and Barker (1995, 392). 17  KGW viii, 84, n.1. 18  Jardine (1984, 70). 19  KGW iii, 73: “Ergo idem orbis solidus (quos opinatur COPERNICVS) in quo haeret PIaneta, tardus est, cum Planeta orbe vectus incedit ex D in E [apogee to a point in the nearest quadrant]; velox, cum it ex E in F [to perigee]. Totus ergo orbis solidus jam velox jam tardus est. Quod COPERNICVS ut absurdum rejicit.” Swerdlow marshals both this passage and the passage from Kepler’s Apologia for support, in Swerdlow (1976, 131–132). 20  KGW viii, 84 (n. 1): “Nostris Philosophis assentitur COPERNICVS. Intellige de spatio Orbium Geometrico: de materia enim, hoc est, de corpulentia adamantina ne PTOLEMAEVS quidem adeo crasse philosophatur.” 21  “So let us come now to our principal subject. It is known that the planetary paths are eccentric. And hence the received judgment among natural philosophers (physicis), which establishes that the orbs be as thick as is required for the demonstrated variety of movements. And so far as this, Copernicus agrees with our philosophers.” KGW i, 47: “Igitur vt ad principale propositum veniamus: notum est, vias planetarum esse eccentricas: et proinde recepta physicis sententia, quòd obtineant orbes tantam crassitiem, quanta ad demonstrandas motuum varietates requiritur. Et hactenus quidem nostris Philosophis assentitur COPERNICVS.” 15

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another quote from the Mysterium, this time from the text of the Mysterium’s first edition (1596), where Kepler says that Copernican orbs cannot be contiguous, because then they would have to be monstrous: “[…] it is seen that in Copernicus no orb is tangent to another but there are immense intervals assuredly filled with a celestial air, which attach to neither of the two neighboring systems.”22 There is often an ambiguity about orbs and spheres in the Renaissance. Are they mathematical or physical, fluid or hard? Kepler preserves “orbis” to describe the paths taken by planets as they are driven by the Sun. He never cleanses the term entirely of its solid-sphere connotations. One such connotation is thickness. Kepler’s model in the Mysterium works, in part, by ascribing a purely geometrical thickness to the planetary spheres: “I give to the orbs themselves as much thickness as is required by the ascent and descent of the planet.”23 This thickness, the difference between apogee and perigee is simply a mathematical object, a certain quantity. Although Kepler rejects solid spheres, he underlines their architectural sense: the planetary orbs with their relative distances set by the Platonic solids constitute the idea mundi fixed in the divine mind.24 Kepler’s orbs are also, it goes without saying, as stable as the most perfect façade: the relationship between Sun and planet is one-­ way, and the planets do not influence one another, so there is no perturbation in the modern sense. Unlike Newtonian orbits, they do not degrade. Their architectural nature should remind us of Kepler’s hefty drawing of the polyhedra in the Mysterium, where they form what looks like a marble sculture too heavy to ever move from the garden. For Kepler, the most compelling feature of Copernican astronomy was not uniformity. Not at all, in fact, since he would embrace non uniform motion as proof that the sun acted as a motor on the planets.25 Instead, Kepler was obsessed with Copernican symmetria. The central claim of the Mysterium is that Copernican planetary distances manifest the divine order of a mathematical creator. Given that the planetary distances could be known with certainty (as proportions of the Earth-Sun radius), Kepler wanted to understand why these distances were expressed instead of others. What made them necessary? His solution was that they expressed proportions inherent in the Platonic solids, polyhedra that held a place of privilege in the Timaeus (which Copernicus cites at least once26) and in Euclid’s Elements. Kepler believed the Timaeus to be a work of the highest philosophical and religious significance, and his own take on a mathematical God and the idea mundi is drawn  Here is the quote in its fuller context. KGW i, 48: “Quae haec Naturae luxuries? Quam inepta? Quam inutilis? Quam minime ipsi vsitata? Atque ex hoc videre est, in COPERNICO nullum orbem ab alio tangi, sed ingentia relinqui systematum interualla vtique plena coelesti aura, sed ad neutrum tamen propinquorum systematum pertinentia.” 23  KGW i, 48: “Orbibus ipsis tantam relinquo crassitiem, quantam requirit ascensus descensusque planetae […]” 24  For the idea mundi in the Mysterium cosmographicum, see KGW i, 23–26. Kepler uses the variant spelling “idaea.” 25  From the Mysterium onward, he believed that planets slowed as they grew further from the Sun because the Sun exerted a force that weakened with distance. He turned this intuition into a principle of his celestial physics. 26  Knox (2002, 403–405). 22

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from it. The polyhedral hypothesis can be read as a response to the dedication and first book of De revolutionibus, and especially to Rheticus’s Narratio prima (Danzig: 1540), which was appended to both editions of the Mysterium. The Narratio, appearing 3 years before De revolutionibus, was the first published explanation of Copernican astronomy. Because Rheticus composed it while staying in Frauenburg as Copernicus’s guest, we can assume that his presentation is more or less in keeping with his master’s opinion. In the treatise, Rheticus presents “the admirable symmetry and interconnection of the motions and spheres preserved by the aforementioned hypotheses,” using the same language later found in De revolutionibus, namely, “admiranda symmetria” and “nexus.” He notes that these features are really best understood not via language but by an immediate comprehension of the mind: “not so much by words as by the perfect and absolute ideas, if I may use the term, of these most delightful objects.”27 Such appeals to the divine idea mundi, acute in the work of Kepler and as a visual motif in seventeenth-century astronomical books,28 are not exotic in the first half of the sixteenth century. We might consider the dedication to Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples’s (c. 1450–1536) 1517 introduction to astronomy, which Duhem notes and approves of for its view of astronomical hypotheses as fictions.29 Lefèvre d’Étaples says that mathematical astronomy is a results-oriented affair of imagination. Yet imagination is not equivalent to unreality or fantasy, as Duhem takes it, but rather operates as the link between sense and reason, as it generally did in the Renaissance. Lefèvre d’Étaples emphasizes similarity and imitation: astronomical practice is an imitation of divine creation, and so its products are copies or likenesses of real things. The language, especially the use “effictus” and “simulacrum,” is highly redolent of Cicero’s partial translation of the Timaeus, the Liber de universitate ex Timaeo Platonis30: For this part of astronomy is almost entirely imaginative and productive. And not otherwise than the wisest and best artisan, through the workings of his divine mind, created the real heavens and real motions, our mind, emulating the father (whenever our fault of ignorance is wiped away slightly) brings forth copied heavens (effictos ceolos) and copied motions (effictos motus) and within them certain simulacra of the true motions, as it seizes the truth within traces of the workings of the divine mind. The mind of the astronomer, then, when it carefully depicts (effingit) the heavens and motions of the heavens, resembles the artist of [all] things creating the heavens and motions of the heavens. […] The mind then resembles the eye in which the ethereal orbs and motions of the orbs are represented without confusion.31  Copernicus and Rheticus (1959, 145). KGW i, 104 (this is the Latin reprinting of the Narratio appended to the first edition of the Mysterium cosmographicum). 28  See Söderlund (2010, 177–187). 29  Lefèvre d’Étaples (1517). Duhem (2004, 66). 30  See sections 6–8 of Cicero (1977). De universitate was first printed in 1485 in a volume including De fato and Topica, with commentary by Giorgio Valla. De universitate was reprinted a handful of times in the sixteenth century. 31  “Nam haec astrologiae pars: tota ferme imaginaria effectrixque est. Et haud secus quod rerum sapientissimus optimusque opifex veros coelos & veros motus divinae mentis opificio producit: mens nostra sui semper aemula parentis (cum ignorantiae labes plusculum detergitur) effictos coelos effictosque motus intra se profert verorumque motuum simulachra quaedam in quibus ut in vestigiis divinae mentis opificii depraehendit veritatem. Est igitur astronomi mens cum coelos 27

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Both Copernicus and Rheticus suggest the possibility for convergence between the mens astronomi and the divine intellect or the divine perspective. In the Copernican scheme, there are two accurate points of view, where an observation coincides with real motions through space. The first is from the center of the mundus. The second is from outside the system, where the entire world is taken in at once. In this, the Copernican system is not unique from geocentric astronomy. The difference comes into play when we, the observers, are set moving. Copernicus frames earthly movement as a virtue rather than a liability. To be locked into place, even at the center, makes knowledge of planetary distance impossible—the conclusions achieved by Copernicus in Book V, relying on measured parallax, would be impossible. Unfortunately, while motion brings understanding, it also distorts our sight. Therefore, if we want an ideal picture of the universe—one that provides an accurate vision of distance and motion—it must be the intellectual vision that an astronomer reaches only after observation, calculation, and reflection. It is the diagrammatic view, and it is the vision closest to God’s own appreciation of his handiwork, as Copernicus suggests in his dedication to the Pope (now remembered for his commissions of Michelangelo).32 There is a long-running question of whether Platonic philosophy played a decisive role in Copernicus’s work.33 The link between astronomy and the divine is found in both Aristotelian34 and Platonic philosophy and is expressed clearly in the Almagest, in a famous passage where the symmetry (συμμετρία) of the heavens is associated with God, a passage that Copernicus clearly echoes.35 I would simply like to point out that in Copernicus, the mathematical understanding of the astronomer takes precedence over physical questions, specifically those of efficient and material cause. We could say that the imago mundi leads to the idea mundi, such that the diagrammatic puts the astronomer in direct contact with the necessity of the ideal. For an illustration (literally) of this point, we might consider Oronce Fine’s (1494–1555) frontispiece for a 1515 edition of Georg von Peuerbach’s Theoricarum novarum textus (Fig. 6.1).36 Ptolemy is staring up through an astrolabe. coelorumque motus gnaviter effingit: similis rerum opifici coelos coelorumque motus creanti. […] Iterum mens similis est oculo in quo aetherei orbes orbiumque motus sine confusione repraesentantur.” Lefèvre d’Étaples (1517, f. a1v). Duhem provides a problematic translation of the above text. Besides his anachronistic reading of “imaginary,” the main problem is that he translates “effictus” as “fictif.” This is a stretch, as “effictus” usually refers to a copy taken from life, as in a portrait. 32  For more on the humanist themes at play in Copernicus’s preface dedicated to the Pope, see Westman (2011, 133–40). 33  On Copernicus’s reading of Ficino, see Knox (2002) and Goddu (2010, 225–229). Anna de Pace argues for the decisive influence of Platonic philosophy on Copernicus in De Pace (2009). I was unable to consult her volume during the writing of this article. Also see Vesel (2014, 306–338). 34  “[…] dans la perspective de la théologie astrale qu’Aristote développe dans le De philosophia et qui demeurera, encore qu’épurée, le fondement de toute sa spéculation théologique, l’astronomie nous fournit une expérience immédiate du divin; elle représente, si l’on peut ainsi parler, l’aspect expérimental de la théologie” (Aubenque 1962, 329). 35  Ptolemy (1984, 37). 36  Peuerbach (1515, f. 1v).

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Fig. 6.1  Georg von Peuerbach, Theoricarum novarum textus Georgii Purbachii cum… expositione Domini Francisci Capuani (Paris: Michael Lesclencher, 1515), f. 1v. Courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek * B&W frontispiece in copy held by Bayerische StaatsBibliothek http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb10196228_00010.html

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Astrologia, at far left, instructs an unnamed astronomer-astrologer. Countryside, rolling hills, and villages fold out behind them. The huge armillary sphere—Earth, zodiac, and great circles—is planted on a solid pedestal at the astronomers’ feet.37 In the image frame is a rather cryptic motto of uncertain origin: Altior incubuit animus sub imagine mundi. We might take this to mean that the superior mind reposes under the image of the world, awaiting inspiration in dreams.38 This seems to be the message of the 1527 frontispiece by Oronce Fine from his edition of Sacrobosco’s Sphaera (Fig. 6.2).39 Here a winged Mercury points to an astronomer laying in a field, in a situation of peaceful sleep or meditation. It is hard to tell whether his eyes are open or closed. His understanding of the cosmographical scheme seems to arise from celestial inspiration. Under his hand, on the ground, is what seems to be a manual with some sort of geometrical diagram. Most of the image is occupied by a massive astronomical-cosmographical diagram, showing the principle spheres. This is the imago mundi referred to in the inscription. So what about uniformity? As Copernicus says to the Pope, his first motivation was annoyance in finding a lack of certainty about the celestial motions among philosophers, given that the machina mundi was created for our sake by the best and most regular (regularissimo) creator.40 The firmest reason for uniformity provided by Copernicus is that celestial bodies can brook no inconsistency, because they are established in optima ordinatione. This is divine necessity, the necessity of the idea mundi. Copernicus is saying little more.41

6.3  Sphericity as Physical Necessity So far, we have discussed necessity from a design point of view. Yet there is a lot of physics in Book I of De revolutionibus, which begins like other works of astronomy that had come before: by establishing the sphericity of the “mundus.” In Aristotelian or Ptolemaic astronomy, a spherical shell of stars makes sense. Every day, the stars  This earth-planted sphere can also be seen in the frontispiece of Regiomontanus’s Epytoma in Almagestum Ptolomei. 38  I have followed Isabelle Pantin’s translation. She cites the Aeneid, VII, 88, where incubuit refers to the priest reposing and awaiting prophetic dreams. Pantin (2009, 69). 39  Sacrobosco (1527). 40  Copernicus (1543, f. 3r). 41  Likewise, in a wide swath of Scholastic and Renaissance thought, the necessity expressed by heavenly bodies is generally linked with their formality, regularity, predictability, and uniformity. In Book X of the Republic, Plato has all the celestial orbs turning around the spindle of necessity (ἀνάγκη). Plato (1935, 616c, 500–501). In Aristotle, the heavens are incorruptible, unwavering, and eternal. Averroes grants them necessity because they are “eternal and never fail to produce their effect.” Belo (2007, 170). As Pietro Daniel Omodeo notes in his chapter, Aquinas ascribes necessity to the celestial bodies because they are dominated by form, in contrast with sublunar matter, whose inherent mutability is the root of contingency. Such examples could be multiplied ad nauseum. 37

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Fig. 6.2 Sacrobosco, Sphaera, ed. Oronce Fine (Paris: Simon Colines, 1527). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé (BIU Santé), Paris

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must turn in a complete revolution. This movement has profound consequences in Aristotelian physics—it is the first motion and the source of time. But once we assume the Earth to rotate diurnally, there is no benefit to having the stars stuck to an orb. The necessity of a stellar sphere seems to vanish, as it would for later “heliocentrists” like Thomas Digges (c. 1546–1595) and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). Copernicus himself famously refuses to take a position on the infinity of the world, leaving the question to natural philosophers. But why? Isn’t Copernicus suggesting a great deal of natural philosophy in Book I? Yes, but it is a natural philosophy motivated almost entirely by a consideration of the Earth. All that he will say about the wider mundus is that it self-coheres: “wholes strive [appetant] to be circumscribed by this boundary, as is apparent in drops of water and other fluid bodies when they seek to be self-contained.”42 Water is an important entity here, because Copernicus makes it into an example of how matter can collect into separate spheres or local centers. Copernicus echoes Pliny: “For we see everywhere, that drops, when they hang down, assume the form of small globes (parvis globantur orbibus), and when they are covered with dust, or have the down of leaves spread over them, they are observed to be completely round […]”43 Copernicus may also have in mind Cicero in the Stoic Book II of De natura deorum. The separate celestial bodies are described by Cicero as perfect spheres held together by their nisus, a pressure or internal force. In turn, their motion is conserved because of their sphericity: “they are round, that is the shape, as I believe I remarked before, that is least capable of receiving injury.”44 Copernicus suggests the self-cohesion of celestial bodies because he wants to talk about the self-cohesion of the Earth—he wants to underline similarities between celestial and terrestrial bodies. For Aristotle and Cicero, the sphericity of heavenly bodies is of a higher order than that of the Earth. They are more perfect, more refined. Aristotle, speaking with the terminology of craftsmen, writes that the precision (ἀκρίβεια) with which the stellar sphere is rounded (ἔντορνος) utterly surpasses anything in our environment: “with each step away from earth the matter manifestly becomes finer in the same proportion as water is finer than earth.”45 Later Aristotelians also drew attention to the unearthly smoothness and perfection of the celestial spheres, which spin at high speed without a hitch.46 One of the really subversive elements of Copernican physics, however, is to make the Earth the standard of spherical perfection and so a standard of ontological perfection. Copernicus calls the Earth’s sphericity “absoluta” at two points—that is, absolute or perfect. The  Copernicus (1978, 8). Copernicus (1543, f. 1r).  Pliny (1855, II 65). Simplicius (2004, 66–68). Knox also notes the reference to Pliny and echo of Cicero. Knox (2005, 189–191). 44  “In aethere autem astra volvuntur, quae se et nisu suo conglobata continent et forma ipsa figuraque sua momenta sustentant; sunt enim rutunda, quibus formis, ut ante dixisse videor, minime noceri potest.” Cicero (1933, II 46). 45  De caelo, II 4. For Cicero, presenting the Stoic cosmos, celestial bodies are composed of a flame that is close to the living and divine fire (ignem) or pneuma. 46  For example, Oresme (1968, 440 114c). 42 43

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absoluteness or perfection of the globe is not immediately understood because of mountains and valleys, but these negligibly change its “universal rotundity” (“universam rotunditatem”).47 This geometrical perfection means, of course, that we should not deny movement to the Earth. Here it is important to note that Copernicus does not claim sphericity to cause movement. But given that spherical things turn circularly, that celestial things are spherical, and that the Earth is spherical, it follows that terrestrial movement is a possibility. Or, to put it differently, terrestrial immobility is not a necessity. But for Copernicus’s argument to work, for the Earth to be truly celestial, it is necessary that it be an absolute sphere. And this in the first half of the sixteenth century was not a foregone conclusion. Ptolemy, in I 2 of his Geography, says that the “continuous surface of land and water is (as regards its broad features) spherical and concentric with the celestial sphere.”48 Ptolemy had established this to be so in his Almagest, although without enlarging upon a rather important detail: that the elements of earth and water share the same surface. If earth and water were somehow displaced, if their spheres did not match up, then one of the spheres would be off-kilter from the world’s center. While Ptolemy’s argument makes intuitive sense for us, a shared earth-water surface does not flow naturally from Aristotle, nor would it be tenable for future writers. According to a theory widely accepted from the medieval period until the late Renaissance, the center of the earth’s sphere was offset from the water’s. The idea is a rather neat way to harmonize Aristotle and Moses: after casting the elements in the Aristotelian order, God drew the northern hemisphere out of the vast seas, leaving the southern hemisphere submerged. He thereby separated the waters, as in Genesis, allowing room for plants and animals to flourish. Without God’s continued decree, the dry part of the Earth would plop back under. Hence, earth and water shared neither the same center nor the same surface. This scheme, first expounded by Jean Buridan (1300–1358), was championed by important forces in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century natural philosophy. Among them were Pierre d’Ailly (1351–1420), Gregor Reisch (1467–1525), and Sebastian Münster (1488–1552), author of the encyclopedic Cosmographiae universalis libri IV  (first edition in German, 1544). Münster’s Cosmographia is among the most developed examples of what we might call the “nub-Earth” hypothesis. It opens with a long look at the rapport between elements, offering an interplay of geography and biblical history: According to the discourse of the holy texts, and the history of Moses, we see that the Earth at the beginning of its creation was completely covered and enclosed by the expanse of the waters, until they drew back from the expanding Earth, leaving a roomy space to men and terrestrial animals for their home and to the plants meant to serve as pasture and support to all that has life. […] From that day on, the sea has never had its natural position.  This was known long before Copernicus. Theon of Smyrna writes about it in his compendium of mathematical knowledge for reading Plato. If we scaled down the earth to the size of a foot in diameter, says Theon, the highest mountains would be smaller than one fortieth the diameter of a millet seed. 48  Ptolemy (2000, 60). 47

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Being drawn to the opposite of this terrestrial mass, it thus doubled its depth as it uncovered the Earth. This depth is called Ocean, the Holy Writ calls it “tehom”, that is, the great abyss where an infinity of waters are assembled.49

Copernicus devotes Chap. 3 of De revolutionibus—“Quomodo terra cum aqua unum globum perficiat”—to the water-earth question. His conclusion, it can be said from the outset, is that earth and water share the same center and the same surface. He explicitly refutes the “Peripatetic” argument of ten times more water than earth. He emphasizes that water, being “fluid by nature, manifestly always seeks the same lower levels as earth and pushes up from the shore no higher than its rise permits.”50 He also cites a number of contemporary discoveries, those by Spain and Portugal, and especially the discovery of America, which he attributes to Amerigo Vespucci. America, Copernicus suggests, is probably on the opposite side of the Earth from India. In short, our globe is covered by islands and continents, with no overwhelming ocean. Voyagers like Columbus and Vespucci had themselves bought into Ptolemy’s vision of the earth-water rapport, as had other cosmographers and astronomers. Peter Apian and Gemma Frisius are two good examples. Their Cosmographia,51 which rivaled Müster’s as the most influential of the sixteenth-­ century cosmography, illustrates a typical Aristotelian scheme of nested spheres, typical except for the representation of the Earth at the center, where earth and water are not separate but instead combined in land, river, and sea (Fig. 6.3). Jean-Marc Besse has drawn attention to the cutting-edge aspect of this illustration, to “the representation of the earth as a unique sphere, ontologically homogenous, composed of the elements of earth and water without interruption.”52 We can also consider the Earth in Fine’s 1515 engraving and again in the 1527 engraving. In both, the cosmological Earth as part of the imago mundi is a sphere with one continuous earth-water surface. When we ask about physical necessity for Copernicus, it comes down to sphericity. Matter must cohere into spheres that are perfect at certain scales, those of celestial movement and planetary form. At smaller scales—that of topography, for example—matter is not expected to behave with spherical regularity.  “Par le discours des sainctes lettres, et de l’histoire de Moyse, on void que la terre au commencement de sa creation estaoit toute couerte et enclose de l’estendüe des eaux, iusqu’a ce qu’elles se retirrent, partie sur la terre s’espandant, laissant neantmoins place commode aux hommes et animaux terrestres pour leur demeure, et aux plantes qui deuoyent seruir de pasture et soustien à tout ce qui a vie […] La mer donc des ce iour n’eut point sa situation naturelle, ains estant retiree en la partie opposite de ceste masse terrestre, a autaunt redoublé sa profondeur, comme elle a descouuert de la terre. Cest profondeur s’appelle Ocean, la saincte Escriture la tomme [tehom], c’est à dire, grand’ abysme: à sçauoir, où il y infinie assemblee d’eaux […]” I have cited from the French translation, Münster (1575, 6). 50  Copernicus (1978, 9). Copernicus (1543, f. 1v). 51  The work was first published by Apian as Cosmographicus liber (1524). It was expanded by Frisius, who appended to the work several of his own treatises. The Apian-Frisius Cosmographia went through many editions and translations. 52  “[…] au centre de la figure, la représentation (« paysagère ») de la Terre comme sphère unique, ontologiquement homogène, composée sans solution de la continuité des éléments de la terre et de l’eau.” Besse (2003, 16). 49

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Fig. 6.3  Peter Apian and Gemma Frisius, Cosmographia, Antwerp: Gregorius Bontius, 1550, f. 3r. Courtesy of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Local ­variations are for all purposes contingent. Tacitly, Copernicus exports this contingency to the other planetary bodies: instead of perfect spheres made of a completely smooth material, the planets become locales for possible landscapes. There is no noticeable tension between pure and practical mathematics here.53 At the scales that count—astronomical and cosmographical—matter really incarnates the geometrical ideal. Copernican necessity is captured by another illustration from Apian and Frisius’s Cosmographia (Fig. 6.4): here is the eye of the cosmographer, whose vision can overlook variations of cities, peoples, topography, and whose Earth is foremost a projection of stellar coordinates on a perfectly smooth sphere.  On this distinction, between the ideal of geometrical form and the imperfections inherent in real bodies, see section (2) of Pietro Omodeo’s contribution to this volume, Practices and Theories of Contingency in Renaissance Approaches to Nature.

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Fig. 6.4  Peter Apian and Gemma Frisius, Cosmographia, Antwerp: Gregorius Bontius, 1550, f. 1v. Courtesy of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

6.4  Toward a Natural Philosophy of the Sphere One of the main questions for Copernicus to answer was how the Earth—or any other celestial body—held together around its unique center and moved. As for gravity, Copernicus writes only that matter has a natural desire (appetentia) implanted by God. As for the relationship between gravity and movement, Copernicus writes that since the other celestial bodies have such a natural desire,

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and since they move, there should be no problem for the Earth.54 It might again be useful to mention the opinion of Kepler, one of Copernicus’s most passionate sixteenth-­century readers: Copernicus preferred to think that the earth and all terrestrial bodies (even those cast away from the earth) are informed by one and the same motive soul [anima motrice informari], which, while rotating its body the earth, also rotates those particles cast away from it. He thus held it to be this soul, spread throughout the particles, that acquires force through violent motions, while I hold that it is a corporeal faculty [facultati corporeae] (which we call gravity, or the magnetic faculty), that acquires the force in the same way, namely, through violent motions.55

How would Kepler have gotten this impression from the text of De revolutionibus? Copernicus reduces natural motion to the circular alone.56 Insofar as objects participate in the whole (universus) of a planet, they partake in its uniform circular motion. Insofar as they are fragmented (pars), they have an unnatural rectilinear motion. Circular motion is permanent, whereas rectilinear motion is temporary—in this, Copernicus removes the rectilinear from natural motion. “For when rectilinear motion brings bodies to their own place, they cease to be heavy or light, and their motion ends. Hence since circular motion belongs to wholes, but parts have rectilinear motion in addition, we can say that ‘circular’ subsists with ‘rectilinear’ as ‘being alive’ with ‘being sick.’”57 Concerning where Copernicus might have borrowed this play of health and sickness, Reijer Hooykaas has noted that the reference to health and sickness as natural and violent motions goes back to Aristotle’s Physics.58 Dwilyn Knox has demonstrated as conclusively as possible that Copernicus consulted the Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine lexicon where many ancient and now-­ lost texts are compiled. When Copernicus looked up kinesis, he found a paraphrase of Philoponus featuring a tight ensemble of ideas about natural motion that fit closely with what we see in De revolutionibus: parts striving to regain the whole, wholes striving to remain together, circular motion as stasis, and recovery of health as natural motion.59 However, that still does not answer for Kepler’s “animistic” interpretation. Copernicus actually employs the Latin animal: “Cum ergo motus ­circularis sit universorum, partium vero etiam rectus, dicere possumus manere cum recto circularem, sicut cum aegro animal.”60 Here is the animal in Kepler’s description of a facultas animalis rotating the Earth. Kepler might have seen here a validation of his own theory of an Earth soul, which he needed to explain diurnal motion, and which was crucial in his account of many terrestrial phenomena, particularly those that were astrologically induced. The cohesion of the planet, directed  Copernicus (1978, 18).  KGW iii, 28, 10–15. Kepler (1992, 58–59). 56  See Chap. 8 of Book I. Copernicus (1978, 15–17). 57  Copernicus (1978, 17). Copernicus (1543, f. 6v). 58  Hooykaas (1987). 59  Knox (2005, 205–208). 60  Copernicus (1543, f. 6v). 54 55

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t­hroughout its parts to achieve movement, for Bruno and William Gilbert (1544– 1603) paralleled the cohesion of animals. The Earth as animal gives Bruno an explanation for why matter should form local centers and why all matter does not simply rush together. For Bruno, water has a very important cohesive role in bodies—an echo of De revolutionibus, Book I.61 One of the first biological or quasi-biological interpretations of Copernican movement of which I am aware appears in François de Belleforest’s introduction to his 1575 French translation of Münster’s Cosmographiae universalis liber. Although de Belleforest was hostile to Copernicus, he manages a very sensitive account of a key passage in Book I of De revolutionibus: I do not want to pursue the question of the fixity and stability of the Earth, seeing that the holy writings put it outside of movement and enclosed under the concavity and admirable vault of the heavens. Nor do I want to put to the fore the fantastic and too insolent opinion of Copernicus, who, to show himself off as among the most skillful, wanted to contradict all philosophers and prove that the Earth is mobile and thus that its movements follow the cadence and admirable harmony of the parts of the world that circle and surround it, and that [the Earth] thus receives more conveniently [plus à son aise] the influences of celestial bodies.62

De Belleforest has in mind two sentences that follow one another in De revolutionibus I 10. The first sentence has been more or less passed over by historians, whereas the second (discussed earlier) is the most famous in all the Copernican literature: Thus indeed, as though seated on a royal throne, the sun governs the family of planets (Astrorum familiam) revolving around it. […] [1] Meanwhile the earth has intercourse with the sun, and is impregnated for its yearly parturition. [2] In this arrangement, therefore, we discover a marvelous symmetry of the universe, and an established harmonious linkage between the motion of the spheres and their size, such as can be found in no other way.63

Between sentences (1) and (2), historians have a tendency to see a rupture: as if (1) belonged to the old allegorical and (2) to the freshly mathematical. However, a clear arch runs from the noble “marriage” of the Sun and Earth to the order of the kingdom. The passage is reminiscent of Martianus Capella, whom Copernicus had  For the important cohesive role of water, see Bruno (1830, 60–62). “Oltre, che il simile si vede ne le gocce impolverate, pendenti e consistenti sopra il piano: per che l’intima anima, che comprende et è in tutte le cose, per la prima fa questa operazione, che secondo la capacità del suggetto unisce, quanto può, le parti: e non è, per che l’acqua sia o possa essere naturalmente sopra o circa la terra, più che l’umido di nostra sustanza sia sopra o circa il nostro corpo.” Ibid., 60–61. 62  “Je ne veux aussi poursuivre ce qui est de la fermeté et stabilité de la terre, voiant que l’escriture saincte mesme nous la fait hors de mouvement, et enclose sous la concauité, et voulte admirable des cieux: et ne veux mettre en auant l’opinion fantastique, et trop gaillard de Copernique, qui pour se monstrer des plus habiles, a voulu contredire à tous philosophes, et prouuer que la terre est mobile, et par consequent elle a ses mouuemens qui vont suiuant celle cadence et harmonie admirable des parties du monde qui la ceignent et entourent, et reçoit par ce moien plus à son aise les influences des corps celestes […]” See first page of Belleforest’s preface de cest oeuvre au lecteur in Münster (1575). 63  Copernicus (1978, 22). Copernicus (1543, ff. 9v–10r). 61

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cited earlier in Chap. 10. Copernicus had likely read Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury), where Capella offers the hypothesis that Mercury and Venus circle the Sun. The famed Copernican appeal to harmony could be an echo of De nuptiis, which opens with an ode to universal unity, personified by the god Hymen: “You cause the elements to interact reciprocally, you make the world fertile; through you, Mind is breathed into bodies by a union of concord which rules over Nature, as you bring conciliation between the sexes and foster loyalty by love.”64 De Belleforest, for his part, seems to have understood Copernicus to mean that the Earth would move so as to best receive the solar vitality. Bruno, Gilbert, and Kepler clearly build upon a similar interpretation, and all express the importance of the Earth’s motion for its overall fecundity (Kepler sexualizes the relationship even more explicitly, suggesting that the Earth receives real pleasure from the relationship of penetration and reception mediated by light.)65 Bruno and Gilbert state the reason for a planet’s movement to be its health. The planet, in order to receive a judicious amount of sunlight on all its sides, must regulate both its revolution and rotation. Hilary Gatti has pointed out the importance of this “thermodynamic principle” for Bruno, descending from a merging of Copernican astronomy and Telesian natural philosophy. It was for Bruno, as Gatti writes, a biological explanation for the structured movement of infinite worlds.66 When later Copernicans turned to the “how,” as in how harmony set itself in the world, they developed a natural philosophy where celestial bodies experienced the same necessities as animal bodies.

6.5  Conclusion When we ask about necessity in the Copernican world, we must turn to a Platonic or Pythagorean framework. Necessity, so far as Copernican symmetry and uniformity, follows from the divine idea mundi, which in turn follows from divine attributes widely accepted in the Renaissance. Physical cause follows suite. The elements can be reduced to their one essential activity: they must coalesce into

 Stahl et al. (1977, 3). I have lightly altered their translation.  “The Earth, then, which by some great necessity, even by a virtue innate, evident, and conspicuous, is turned circularly about the Sun, revolves; and by this motion it rejoices in the solar virtues and influences, and is strengthened by its own sure verticity, that it should not rovingly revolve over every region of the heavens. The Sun (the chief agent in nature) as he forwards the courses of the Wanderers, so does he prompt this turning about of the Earth by the diffusion of the virtues of his orbes, and of light. And if the Earth were not made to spin with a diurnal revolution, the Sun would ever hang over some determinate part with constant beams, and by long tarriance would scorch it, and pulverize it, and dissipate it, and the Earth would sustain the deepest wounds; and nothing good would issue forth; it would not vegetate, it would not allow life to animals, and mankind would perish.” Gilbert (1958, 224). Also see, Regier (2017). 66  Gatti (1999, 121). 64 65

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relatively perfect spheres. Their only “natural” motion must be that of the sphere—a circular revolution. I have stressed the relationship between the diagrammatic and the idea mundi: matter behaves with geometrical rigor at the scale captured by astronomical and cosmographical diagrams. Reading Book I, we might say that a certain contingency exists at the scale of landscapes—these are small irregularities from the overall sphericity of the planet. The distinction between “sublunar” and “supralunar” becomes the difference between what the eyes witness all around in the local landscape—bay, valley, mountain, and river—and the geometrical perfection witnessed in the mind’s eye of the astronomer. Later Copernicans would work through how to turn hints in Book I into a coherent natural philosophy. For reasons touched upon above, they chose to understand the celestial bodies as living and, as it were, possessed of the necessities and contingencies of the animal body.

Bibliography Primary Apian, Peter. 1524. Cosmographicus liber. Landshut: J. Weissenburger. Apian, Peter, and Gemma Frisius. 1550. Cosmographia. Antwerp: G. Bontius. Bruno, Giordano. 1830. In De l’infinito universo e mondi, ed. Adolfo Wagner. Leipzig: Weidmann. Cicero. 1933. De natura deorum; Academica. Trans. H. Rackham. Harvard: Harvard University Press. ———. 1977. In De Divinatione, De Fato, Timaeus, ed. Otto Plasberg. Stuttgart: Teubner (This edition is available online through the Perseus Digital Library of Tufts University). Copernicus, Nicholas. 1543. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Nuremberg: J. Petreius. ———. 1978. Nicholas Copernicus on the Revolutions, ed. Jerzy Dobrzycki. Trans. Edward Rosen. Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers. Copernicus, Nicholas and Georg Joachim Rheticus. 1959. Three Copernican Treatises. Trans. Edward Rosen. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications. Gilbert, William. 1958. On the Magnet (De Magnete). Trans. Silvanus Phillips Thompson. New York: Basic Books. Kepler, Johannes. 1937. Gesammelte Werke [KGW], ed. Walther von Dyck et al. Munich. ———. 1992. New Astronomy. Trans. William H. Donahue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kepler, Jean. 1993. Le secret du monde. Trans. Alain Segonds. Paris: Gallimard. Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques. 1517. Introductorium astronomicum theorias corporum coelestium duobus libris complectens, adiecto commentario declaratum. Paris: H. Stephanus. Münster, Sebastian. 1575. La cosmographie universelle de tout le monde. Trans. François de Belleforest. Paris: M. Sonnius. Oresme, Nicole. 1968. Le livre du ciel et du monde, ed. Albert D. Menut and Alexander J. Denomy. Trans. Albert D. Menut. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Plato. 1935. The Republic. Trans. Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pliny the Elder. 1855. Historia naturalis. Trans. John Bostock. London: H. Bohn. Ptolemy. 1984. Ptolemy’s Almagest. Trans. G. J. Toomer. London: Duckworth. ———. 2000. Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters. Trans. J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Sacrobosco. 1527. In Sphaera, ed. Oronce Fine. Paris: S. Colines. Simplicius. 2004. On Aristotle’s On the Heavens 2.1–9. Trans. Ian Mueller. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. von Peuerbach, Georg. 1515. Theoricarum novarum textus Georgii Purbachii. Paris: M. Lesclencher.

Secondary Aubenque, Pierre. 1962. Le Problème de l’être chez Aristote. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Barker, Peter. 2011. The Reality of Peurbach’s Orbs: Cosmological Continuity in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Astronomy. In Change and Continuity in Early Modern Cosmology, ed. Patrick J. Boner, 7–32. Dordrecht: Springer. Barker, Peter, and Bernard R. Goldstein. 1998. Realism and Instrumentalism in Sixteenth Century Astronomy: A Reappraisal. Perspectives on Science 6: 232–258. Belo, Catarina. 2007. Chance and Determinism in Avicenna and Averroes. Leiden: Brill. Besse, Jean-Marc. 2003. Les grandeurs de la Terre  : aspects du savoir géographique à la Renaissance. Paris: ENS Éditions. De Pace, Anna. 2009. Niccolò Copernico e la fondazione del cosmo eliocentrico. Milan: Bruno Mondadori. Duhem, Pierre. 2004 [1908]. Sauver les apparences. Paris: Vrin. Gatti, Hilary. 1999. Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science: Broken Lives and Organizational Power. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Goddu, André. 2010. Copernicus and the Aristotelian Tradition: Education, Reading, and Philosophy in Copernicus’s Path to Heliocentrism. Leiden: Brill. Goldstein, Bernard R., and Peter Barker. 1995. The Role of Rothmann in the Dissolution of the Celestial Spheres. The British Journal for the History of Science 28: 385–403. Grant, Edward. 1987. Celestial Orbs in the Latin Middle Ages. Isis 78: 153–173. Hon, Giora, and Bernard R.  Goldstein. 2008. From Summetria to Symmetry: The Making of a Revolutionary Scientific Concept. Dordrecht: Springer. Hooykaas, R. 1987. The Aristotelian Background to Copernicus’s Cosmology. Journal for the History of Astronomy 18: 111–116. Jardine, Nicholas. 1982. The Significance of the Copernican Orbs. Journal for the History of Astronomy 13: 168–194. ———. 1984. The Birth of the History and Philosophy of Science. Kepler’s “A Defence of Tycho against Ursus” with Essays on Its Provenance and Significance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knox, Dilwyn. 2002. Ficino and Copernicus. In Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, ed. Michael J.B. Allen, Valery Rees, and Martin Davies, 399–418. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2005. Copernicus’s Doctrine of Gravity and the Natural Circular Motion of the Elements. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 68: 157–211. Mehl, Édouard. 2016. Novum struam mundum’: Kepler’s Rebuilding of the Copernican ‘symmetria mundi’. In Unifying Heaven and Earth: Essays in the History of Early Modern Cosmology, ed. Miguel A. Granada, Patrick J. Boner, and Dario Tessicini, 197–216. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. Neugebauer, Otto. 1975. A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy. Berlin: Springer. Omodeo, Pietro Daniel. 2014. Copernicus in the Cultural Debates of the Renaissance: Reception, Legacy, Transformation. Leiden: Brill. Pantin, Isabelle. 2009. Altior incubuit animus sub imagine mundi. L’inspiration du cosmographe d’après une gravure d’Oronce Finé. In Les Méditations cosmographiques à la Renaissance, ed. Cahiers V.L. Saulnier, vol. 26, 69–90. Paris: PUPS.

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Regier, Jonathan. 2017. Ghosts in the Celestial Machine: A Reflection on Late-Renaissance Embodiment. In Embodiment: A History, ed. Justin E.H.  Smith, 347–354. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosen, Edward. 1976. Reply to N. Swerdlow. Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences. Vol. 26, 301–304. Shank, Michael H. 2002. Regiomontanus on Ptolemy, Physical Orbs, and Astronomical Fictionalism: Goldsteinian Themes in the ‘Defense of Theon against George of Trebizond’. Perspectives on Science 10: 179–207. Söderlund, Inga Elmqvist. 2010. Taking Possession of Astronomy: Frontispieces and Illustrated Title Pages in 17th-Century Books on Astronomy. Stockholm: The Center for History of Science at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Stahl, William Harris, Richard Johnson, and E.L. Burge. 1977. Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts: The Marriage of Philology and Mercury. New York: Columbia University Press. Swerdlow, Noel. 1973. The Deriviation and First Draft of Copernicus’s Planetary Theory: A Translation of the Commentariolus with Commentary. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 117: 423–512. ———. 1976. Pseudodoxia Copernicana. Archives Internationales d’Histoire Des Sciences 26: 108–158. Swerdlow, Noel, and Otto Neugebauer. 1984. Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus. New York: Springer. Szczeciniarz, Jean-Jacques. 1998. Copernic et la révolution copernicienne. Paris: Flammarion. Vesel, Matjaž. 2014. Copernicus: Platonist Astronomer-Philosopher. Cosmic Order, the Movement of the Earth, and the Scientific Revolution. Trans. Manca Gašperšič. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Westman, Robert S. 2011. The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Chapter 7

Astrological Contingency: Between Ontology and Epistemology (1300–1600) Steven Vanden Broecke

This paper argues that the change from medieval to early modern Latin astrology involved, among other things, a shift in dominant interpretations of the relation between celestial influence and sublunary life, as well as of the precise nature of astrology’s inherent contingency as a conjectural art. The Latin astrological tradition of the late middle ages, we argue, approached astrology as an “art of embodiment,” in which anagogy and self-governance were considered more fundamental than self-protection and utilitarian knowledge. These priorities also shaped attitudes toward the contingency of astrological prediction. The uptake of astrology as an art that operated within an ontological domain circumscribed by the presence of matter entailed a fairly relaxed attitude about astrological contingency as an inevitable ontological phenomenon. Much of this changed in the sixteenth century, in no small part due to a new skepticism about astrology and the very reality of celestial influence. Taking our cue from the rich tradition of Lutheran astrology, we argue that astrology was now presented as an art which studied a specific class of sublunary effects, not so much the universal governance of sublunary matter. This opened a conceptual space where celestial influence could be treated as necessary and astrological predictions as secure ceteris paribus. We argue that this shaped a different interpretation of astrological contingency: astrological conjecture now became an epistemological phenomenon that was often accidental to the art, rather than an ontological one that was mostly internal to it.

S. Vanden Broecke (*) Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. D. Omodeo, R. Garau (eds.), Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 332, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67378-3_7

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7.1  Introduction In 1552, a rising star in Europe’s astrological pantheon committed one of the art’s more notorious gaffes. It happened when Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576) made an extensive stop in London on his way back to Milan from Scotland, where he had spent the summer succesfully attending to the troublesome health of the archbishop of St. Andrews. In London, our Italian physician befriended John Cheke (1514– 1557), tutor to the young king Edward VI (1537–1553), and proceeded to cast the king’s horoscope (Fierz 1983, 8–21). Cardano claimed to have spent about 100 hours on his prognostic, but also held  that external circumstances prevented him from spending an extra half hour to determine the length of the king’s life through the astrological technique of prorogation. As a result, his analysis included general warnings about the king’s tenuous health but failed to reveal the glaring truth that Edward VI would die of an illness only 9  months later (Cardano 1663, vol. 5, 505b;507a). Subsequent analyses did turn up ample indications of imminent danger but even so Cardano concluded that termination of human life could not always be straightforwardly attributed to astrological factors (Cardano 1663, vol. 5, 504a). Through its inclusion in the Liber duodecim geniturarum (1554), Cardano’s second published horoscope collection, the case of Edward VI became a frequent focal point of astrological debate in the second half of the sixteenth century. In the second edition of his successful astronomical Ephemerides (1560), the Low Countries astrologer Johannes Stadius (1527–1579) revisited the royal chart, so as to demonstrate that a combination of reliable astronomical data, astrological technique, and a proper understanding of Ptolemy’s classic Tetrabiblos could capture the precise timing of the king’s death after all (Stadius 1560, ff. e2r–e3r).1 Such criticism was all the more poignant in view of the fact that Cardano had recently written his own commentary on Tetrabiblos (Fierz 1983, 12–13) and that the published version of his analysis of Edward VI’s horoscope was preceded by a call for more astronomical accuracy (Cardano 1663, 503). In 1555, a young Frisian medical student by the name of Sicke van Hemminga (1533–1586) was a guest of the botanist Rembert Dodoens (1517–1585) in the Brabant town of Mechelen. It was there that Hemminga, who evidently had some skill in astrology, was asked by an unknown Englishman to determine the length of the life of an anonymous person from the latter’s nativity (Hemminga 1583, 121).2 Following a procedure that was uncannily similar to that of Stadius, Hemminga concluded that “if this adolescent is still alive (…) then either the stated time of birth is false, or astrology itself is” (Hemminga 1583, 124).3 Predictably, the nativity turned out to belong to the recently deceased Edward VI.

 On Stadius, see Ernalsteen, Joseph A.U. 1927; Vanden Broecke 2003, Chaps. 6, 7, 8.  On Hemminga, see Vanden Broecke 2003, 252–6; Westman 2011, 226–8. 3  “Quare si adhuc superstes sit hic adolescens, assero, aut hanc quam obtulistis nativitatis horam falsam esse, aut certe ipsam Astrologiam.” 1 2

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Unlike Stadius, Hemminga gradually came to reject his astrological sympathies. Like many other critics, he came to associate the art with determinist convictions and false promises of mastery over the realm of particular events. Accordingly, the story of his successful handling of Edward VI’s nativity appeared in Astrologiae ratione et experientia refutatae liber (1583), where it introduced an extended attack on the credibility of astrological guidance by way of an attack on Cardano’s published analysis. According to Hemminga, astrologers’ predictions were fatally conjectural, in as far as they failed to take into account all of the other causes that co-determine the shape of sublunary events (Hemminga 1583, 126–7). The unforeseen death of Edward VI drew several other astrological comments. Nevertheless, our preliminary triad already captures many of the basic tensions and responses surrounding astrology’s conjectural nature. First of all, there was the negative stereotype of the determinist astrologer promising insight into future particulars – a stereotype that the critical Hemminga exploited to his advantage. Secondly, we have an emphasis on the presence of superior providential powers (which Cardano referred to as “fate”) that may cross through the astrologer’s predictive practice. Thirdly, we have astrologers’ concerns to minimise the art’s conjectural nature by improving its technical infrastructure and legacy. Finally, we have interpretations of celestial influence as but one among a plethora of efficient causes jointly shaping sublunary events. Interestingly, each of these were matters of concern across the divide between astrologers and their opponents. Much as was the case in demonology, the divide between astrological “believers” and “critics” was often difficult to draw in the Renaissance.4 In line with the overall goals of this volume, this paper will focus less on astrologers’ proposals to minimize the presence of contingency in their art and more on their interpretation of inherent contingency in the art. It does this by privileging three guiding questions. Did astrologers adopt notions of inherent contingency? If so, how did they account for this phenomenon? And can one detect chronological shifts in these accounts?

7.2  Contingency in the Late Medieval Corpus Astrologicum It is now common knowledge that late medieval European university life stimulated a rich and robust culture of astrological teaching and practice. Focusing on central Europe, Michael Shank and Darren Hayton detailed the many ways in which academic astrology provided expert consulting for local rulers (Shank 1997, 245–70; Hayton 2015). Darrel Rutkin and Robert Westman reminded us that academic astrological teaching was a highly interdisciplinary, well-delineated, and international enterprise in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Rutkin 2002, 25–62; Westman 2011, 25–62). Monica Azzolini has recently argued that Italian universities of this period knew something like a corpus astrologicum: a loosely defined curriculum of  For the tenuous difference between demonological “skeptics” and “believers,” see Clark 1997.

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set texts used for academic astrology teaching, parallelling the corpus astronomicum which existed for the teaching of astronomy (Azzolini 2013, 39–50). More often than not, the texts that constituted this corpus astrologicum included lengthy preliminary discussions on the ontological, epistemological, utilitarian, and moral issues surrounding astrology. As we shall soon see, this also entailed claims for the inherent contingency of the art. In order to properly understand these claims, we must first consider a recurring theme in the late medieval corpus astrologicum: an approach to the visible celestial bodies as an essential component in God’s governance of His creation. Consider the corpus of astrological texts that Bonetto Locatelli and Ottaviano Scoto published in Venice in 1493, and that seems to have targeted the needs of Italian university curricula (Azzolini 2013, 41). The introductory letter of this collection, addressed by Girolamo Salio of Faenza (fl. 1488–1509) to the famous Bolognese professor Domenico Maria de Novara (1454–1504), invoked Aristotle to emphasize that “this inferior world is necessarily governed [gubernari] by the superior one” (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. [*1v]). The collection’s first and foremost text, Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, also included a prefatory letter by its medieval translator Aegidius de Tebaldis (fl. 1257) in which the latter considered it beyond doubt that “all inferior things are moved by divine providence disposing the superior bodies,” which enact “anything that happens on earth as vicars of God” (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. a2r).5 The authoritative commentary to the Tetrabiblos by Abu’l Hassan Ali Ibn Ridwan Al-Misri (998–1061, latinized as Haly Avenrodoan), also provided here, described astrology as the art of discerning the cosmic rhythms in which sublunary beings were inevitably embedded (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. a4r). Likewise, Ibn Ridwan’s commentary associated astrological knowledge with the organizing of human governance (gubernatio) and care (custodia) of the body, thus emulating divine providence (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. b2v). It was no coincidence, then, that the influential Speculum astronomiae (between 1260 and 1270) characterized mundane astrology as the art of revealing “what God (…) will produce in a given year, using the stars as if they were instruments” (Zambelli 1992, 229; 251–55). Late medieval prognosticators practiced such convictions in their own productions. The preface to Martin Pollich of Mellerstadt’s vernacular Practica Lipcensis of 1486 began by pointing out that “the honorable God of the heavens, who governs and universally rules over this entire world by His will and power,” created the heavens and the stars, endowing them with light, motion, and influence. This God, Pollich continued, “moves the heavens around the terrestrial realm,” situating and fixing the latter in the middle “so that through these, the lower world would be ordered and ruled” (Vanden Broecke 2015, 504–5). The significance of these claims lay not so much in their demonstration of the far-reaching interpenetration of astrology and religion, which has been documented by previous scholars (North 1980, Dupèbe 1998). Far more important is the way in which they speak to the anagogical role assigned to astrology. The art’s supposed ability to penetrate the “secondary causes” of a single web of the divine governance 5  “Ceterum dubitatio non occurrit quod divina providentia disponente superiorum corporum inferiora omnia moveantur quoniam ipsa fuit causa omnium accidentium terrenorum.”

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of creation was valued because it allowed embodied selves to engage a single art of self-government in which they transcended their natural state. Authorities like Guido Bonatti (c. 1207–c. 1296) characterized this given work of the stars as “all things which happen here below according to the natural order [my italics]” (Bonatti 1550, col. 3). Readers of the aforementioned Venetian edition of the Latin Ptolemy were likewise invited to associate astrology with the ability to “state at all times the things which happen in all sublunary bodies, relative to their natural state [my italics]” (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. a2v and f. g3r). The Latin corpus astrologicum thus approached the art as a tool of human anagogy qua natural being. In this literature, notions of astrological self-transformation were strongly shaped by specific notions of embodiment. For these authorities, being corporeal meant being born into a relation of governance by the visible stars. It meant being the subject of ever-changing bodily states, whose fluctuations moved in step with a cosmic rhythm that was consistently announced by these celestial bodies before they came to pass. Accordingly, astrology was not primarily valued as an art of predicting the behavior of a specific class of external natural forces impacting on the body. Instead, it discerned the historical vagaries that came with one’s bodily situatedness in God’s natural order (as opposed to His order of grace) and sought to alter this given narrative of embodiment by specific measures. As John of Saxony’s commentary on Alcabitius’s Latinized Libellus isagogicus pointed out, astrology enabled humans to modify or assist the “work of the stars” (al-Qabisi 1523, f. a2r/v). Likewise, Speculum astronomiae rejected any suggestion that human actions “frustrated” the operations of heaven, referring to them as “perfecting” such operations instead (Zambelli 1992, 258–9). Astrology was not so much an art of protecting or insuring the self against an external field of natural forces but of transforming the life narrative that came with the self’s corporeality in the natural state. It could be claimed, then, that the late medieval corpus astrologicum approached astrology as an “art of embodiment,” in which anagogy and self-governance were considered more fundamental than self-protection and utilitarian knowledge. These priorities also shaped attitudes toward the contingency of astrological prediction. Every student of the corpus astrologicum was familiar with warnings about the art’s contingency. The first aphorism of ps.-Ptolemy’s Centiloquium, a set text for any late medieval student of astrology, told its readers: “The science of the stars derives from you and from the stars. The astrologer must not foretell a thing in its particulars but universally, as one who sees a thing from above. This happens when someone considers the thing according to its matter, and does not reach certain knowledge. We have doubtful knowledge of a thing in its materiality, but certain knowledge is obtained through its form. And these judgments which I give thee are in between the necessary and the possible, as when someone considers both the nature of things and the work of the stars” (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. o1r).6

6  “Scientia stellarum ex te et ex illis est. Astrologus autem non debet dicere rem specialiter sed universaliter ut quod eminus videt aliquam rem. Sic enim facit qui considerat rem secundum materiam suam et non venit ad eius certam cognitionem. Per materiam habemus de re cognitionem dubiam, per formam vero certam. Et hec iudicia quae trado tibi sunt media inter necessarium et possibile. Quod dixi hec iudicia esse inter necessarium et possibile, hoc est apud eum qui rerum naturas et stellarum opus considerat.”

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This Latin translation, made by John of Seville (fl. 1135–1153) from the original Arabic in 1136, built a strong associative opposition between particular/formal/ certain knowledge and universal/material/conjectural knowledge of future events. The former was associated with the superlunary “work of the stars” and the latter with a sublunary “nature of things.” In the accompanying commentary to this text, Ibn Ridwan adopted the same distinction, simultaneously presenting “judgment on matter and its quality” as the default practice of working astrologers while contrasting this with “signifying the form of future things, which resides in the agent and the form of truth” (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. o1r). This is certainly how the Italian physician Pietro d’Abano (1257–1315) understood this text. In his Lucidator dubitabilium astronomiae, d’Abano agreed that astrology should speak universally, attributing this to the fact that the art “cannot determine someone’s particular nature and individual proportion because of the indetermination of matter to one effect or another” (Vescovini 1988, 109, 11–13). Curiously, however, late medieval textbooks did not prioritize the indetermination of matter as an obstacle that one had to overcome. Consider Chapter I.7 of Guido Bonatti’s Liber astronomiae, written “against those who say that the stars can only signify two things, the necessary and the impossible, but not the possible” (Bonatti 1550, col. 6). In this chapter, Bonatti argued that astrology did not specialize in the necessary natural regularities or impossibilities that natural philosophy uncovered but in the possibilities and historical vagaries of nature at work. Astrology’s terrain was that of the possibility for a man to swim, or not, or for a cloud to shed rain, or not (Bonatti 1550, col. 7). Borrowing the phrasing of Centiloquium 1, Bonatti thus situated astrological judgment “between the necessary and the possible” (Bonatti 1550, col. 7). Astrological judgment specified natural possibilities that could be realistically expected at any given time, but this did not turn them into necessities, or impossibilities, per se (Bonatti 1550, col. 7).7 Astrologically predicted events only acquired the latter status in the (non-)fulfillment of the event. Bonatti’s argument was strongly indebted to a passage in book I, diff. 5 of Albumasar’s Introductorium maius (848), where Albumasar tackled the criticism that well-formed significations of future events could only have necessary or impossible things as their referents, not possible events (Albumasar 1996, vol. 5, 36–42).8 Much like Bonatti after him, Albumasar replied that the astrologer foresees whether 7  “Igitur possibile est & iudicia stellarum sunt, quoniam per motus & dispositiones corporum supercoelestium & aeris variationem, tu potes scire ex qua nube debet esse pluvia & ex qua non debet esse pluvia (…). Item cum aliquis habet rem edibilem in ore, possibile est quod non comedat nec glutiat eam: & istud possibile, habet se ad utrunque ad necessarium scilicet, & impossibile. Quia cum sit possibile ipsum comedere, & si comederit, illud possibile, factum est necessarium, ex quo pervenit in actum, & est ei ablata possibilitas, & est effecta, & devenit in diffinitionem necessarii. Similiter cim sit possibile, ex quo non pervenit in actum impossibile, & devenit in diffinitionem impossibilis, & est ablata possibilitas. Et sic stellae, & elementa habent significare possibilia, & non tantum necessaria & impossibilia.” 8  The relevance of this criticism probably lay in the suggestion that sublunary knowledge and/or negotiation of celestial influences was futile and vacuous (cf. Zambelli 1992, 71).

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it will be possible for something to occur, or not, at a specific moment in the future (Albumasar 1996, 41 and 1474–5). However, whether this potential (John of Seville’s translation uses the term “fortitudo”) would be instantiated at such a time was dependent on additional causes operating on the receiving matter, including human cogitation and volition. Albumasar and Bonatti were careful to maintain a distance between possible and actual events in the realm of astrological causation. Similar caution applied in the case of Tetrabiblos and the accompanying commentary of Ibn Ridwan. Concerning a passage in Tetrabiblos I.3 where Ptolemy signaled a popular opinion “that absolutely all future events are inevitable and inescapable” (Ptolemaeus 1940, 31), Ibn Ridwan commented: Such credulity would be truthful if matter which receives the operation of an agent, would not simultaneously receive the operations of many other things. In the latter case, receiving [matter] will not receive the work of the stars if there is something contrary [to the work of the stars] in these other things, and equal to the operations of the stars (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. b2r).9

Matter is interpreted here as an indifferent and perfectly malleable site of causal operations. However, we should not expect a stable and univocal interpretation of this issue from the Ptolemy commentary. On the one hand, Ibn Ridwan claimed that people born under similar celestial conditions would nevertheless be different in body and spirit, depending on the region or even the seed from which such a person was co-formed (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. a7r). Such comments emphasized a multiplicity of efficient causes as sources of astrological contingency. On the other hand, the Latinized Ptolemy and his Arabic commentator also singled out sublunary matter itself as the underlying challenge. Ibn Ridwan’s commentary thus claimed that: Error may occur in this science due to the matter receiving the virtues of the stars, which is neither firm nor stable. Since it is very difficult to know a complexion fashioned by a conjunction of stellar virtues, this man [Ptolemy] wishes to erase our doubt by showing that this error does not betray a defect in the nature of the science, but stems from the difficulty of the task and the insufficient magnitude of the human intellect (…) (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. a6v).10

Subsequent passages in the Latin Ptolemy delivered essentially the same message to readers of this corpus astrologicum (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. a6v).11 9  “Haec autem credulitas vera esset si materia recipiens opus non reciperet opera ab alijs rebus multis, sed recipiendo a rebus multis de iure non recipiet stellarum opera, si in eis aliquid fuerit contrarium quod stellarum operibus sit equale.” 10  “In hac scientia possit error accidere propter materiam recipientem virtutem stellarum, quae non est firma neque stabilis. Et quia est grave multum scire complexionem quae fit ex coniunctione virtutum stellarum, nunc aut vult homo dubium destruere et ostendere nobis quod error iste non est propter defectum quod sit in natura scientie sed est pro eo quod res est gravis multum in se et intellectus humanus non habet virtutem sic magnam quod possit intelligere.” 11  “Accidit item generaliter quod ad nullam qualitatem istius materiei scientiam veraciter sed opinabiliter pervenimus. Maxime aut ad id quod ex multis dissimilibusque rebus colligit. Et generaliter dixo quod status huius materie dirigi non potest ut totaliter attingat via certa multum in qua non sit dubium aliquid, nisi subtilitate intellectus aliquorum qui possunt res considerare acutius quam alij, et maxime in his quae composita sunt multarum et diversarum rerum.”

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It seems fair to conclude that late medieval Latin astrology, as represented in key texts of the corpus astrologicum, presented itself as an art that operated within an ontological domain circumscribed by the presence of matter. In his study of Albertus Magnus’ Speculum astronomiae, Scott Hendrix usefully articulated Albertus’ strong sense of this quid pro quo. For Albertus Magnus, Hendrix points out, the perfection of superlunary order and causation: […] cannot be received ‘in generated things. Because of the mutability of their being, it is received mutably and contingently’. […] Thus, by the time celestial bodies communicate their influence to the terrestrial realm, the result is not something that must happen, but merely something that is likely to happen (Hendrix 2010, 78–9).

Accordingly, the corpus also contained warnings about the astrologer’s own excessive relations to matter. Alcabitius’ Libellus isagogicus considered it fitting that “the astrologer be firm and stable in meditation: effeminate and languid persons should therefore be ousted from the discipline” (al-Qabisi 1523, f. A3r). Celestially shaped particulars did constitute the objects of astrological prediction, but were not to be discerned completely in materiam.12 Interestingly, the Latin corpus also had a fairly relaxed attitude about the epistemological limitations this implied. Ptolemy told his readers that: Although it may happen that prognostication fails in a majority of cases, it is still fitting for us to carefully pursue it, since there is some truth in it (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. b2r).13

Ibn Ridwan’s commentary to this passage agreed: Likewise, [Ptolemy] says that although the use of astrological prognostication often leads to error, that small measure of certainty which is contained therein is of great use for taking the matter in hand, as we do in preserving health (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. b2r).14

To trace the larger background to this relaxed attitude, I believe we do not need to look very far. In all likelihood, it was precisely the aforementioned understanding of astrology as an art of embodiment and self-governance that shaped an emphasis on materiality and its negotiation, as well as a focus on the articulation of possibilities for such negotiation. One key component of this understanding of astrology must be emphasized: negotiating celestial influence was not primarily understood as an art of resisting external impacting forces but of modifying the nature of their effects. In other  See, for instance, the following passage from Ibn Ridwan’s commentary on Tetrabiblos, which articulates the precise effect of a combination of celestially induced good morals and socially induced thievery: “[…] sed debemus dicere quod erit minus malus ceteris latronibus, donec eorum societatem dimittat et tunc ad naturam suam redibit, et ita debemus facere in omnibus alijs rebus generalibus et particularibus, in legibus et moribus gentium accidentibus” (Ptolemaeus, Liber quadripartiti, f. A7v). 13  “At licet contingeret quod in maiori parte prognosticatio falleret, esset tamen conveniens ut eam subtiliter investigaremus, eo quod ei veritatis aliquid inest.” 14  “Dicit similiter teneo convenire quod quamquam isti considerantes in rebus pronosticationum astronomiae errent multum; id tamen modicum certitudinis quod est in eis diligere nos multum convenit et procurare de illo, de modo quo faciemus in custodienda salute.” 12

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words, late medieval astrological texts were much less concerned with the fact of celestial influence than they were with the modalities of bodily “reception” of celestial influence. Time and again, Ptolemy and his commentator valued astrological prognostication for its powers of allowing the soul to “adapt to the reception of any coming thing” (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. a2v).15 Such adaptation of the self was typically described in terms of furnishing the body with qualities which could oppose and thereby alter those of imminent influences. This is how the Latin Ptolemy qualified the supposed necessity of celestial influences: (…) if the ignorance of the astrologer does not furnish something contrary to this, it will happen of necessity and will occur according to its own natural virtues (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. b1r).16 If we make our bodies more cold before the coming of a general heat, the latter will settle less in us. Likewise, we can augment the heat in individual things, so as to convert them towards [humoral] excess (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. b1v).17

Here too, Ibn Ridwan followed this line of thought in his commentary: [Ptolemy] means that the works of the stars that encounter great contrary virtues will not affect us, unless through our own ignorance in not having prepared a way of turning aside things which do not happen of necessity. There is great utility in knowing prognostics when we can turn away an evil in such a way that it does not arrive (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. b1r).18

In other words, astrological self-governance was integrated in a broader practice of “body work,” informed by prognostication, which sought to alter the modalities of reception of celestial influence in sublunary matter. Opposing contraries, Ptolemy promised, would either prevent their virtues from manifesting themselves, or would at least have them occur less severely (Ptolemaeus 1493, f. b2v).19 It is likely that this specific understanding informed the phenomenon that we have been tracing over the course of this section: a late medieval astrological discourse in which matter appeared not so much an epistemic obstacle to the astrologer’s knowledge, but rather as the ontological site of intervention for the astrologer,  “(…) et plane suaviterque eam [animam] ad cuiuscunque rei futurae receptionem coaptat [prognosticatio]”. Also see Ptolemaeus 1493, f. B1v: “Vult dicere quod astrologo convenit res presciri quae per opera [sic] stellarum mutationem recipere possunt.” 16  “(…) si artificis ignavia ei non aptetur contrarium, necessario continget et secundum suae proprie naturae vires procedet”; Ibidem: “Et in talibus debemus dicere istud erit nisi adhibeat ibi custodia.” 17  “(…) cum nostra nos infrigidamus corpora ante caloris generalis adventum, minus caloris nobis incubat. Idem nos in rebus individuis facere possumus quae calores augmentant, ut eas scilicet ad  intemperiem convertamus”; Ibid.: “(…) opera terrena rem primam sequuntur nisi in aliquo opere resistantur sic opera celestium corporum opus propriae naturae sequitur nisi contrarietur opere aliquo vel medicentur.” 18  “Vult dicere quod opera stellarum quae habent magnum contrarium in virtute non transibunt ad nos nisi nescietate nostra. Quia non faciemus preparationem deviandi ei quae non sunt necessaria ut contingant. Et in his scire pronosticationes magnum est proficuum quia malum in modo quod non veniet poterimus deviare, ubi gratia.” 19  “(…) aut nullatenus via naturali et prius indicata contingent, vel si contigerit in modico accident.” 15

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which the latter sought to negotiate by discerning future episodes in the life of the body. It was such an understanding of astrology, I suggest, which prioritized an ontological rather than an epistemological understanding of the contingencies of astrological practice.

7.3  Contingency in Reformation Astrology In 1549, the Paris printer Christian Wechel published an anthology of texts supporting judicial astrology. Selected and introduced by the Wittenberg alumnus Gervasius Marstaller (d. 1578), this collection of ten previously published discourses privileged the Lutheran astrological culture, which was beginning to spread from its original home at Wittenberg University.20 Marstaller himself contributed to this expansion through his residency at the Parisian Collège de Beauvais, where he forged intimate ties with local mathematician-astrologers like Oronce Finé (1494– 1555) and Antoine Mizauld (1510–1578) (Dupèbe 1998, vol. 3, 325 sqq.). Along with Marstaller’s introductory Theoremata (…) quid sit de arte divinatrice (…) sentiendum, the collection documented the astrological views of the Protestants Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) and Jakob Milich (1501–1559) in Wittenberg, and Johann Schöner (1477–1547) and Joachim Heller (1518–1590) in Nürnberg. These were paired with older discourses by Ptolemy (c. 100–c. 170  AD), George of Trebizond (c. 1396–c.1472), Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503), Eberhard Schleusinger (c. 1435–after 1499), and Pietro Pitati (fl. 1539).21 By anthologizing some of the main voices of Lutheran astrological culture while juxtaposing them with older presentations of the art, Marstaller’s Artis divinatricis (…) encomia et patrocinia (1549) offers a fine starting point for exploring Lutheran astrology in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. As we will see, such an exploration has considerable relevance for the topic of this paper.

7.3.1  What Was Lutheran Astrology? Scanning the texts of Marstaller and his Lutheran peers – in good Melanchthonian fashion – for recurring topoi, allows one to discern a shared and distinct interpretation of astrology.22 On the one hand, Marstaller’s Theoremata and Heller’s Praefatio in Isagogen astrologicam Ioannis Hispalensis underwrote the traditional view of the  For a critical review of the historiographical construct of an astrological “Wittenberg circle,” see: Brosseder 2004, 11–17. 21  The contents of the collection are briefly discussed in: Dupèbe 1998, vol. 3, 352–63. 22  Needless to say, this section should not be read as a statement of exclusively Lutheran interpretations of astrology. Instead, it aims for preliminary “family resemblances” which may help to articulate Lutherans’ manners of approaching astrology. 20

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stars as a medium for divine action on man (Marstaller 1549, 17 and 89). On the other hand, one notices that this view now had much less practical significance. More precisely, the late medieval project of reading the “natural life of the body” through astrology (and, conversely, of privileging the body as a site of human anagogy and self-governance) seems to have become far more opaque in these Lutheran texts. This overall change can be described from several angles, of which I will privilege four. First of all, one encounters an interpretation of astrology as an art that specializes in a specific class of sublunary effects. As we have seen, late medieval astrological textbooks typically approached the moving heavens as quintessential links in the relation between divine providential governance on the one hand and sublunary embodiment on the other. The ultimate sources of a continuous process of change in sublunary matter, they were nevertheless integrated in a broader providential narrative. Our Lutheran authorities, by contrast, tend to approach the visible heavens as a more or less closed causal system producing its own set of sublunary effects. Philip Melanchthon emphasized how “experience has found there to be certain effects of the stars and their light in elements and mixed bodies” (Marstaller 1549, 50). Indeed, Melanchthon considered it his primary task to demonstrate the very reality of celestial efficient causality on sublunary bodies (e.g., Marstaller 1549, 60 and 69). For Marstaller, astrology was a doctrine of efficient causes moving sublunary matter (Marstaller 1549, 13), a natural-philosophical discipline “that teaches the effects of starry light on the elements and mixed bodies, and which temperaments, alterations and inclinations it gives birth to” (Marstaller 1549, 72). This emphasis on efficient causation may have been reinforced by a consistent narrowing of the physical basis of celestial causation. To the scholastic triad of motion, light, and occult influence, these Lutheran authorities preferred celestial light only (e.g., Marstaller 1549, 14,21,72-4,78,98). Likewise, this emphasis may also have encouraged the adoption of a specific interpretation of sublunary variety: where older texts like Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos tended to focus on describing the phenomenon of sublunary variety itself as an epiphenomenon of sublunary beings’ variable relations to the heavens, Lutheran astrologers turned to the heavens for an explanation of the given dissimilitude between numerically different sublunary beings.23 Secondly, these discourses tended to approach humans as beings who are confined to a natural state. Accordingly, astrology’s purpose was not so much to assist in transcending and transforming this state but rather to minimize its negative effects on one’s material and spiritual conditions. Astrological revelations of future temperaments, dispositions, and inclinations, Marstaller wrote, offered “fortunate and useful knowledge for protecting health and for ruling one’s mores and life” (Marstaller 1549, 33). According to Jakob Milich, astrology allowed the self  A good example of Ptolemy’s approach to sublunary variety is Tetrabiblos, Chapter II.2. See Ptolemaeus 1493, f. D4v-D5v. For the alternative focus, see, e.g., Marstaller 1549, 32: “Indicat unde tam manifesta formae animorumque differentia, quae est inter singulos homines, oriatur”; Ibid., 62: “Si quis autem considerabit diversas regionum naturas, & diversarum gentium ingenia, quam aliam causam huius dissimilitudinis ostendere poterit, quam coeli naturam?”

23

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“to rule fortune in some manner, enabling one to be protected from severe storms, or at least to mitigate them” (Marstaller 1549, 75). To a greater extent than was the case in late medieval astrological textbooks, our Lutheran astrologers approached the art as the purveyor of a utilitarian knowledge that helped to insure humans against loss. Theological convictions provided at least some of the background which helped to shape such attitudes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lutheran astrologers equated man’s natural state with a post-lapsarian state. “Would that human nature had not been corrupted,” Melanchthon wrote, “the divine light – governor of all motions – would shine forth in us, and the stars would have had different actions in uncontaminated matter” (Marstaller 1549, 56). Likewise, the stars’ post-lapsarian effects were frequently presented as manifestations of divine wrath or love toward fallen man. Marstaller warned his audience: Because many of us either contemn these [divine] admonitions, or at least lack the necessary regard for them, we receive just punishment for our impiety and self-assurance; punishment which we could easily avert through penitence and emendation of our lives, through the goodness of our God (Marstaller 1549, 27–8).24

Both the Protestant emphases on fallen man’s corrupted relation with God and the uptake of misfortune as an epiphenomenon of this state thus helped to shape an interpretation of human self-government as an art of protecting one’s material and spiritual state against further corruption. Our third component of Lutheran interpretations of astrology is directly connected to this. The broader change in astrology from an art of embodiment toward an art of protection also favored a view of the art as an interpreter of celestial signs of warning or authorization, rather than as the spokesman of a cosmic web of corporeal governance. “God,” Marstaller wrote, “discloses His wrath or goodness through the stars and many other means” (Marstaller 1549, 29). For Melanchthon, there were “many true and perpetual significations of divinatory astrology, although perhaps less than in medicine” (Marstaller 1549, 69). Jakob Milich described astrology as an art of self-regulation by attending to signs (Marstaller 1549, 70) and called eclipses and conjunctions “oracles” of God (Marstaller 1549, 76). This focus on divinely granted indications of warning or authorization in turn shaped a different construal of the precise kinds of changes announced in the heavens. To a greater extent than was the case in the late Middle Ages, such changes were now taken as changes in what Machiavelli’s Il Principe famously referred to as a variable “quality of the times.” In his groundbreaking study of ancient Jewish and Christian astrology, Kocku von Stuckrad has referred to astrology as an art of discerning “time qualities” (von Stuckrad 2000, 100). While I am less inclined to turn this into a universally applicable description, it is useful in capturing one of the

 “Et quia plerique eas admonitiones vel contempsimus, vel ijs debebamus non affecti sumus, ideo meritas impietatis atque securitatis nostrae poenas nunc damus, quas poenitentia ac vitae emendatione pro bonitate Dei nostri facilè avertere potuissemus”. Also see: Ibid., 26, 34, 55, 63, 64, 76, 119.

24

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distinguishing features of Renaissance Lutheran astrology. In discussing the various uses of astrology, Marstaller mentioned as his second use: [astrology] shows us the differences of times: which ones are suitable, and which less so, for a specific task. It is not superstitious for physicians, farmers and others to observe such things (Marstaller 1549, 26).25

The challenge of coordinating individual action with a given cosmic situation was, of course, hardly exclusive to Lutheran astrology. Nevertheless, Marstaller’s assertion does hint at a specific interpretation of such coordination: in his view, it primarily involves assessing a variable “present” which co-determines the material success of a proposed action. Likewise, he described astrology as a source of information “to which we accommodate our decisions and endeavours” (Marstaller 1549, 33). Almanacks showed “which times are apt for medicating, relative to individual age and temperament” (Marstaller 1549, 37), which Joachim Heller referred to as the “quality of the year” (Marstaller 1549, 95). The emphasis on “time qualities” thus confirms the more utilitarian uptake of astrological revelation that we previously discerned, in which the art comes forth as a source of information for perfecting sublunary action. Finally, I wish to point out a fourth aspect that would seem to corroborate this suggestion: an uptake of astrological knowledge as a tool of self-disciplining. “If only the parents of [Gaius Scribonius] Curio [the Younger] or [Mark] Anthony had sufficiently understood the nature of their sons [through astrology],” Marstaller exclaimed, “singular art could have altered their fierce and restless characters to moderation.” Indeed, it was a “tamer” which Philip II of Macedonia sought in the philosopher-tutor whom he assigned to Alexander the Great (Marstaller 1549, 77). Marstaller continued: Accordingly, it is profitable to discern the ways of one’s nature, so that it may be bent towards virtue and led away from vice through correct discipline (Marstaller 1549, 77).26

For Marstaller, such forms of astrological self-government were nothing less than a divinely ordained task, for which celestial warning signs had been instituted in the first place (Marstaller 1549, 34).

7.3.2  Contingency and Epistemology At least two general conclusions can be drawn from my preliminary attempt at sketching a family portrait of Lutheran astrology. On the one hand, it appears that Lutheran astrologers upheld a different interpretation of what it meant to engage in self-governance. As we have seen, late medieval Latin astrology operated with a  “(…) ostendit nobis discrimina temporum, quae sint idonea, quae minus idonea operis, medicis, rusticis & alijs quibusdam non supersticiose observatis.” 26  “Ita prodest videre quo quemque ducat natura, ut disciplina idonea ad virtutem flectatur, & à vitijs abducatur.” 25

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model of self-governance that focused on body work through insight into future episodes of the life of a body that was already celestially governed. Our Lutheran astrologers, on the other hand, interpreted astrological self-governance as a practice of self-protection, more specifically, of protecting the self from the spiritual or material losses which the heavens might bring. This was likely stimulated by their theological emphasis on a Deus absconditus whose default relation to man was one of wrath and alienation. This emphasis seems to have shaped a greater legitimacy of misfortune, both as something which was simply there for man to fight unto death and as a permanent reminder of the need to maintain and defend one’s spiritual relation to God (Marstaller 1549, 34 and 58). As a result, the notion of astrology as a means of participating in divine governance of the body eroded considerably. On the other hand, this specific interpretation of self-governance also entailed a different interpretation of the art of astrology. To a greater extent than in the late medieval corpus astrologicum, the art was now valued and approached as a technological tool which delivered useful information about the state of a material milieu so as to maximize profit or ward off loss. Indeed, it would appear that our Lutheran astrologers primarily approached the heavens as a site of significations and warnings of imminent bodily danger, not so much as a key component of God’s cosmic gubernatio. These general features also had a direct bearing on the interpretation of astrology’s conjectural status. First of all, the aforementioned instrumentalization of the art placed a stronger premium on the need to defend its connection with physical reality. That these astrological discourses contained more or less extensive defenses of the art was hardly unusual in itself. However, one does find that the most common worst-case scenario envisioned was not so much the religious illegitimacy of the art but rather the notion of there being no celestial influences “out there” to guarantee the meaningfulness and utility of the art (E.g. Marstaller 1549, 69).27 As a result, the conjectural nature of astrological predictions became a potential sign of the art’s irreality and something to be excused or legitimated in itself. One way to soften this risk was to associate astrology with other useful arts where conjecture was seen to be legitimate: Another accusation, which undermines faith in the art even among the learned, is that the art does not foresee everything in this infinite variety of human events. Accordingly, some shrewd men deny that an art (that is, a universal and perpetual doctrine) can exist on the basis of particular observations of a few events. As if medicine heals all diseases, as if political wisdom foresees all tempests of the state or cures them all. Nevertheless, it should be conceded that there are many true and firm precepts, useful to life, in both of these arts (Marstaller 1549, 69).28  “Ita ego utrunque disputabo, & veram esse doctrinam de coelestibus effectibus, et magnas ad vitam utilitates afferre.” 28  “Sed aliud est crimen quod etiam apud doctos detrahit fidem arti, quod videlicet in hac infinita casuum humanorum varietate, ars ipsa non praevidet omnia: negant igitur homines acuti artem, hoc est, universalem & perpetuam doctrinam existere posse, ex particularibus paucorum eventuum observationibus: quasi vero aut medicina morbos curet omnes, aut politica sapientia omnes Rerumpublicae tempestates prospicere, mederi omnibus incommodis possit. Et tamen concedendum est, multa utriusque artis vera & firma praecepta esse, & ad vitam utilia.” 27

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Secondly, one finds that the very source of astrology’s conjectural nature was conceptualized differently. As we have seen, late medieval Latin astrology primarily interpreted astrological conjecture as an unavoidable epiphenomenon of focusing on the secret life of matter and the body by trying to discern its celestial gubernatio. There were inherent limits to human insight in this life of the body, and this is what spawned the conjectural nature of astrology. Like their medieval predecessors, Lutheran astrologers identified matter as the object of celestial influence. “Astrology,” Marstaller quoted Melanchthon, “is the doctrine that seeks out universal efficient causes in the motions and powers of the stars, which move matter in bodies here below” (Marstaller 1549, 13–4). As this passage suggests, however, the focus of our Lutheran astrologers lay with the knowledge of celestial efficient causes, rather than with the affections of sublunary matter and bodies (Marstaller 1549, 73 and 21).29 From this starting point, our Lutheran astrologers tended to approach the visible heavens as the capstone of one particular “system” of production of natural effects here below and not so much as a hierarchical source of gubernatio of sublunary bodies. Speaking of the different virtues of the planets, Melanchthon stated, in Marstaller’s edition: Their admirable order, position, and the utterly certain laws of their course across the heavens testify that these were instituted by the supreme reason of this creator. Accordingly, it would be unfitting for the stars to have neither significations nor effects (Marstaller 1549, 66).30

Likewise, Marstaller wrote: Since there are certain effects of the stars, and since their inspection has borne us an art, this divinatory astrology cannot be empty (Marstaller 1549, 50).31

This also provided the background for a different diagnosis of astrological conjecture. According to Marstaller, there were three distinct sources of conjecture in astrology: Along with the supreme cause [God], astrological predictions can be impeded partly by inferior causes; partly by other celestial causes that cannot be sufficiently penetrated by the infirmity of the human mind. This is why they are called conjectural by the astrologers themselves (Marstaller 1549, 18).32

 It is interesting to compare this with the older view, also represented in this volume through the Encomium of Eberhard Schleusinger. See: Marstaller 1549, 124–5. 30  “Cum autem & hic admirabilis ordo ac positus, deinde certissimae leges cursus testentur, hoc opificium summa ratione constare, non est consentaneum astra nullas significationes, nullos effectus habere.” 31  “Cum igitur sint aliquae effectiones astrorum, & earum animadversio artem peperit, non inanem esse hanc divinatricem necesse est (…)”; Also see Joachim Heller’s comments: Marstaller 1549, 88–89. 32  “(…) cum praeter supremam illam causam partim ab inferioribus, partim ab alijs coelestibus causis, quae ob humani ingenij infirmitatem satis perspici nequeunt, impediri possunt, coniecturales ab ipsis Astrologis vocari (…).” 29

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It would appear that astrological conjecture was being reconceptualized here as an epiphenomenon of the relative strength of celestial forces vis-vis other causal forces. This squares with the fact that several subsequent Lutheran astrologers tended to invoke the “strength” of astrological causes as something which had to compete with other causal forces in order to produce their specific effects. In his influential Commentarius de praecipuis divinationum generibus (1560), Caspar Peucer (1525–1602) remarked that: It is difficult to determine whether the causes which testify to, and indeed lead us to expect, a future effect, will have sufficient strength and forces to produce and fulfill this effect. For it often happens that the causes that are investigated, supplying conjectures about events, only provide a singular or partial power to such events, and cannot effect such things on their own, without the assistance of associate causes (Peucer 1580, 51v).33

Echoing Peucer’s comments, the introduction of Johannes Garcaeus’ (1530– 1574) massive Astrologiae methodus (1576) provided a similar warning to astrology’s tyrones: The greatest difficulty in divining, opening up a downhill and slippery slope towards error, occurs when there is great variety and obscurity of causes, and when matter’s motion is inconstant. In such a case it is difficult to determine whether the causes that lead us to expect a future effect will have sufficient strength to produce their effect, since the causes that furnish conjectures of events are so partial and frequently impeded by contrary [causes] (Garcaeus 1576, f. b1r).34

The important part here is not the acknowledgment of astrological conjecture, but its diagnosis as something which is externally caused by the concurrence of alternative causes. This reinforced a conceptual space in which celestial influence could be treated as necessary and astrological predictions as secure ceteris paribus. In other words, it encouraged one to approach astrological judgment epistemologically, as a conjecture referring to external events, rather than ontologically, as referring to variable modalities of the self’s material embodiment. According to Marstaller, astrological predictions were therefore “certain unless something opposes them” (Marstaller 1549, 19).35 In his view, the predictions themselves were “impeded” by external causes, thus rendering them conjectural (Marstaller 1549, 18).

 “Difficile est constituere, utrum causae, quae de secuturo effectu testimonium perhibent & spem faciunt, satis roboris habeant ac virium ad eundem producendum ac perficiendum. Frequenter enim illae, quae inquiruntur causae, quaeque coniecturas de eventibus suppeditant, ad eosdem vim tantum μερικήν ἀπὸ μέρους conferunt, nec absolvendis sua vi effectibus sufficiunt, cittra opem causarum sociarum.” 34  “Omnino maxima est divinandi difficultas, et admodum prona ac lubrica via est aberrandi, cum magna sit varietas et obscuritas causarum, vagusque sit motus materiae. Hinc difficile est constituere, utrum causae, quae de secuturo effectu spem faciunt, satis roboris habeant ad effectum producendum, cum illae, quae eventuum coniecturas suppeditant, tantum sint partiales, et contrarijs saepe impediantur.” 35  Compared with Eberhard Schleusinger: “Non sola ergo sufficit astri cognitio, sed & subiectorum et passivorum maxime natura” (Marstaller 1549, 125; my italics). 33

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Such utterances were neither completely new, nor exclusive to Lutheran astrologers. In his important De astrologica veritate, et in disputationes Iohannis Pici adversus astrologos responsiones (1498), Lucio Bellanti had already written: […] prognosticatory astrology foretells future events for the most part. On the assumption of [a role for] matter and further impediments, it will always reveal future things unless free will, fortune, luck, or the unsuitability of matter throw up obstacles (Bellanti 1554, 13).36

Nevertheless, it is significant that Lutheran astrologers wielded a distinct name for this epistemically secure ceteris paribus view of astrological causation: “physical necessity.” Garcaeus’ Astrologiae methodus, for instance, claimed that: “Astrologers have their reasonings and predictions, taken from signs and natural causes that are open to the senses. These predictions are firm and have secure effects with physical necessity, not absolute necessity” (Garcaeus 1576, f. b2r).37

7.4  Conclusion As we saw at the beginning of this paper, sixteenth-century astrologers gave particular significance to Cardano’s failure to predict the death of King Edward VI.  To Cardano himself, his failure signaled the limits of astrological causation. To Johannes Stadius, the episode signaled the importance of proper practice. To Sicke van Hemminga, it spelled out the lesson of astrology’s utter vacuousness. In this paper, I have argued that these reactions may also have been symptomatic of a deeper change in astrologers’ attitudes toward the art’s inherent contingency. Late medieval astrological discourse, as found in the loose conglomerate of texts that constituted an academic corpus astrologicum, identified the reception of celestial influence by sublunary matter as a major source of the art’s inherent contingency. However, its specific interpretation of astrological self-governance as a practice of body work on the basis of prognostication also implied a surprisingly relaxed attitude toward astrological contingency. Late medieval astrology approached matter not so much as an epistemic obstacle to the astrologer’s knowledge, but rather as the ontological site of intervention for the astrologer, which the latter seeks to negotiate by discerning future episodes in the life of the body. Such interventions were premised on astrology’s ability to unveil future possibilities, not so much on the prediction of actual events. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, alternative attitudes manifested themselves, which may have been connected to the new wave of astrological criticism which began with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s formidable Disputations against  “(…) pronosticatrix vero quanquam in pluribus evenientia […] concludit, supposita tamen materia, remotisque impedimentis, semper futura manifestabit, quum non liberam voluntatem, non fortunam, vel casum, non materiae ineptiam sic habeat obstantia.” 37  “Astrologi vero, ex signis & causis naturalibus sensui obvijs, suas habent ratiocinationes & praedictiones, quae sunt firmae, & certas habent effectiones, necessitate Physica, non absoluta”. The expression “necessitas physica” is also used in: Naibod 1560, f. β4r. 36

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Divinatory Astrology (1496). As a result, the conjectural nature of astrological predictions became a potential sign of the art’s irreality and something to be excused or legitimated in itself. More fundamentally, however, there are indications that sixteenth-­century astrologers turned to astrology for knowledge of celestial efficient causes impacting on sublunary matter and bodies (Marstaller 1549, 73 and 21).38 The visible heavens were increasingly approached as the capstone of one particular “system” of production of natural effects here below and not so much as a hierarchical source of gubernatio of sublunary bodies. Diagnosing astrology’s conjectural nature as an effect of celestial influence competing with non-astrological causes, sixteenth-century astrologers opened up a conceptual space in which celestial influence could be treated as necessary and astrological predictions as secure ceteris paribus. In this way, they began to approach astrological conjecture as an external and epistemological phenomenon, rather than as an internal and ontological one. This phenomenon can be clearly discerned in the Lutheran astrologers of the broader “Wittenberg circle,” but future research may very well unearth earlier developments in the first quarter of the sixteenth century.

Bibliography Primary Albumasar. 1996. Liber Introductorii Maioris ad Scientiam Judiciorum Astrorum, ed. Richard Lemay. 9 vols. Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale. Al Qabisi. 1523. Alkabitius Astronomie iudiciarie principia tractatus cum Joannis saxonij commentario. Paris: Simon Colinaeus. Bellanti, Lucio. 1554. De astrologica veritate liber quaestionum astrologiae defensio contra Ioannem Picum Mirandulanum. Basel: Johannes Hervagius and Jacobus Parcus. Bonatti, Guido. 1550. De astronomia tractatus X. Basel: Nicolaus Prucknerus. Cardano, Girolamo. 1663. Opera Omnia [OO], 10 vols. Lyon: Jean Antoine Huguetan and Marc Antoine Ravaud. Garcaeus, Johannes. 1576. Astrologiae methodus, in qua secundum Ptolemaei, exactissima facillimaque Genituras qualescunque iudicandi ratio traditur. Basel: Henricus Petreius. van Hemminga, Sicke. 1583. Astrologiae ratione et experientia refutatae liber. Antwerp: Christophe Plantin. Marstaller, Gervasius. 1549. Artis divinatricis, quam astrologiam seu iudiciariam vocant, encomia & patrocinia. Paris: Christian Wechel. Naibod, Valentin. 1560. Enarratio elementorum astrologiae. Cologne: apud haeredes Arnoldi Birckmanni. Peucer, Kaspar. 1580. Commentarius de praecipuis divinationum generibus. Wittenberg: Johannes Lufft. Ptolemaeus, Claudius. 1493. Liber quadripartiti Ptholemei (…). Venice: Bonetus Locatellus. ———. 1940. Tetrabiblos. Trans. and ed. Frank E. Robbins. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Stadius, Johannes. 1560. Ephemerides novae et auctae Ioannis Stadii Leonnovthesii. Cologne: Haeredes Arnoldi Birckmanni.  It is interesting to compare this with the older view, also represented in Marstaller’s volume through the Encomium of Eberhard Schleusinger. See: Marstaller 1549, 124–5.

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Secondary Azzolini, Monica. 2013. The Duke and the Stars. Astrology and Politics in Renaissance Milan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brosseder, Claudia. 2004. Im Bann der Sterne. Caspar Peucer, Philipp Melanchthon und andere Wittenberger Astrologen. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Clark, Stuart. 1997. Thinking with Demons. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dupèbe, Jean. 1998. Astrologie, Médecine et Religion à Paris. Antoine Mizauld (c. 1512–1578). PhD dissertation, 4 vols. Université de Paris X Nanterre. Ernalsteen, Joseph A.U. 1927. Joannes Stadius Leonnouthesius 1527–1579. Brecht: L. Braeckmans. Fierz, Markus. 1983. Girolamo Cardano, 1501–1576. Physician, Natural Philosopher, Mathematician, Astrologer, and Interpreter of Dreams. Trans. Helga Niman. Boston: Birkhäuser. Hayton, Darin. 2015. The Crown and the Cosmos. Astrology and the Politics of Maximilan I. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Hendrix, Scott E. 2010. How Albert the Great’s Speculum Astronomiae Was Interpreted and Used by Four Centuries of Readers. A Study in Late Medieval Medicine, Astronomy, and Astrology. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press. North, John D. 1980. Astrology and the Fortunes of Churches. Centaurus 24: 181–211. Rutkin, Darrel H. 2002. Astrology, Natural Philosophy and the History of Science, c. 1250–1700: Studies Toward an Interpretation of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem. PhD dissertation. Bloomington: University of Indiana. Shank, Michael. 1997. Academic Consulting in 15th Century Vienna: The Case of Astrology. In Texts and Contexts in Ancient and Medieval Science. Studies on the Occasion of John E. Murdoch’s Seventieth Birthday, ed. Edith Scylla and Michael McVaugh. Leiden: Brill. von Stuckrad, Kocku. 2000. Das Ringen um die Astrologie. Jüdische und christliche Beiträge zum antiken Zeitverständnis. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Vanden Broecke, Steven. 2003. The Limits of Influence. Pico, Louvain, and the Crisis of Renaissance Astrology. Leiden/Boston: Brill. ———. 2015. Self-governance and the Body Politic in Renaissance Annual Prognostications. In From Masha’ Allah to Kepler: Theory and Practice in Medieval and Renaissance Astrology, ed. Charles Burnett and Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum. Bath: Sophia Centre Press. Vescovini, Graziella Federici. 1988. Il ‘Lucidator Dubitabilium Astronomiae’ di Pietro d’Abano. Opere scientifiche inedited. Padova: Programma e 1+1 Editori. Westman, Robert S. 2011. The Copernican Question. Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zambelli, Paola. 1992. The Speculum Astronomiae and its Enigma. Astrology, Theology and Science in Albertus Magnus and his Contemporaries. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Chapter 8

Secundum Quid and Contingentia: Scholastic Reminiscences in Early Modern Mechanics Pietro Daniel Omodeo

According to medieval theocentric worldviews, the concept of Nature as God’s Creation implied the contingency of its very existence. However, Scholastic thinkers did not limit their discussion of contingency to the onto-theological dimension, that is, the foundation of reality upon God’s will. Rather, contingency also implied a certain mental model for physical causality, regarded as a not-necessary but determined concatenation of natural events. Heated debates were raised in the framework of medieval philosophy concerning divine prescience and human freedom, God’s omnipotence and natural order, the distinction between logical and ontological necessity, as well as determinism and indeterminism in natural chains of events. All these issues gravitated around the problematic of contingency.1 The investigation of the Scholastic model of contingent causality is a prerequisite for understanding long-lived explanations of natural phenomena produced within the conceptual framework of Scholasticism, and within those of later natural philosophies that more or less overtly stemmed from it. My present undertaking is to briefly assess in what form a “principle of contingency” entered the science of weights and mechanics between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period.

 Among other sources, see Maier (1949), pp. 219–250; Osler, “Divine Power and Divine Will in the Middle Ages: Historical and Conceptual Background,” Osler (1994), 15–35, Roques (2015). 1

P. D. Omodeo (*) ERC Endeavor Early Modern Cosmology (GA 725883), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venezia, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. D. Omodeo, R. Garau (eds.), Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 332, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67378-3_8

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8.1  C  ontingentia: A Principle of Causality in Medieval Conceptions of Nature In order to understand why the problem of contingency is crucial for the medieval debates on nature and the natural science of the time, it is expedient to begin by looking at early codifications of the concept and the philosophical problems surrounding it. The Latin word “contingentia” is a translation of the Aristotelian concept of “possibility,” both as modal logical ἐνδεχόμενον and physical-metaphysical δύναμις within a hylomorphic framework. In the Christian context of creationist theology, this terminus was transformed and received an onto-­theological connotation that went far beyond the original meaning. In late Scholasticism, contingentia signifies the worldly reality or nature as Creation. Nature is contingent; it exists de facto but could also not, because its existence depends on God’s will. As John Duns Scotus (1266–1308) puts it: So then, the first issue has become clear: how there is contingency in things – because it comes from God – and what is in God which is the cause of this contingency – because it is his will.2

In Aristotle, there was a tension between two meanings of “possibility.” According to Prior Analytics (13: 32 a 18–20), the possible is that which is “neither necessary nor impossible,” whereas according to De interpretatione (On Interpretation) (13: 22 a 14–13 a 26), possibility is exclusively that which is opposed to “impossibility” and therefore includes also that which is necessary. Reminiscent of this original blurriness, one can find in Scholastic philosophy two different definitions of contingency, either as “quod est nec impossibile nec necessarium” (that which is neither impossible nor necessary) or “quod non est impossibile” (that which is not impossible).3 Both meanings were kept in the Latin rendering of the Aristotelian possibility as contingentia by Marius Victorinus (fl. fourth century CE) and Boethius (fl. sixth century CE), but the Latin expression also suggested an affinity between that which is contingent (contingit) and that which occurs (evenit or accidit).4 This third connotation would eventually prevail through the late Scholastic differentiation between contingentia and possibilitas and its reception in the philosophical systems of the seventeenth century (and most notably that of Leibniz).5 Unlike abstract (purely logical) possibility, contingency referred only to that which is real but not so by necessity: “id, quod (est sed) potest non esse” (that which is but could not be). In the Christian perspective of the Almighty’s Creation, contingency happened to include all that is not God himself in His absoluteness  – that is to say, nature, or the universe. 2  Scotus (1994), 140: “Sic igitur apparet primum, quomodo est contingentia in rebus, quia a Deo, − et quid est in Deo quod est causa huius contingentiae, quia voluntas eius.” 3  Vogt (2011), 52. The entire Chapter One is relevant for a historical overview of the reception and transformation of the Aristotelian concept of “possibility” as “contingency” in the Latin tradition. 4  Ibid., 50. 5  Schepers (2014).

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This background is fundamental for understanding not only theological disputes but also natural philosophical and scientific developments during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. The connotation of nature as contingent—as that “which could not be”—is theological and metaphysical in its essence, since it points to the dependency of the world on God. However, from the point of view of natural conceptualizations, not only the “vertical” dimension of metaphysics is relevant but also the “horizontal” dimension of causality within nature. On the horizontal plane of the interrelation among finite beings, contingency refers to a degree of indetermination and a certain unpredictability in the connection between causes and effects. Moreover, whereas a theological perspective focuses on the radical contingency of that which exists as created being, natural reflections addressed the relationship between contingency and necessity within nature, that is, between divine order and phenomenal imperfection. This relationship between that which is necessary and that which is not necessary had to be conceptualized and indeed was conceptualized as the relationship between the absolutum and the conditionale or secundum quid. In the following, I would like to stress that this perspective affected natural theorizations and explanations, such as those of the scientia de ponderibus (science of weights). I will soon deal with this. But before addressing this discipline, in order to pinpoint the historical endurance of basic mental models, I should consider the views on natural contingency of two influential theologizing philosophers, one from the Middle Ages and one from the Renaissance: Thomas Aquinas in the Summa contra gentiles (1270 ca.) and Philipp Melanchthon in the Initia doctrinae physicae (15491).

8.2  Theologizing Approaches to Natural Contingency In the first book of the Summa contra gentiles, Thomas defined contingency through its distinction from necessity. In the case of the contingent beings, as one reads in Summa contra gentiles I 67, a cause can produce its effect or not, whereas in the case of necessary beings, their cause cannot but produce them: The contingent differs from the necessary according to the way each of them is found in its cause. The contingent is in its cause in such a way that it can both not-be and be from it; but the necessary can only be from its cause. […] Just as from a necessary cause an effect follows with certitude, so it follows from a complete contingent cause if it be not impeded.6

A contingent cause, as one reads, will fulfill its tendency to produce a certain effect “si non impediatur,” that is, if no impediment hinders its realization. In the second book of the Summa contra gentiles, Thomas dealt extensively with the contingent being (II 15: “omne quod est possibile esse et non esse” and 6  Aquinas (1975), 221 f: “Contingens a necessario differt secundum quod unumquodque in sua causa est: contingens enim sic in sua causa est ut non esse ex ea possit et esse; necessarium vero non potest ex sua causa nisi esse. […] Ex causa necessaria certitudinaliter sequitur effectus, ita ex causa contingenti completa si non impediatur.”

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“[id quod] ad utrumlibet se habet”).7 According to him, the world is contingent insofar as it is created. In this general sense, “Deus est omnibus causa essendi” (Summa contra gentiles II 15). In particular, God’s free will is the origin of this world. Nonetheless, Thomas does not exclude that natural reality is populated by both necessary and contingent beings. Absolute necessity (necessitas absoluta), he writes in Summa contra gentiles II 29, does not pertain to God, since His decision and action is independent of any constriction (debitum). Rather, absolute necessity pertains to the immaterial or “separated” beings as well as to those bodies in which the form fulfills all potentialities of their matter, as is the case with the heavenly bodies transported in circles. As for terrestrial (sublunar) bodies, their forms are imperfectly realized. Matter, as the potentiality to take different forms, is at the origin of their contingency, that is, it is the source of the possibility to realize or not to realize certain effects (II 30): “But in things whose form does not fulfill the total potentiality of the matter, there still remains in the matter the potentiality of another form.”8 For the low realm of birth, corruption, and change, Thomas speaks of conditional necessity (necessitas conditionalis). In the sublunary sphere, contingency cohabits with absolute necessity (e.g., the inevitability of the death for all animals and the hylomorphic composition of all bodies). Whereas necessity pertains to the formal determinations of natural phenomena, contingency is the partial fulfillment of necessary tendencies (II 23): For the power of every agent which acts by natural necessity is determined to one effect; that is why all natural things invariably happen in the same way, unless there be an obstacle; while voluntary things do not. God’s power, however, is not ordered to one effect only […]. Therefore, God acts, not out of natural necessity, but by His will.9

Thomas points to natural regularities as a sign of the causal determination of the effects. Nonetheless, he adds, impedimenta can hinder the production of these effects. Furthermore, the will, in particular divine will, is not determined (non ordinatur) to produce one specific effect. Note that the freedom of will (the liberum arbitrium) has a positive connotation that conditional necessity cannot receive. The natural reflections on contingency by Philipp Melanchthon are an instance of the lasting influence of Scholastic conceptions on nature even in a post-­Scholastic environment, such as reformed Wittenberg. In fact, Melanchthon’s intention as a Lutheran reformer of university curricula was to renounce Scholasticism, especially in theology, whereas he did not renounce the Aristotelian framework in philosophy. Nonetheless, his reflection on contingency documents a striking continuity between his philosophy and that of his medieval predecessors.

 Ibid., 48: “everything that can be and not-be” and “it is indifferent to either.”  Ibid., 87: “In quibus [rebus] vero forma non complet totam potentiam materiae, remanet adhuc in materia potentia ad aliam formam.” 9  Ibid., 68: “Omnis enim agentis per necessitatem naturae virtus determinatur ad unum effectum. Et inde est quod omnia naturalia semper eveniunt in eodem modo, nisi per impedimentum: non autem voluntaria. Divina autem virtus non ordinatur ad unum effectum tantum […]. Deus non agit per necessitate naturae, sed per voluntatem.” 7 8

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An entire chapter of his Initia doctrinae physicae is dedicated to the issue “De contingentia” (On Contingency). It begins with the distinction between celestial necessity (Non est animadversum, aliqua coeli partem mutatam esse, et motus coelestes servant perpetuas leges) and sublunary corruption. According to Melanchthon, in order to overcome this asymmetry, the ancient philosophers tried to reduce the conditions of one of these two realms to those of the other. The Epicureans, on the one hand, attributed an earth-like condition to the heavens by claiming that chance (casus) is the principle of both celestial and terrestrial phenomena. By contrast, the Stoics did not limit necessity to the motions of the heavenly bodies and judged all of nature to be ruled by the inescapable laws of the fatum (fate).10 Embracing an Aristotelian perspective, Melanchthon opposed both of these ancient schools with the view that nature is both necessitated and contingent in its different realms. “Necessity,” as one reads, has three distinct meanings. As necessitas absoluta (absolute necessity), it simply refers to that whose opposite is impossible (cuius contradictorium simpliciter est impossibile). Among the “absolute necessities,” Melanchthon includes the truth that God is free (Deus est libere agens), defining freedom as the faculty to act, to suspend an action, or to act differently (Libertas est facultas agendi, aut suspendendi actionem, aut aliter agendi).11 Second, natural necessity (necessitas physica) refers to ordinary regularities, in particular in astronomy. Melanchthon calls these regularities “laws of nature”: Physical necessity is an acting manner [modus agendi] ordered according to natural causes in such a manner that, if it is not interrupted by God, causes cannot act in a different way. E.g., the solar path is said to be necessary, because it cannot be changed other than by divine intervention.12

Thus, certain phenomena can be said to be necessary relative to their ordered occurrence, although they are not necessary as to their being. God’s action, which is not limited by natural constraints, is indeed the source of natural contingency. From His viewpoint as architectus et servator universi opificii mundi (architect and maintainer of the universal worldly construction), nature is intrinsically contingent as a whole. It is utmost certain that God is a very free agent. He is not bound to second causes, as the Stoics wrongly believed. This freedom of God’s will is the first origin of contingency. In fact, contingent is that which does not exist by necessity but, once it has been posited, it does not imply anything impossible. Moreover, although the heavens move freely and contingently from the viewpoint of the doctrine of the Church, nonetheless we say in philosophy that the ­heavens move by necessity. By that we refer to physical necessity. In fact, we speak about the order that has already been established.13  Melanchthon (1550), 31r-v.  Ibid., 32r. 12  Ibid., 35r: “Necessitas physica est modus agendi ordinatus in causis naturalibus, quo modo non interrupto a Deo, non possunt illae causae aliter agere, ut Solis cursus dicitur necessarius, quia mutari non potest, nisi divinitus.” 13  Ibid., 32v: “Certissimum est igitur, Deum esse agens liberrimum, non alligatum causis secudis, ut Stoici fingebant. Haec libertas voluntatis divinae, primus fons est Contingentiae. Est autem 10 11

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The third meaning of necessity is that of causal concatenation, whereby if certain causes are given, determined effects will follow (certo sequitur aliquid, quod tamen sua natura contingens est). According to Melanchthon, there are two sources of contingency in nature. One is material and depends on the various motions of the elements and their compounds (motus in elementis et mixtis). The other one is human freedom. The difference between the two is that whereas natural beings are directed toward one determined effect that they can realize or not (e.g., the vertical fall of a stone striving toward the center of the elements), human will can act in various directions and can also refrain from an action thanks to inner refrainment or impulses to the contrary.14 This freedom implies responsibility, since it includes the possibility to commit a sin, that is, the possibility to deviate from the laws of God. The distinction between voluntary freedom and natural necessity implies that, in Melanchthon’s terms, the “first” causes (e.g., the will) can act independently from the “second” causes (natural order). “The artisan acts differently from the matter he uses; the physician freely acts whereas his remedy acts physically.”15 In a similar but perfect manner, the highest artifex, that is, God, freely imposes onto nature the laws of physics.

8.3  S  ecundum Quid and Circularity as “Contingented Straightforwardness” in the Scholastic Scientia de Ponderibus The medieval scientia de ponderibus (science of weights) drew heavily on the idea of the conditional limitation of natural necessity depending on circumstances (secundum situationem, also literally meant as “depending on the position”). In particular, the concept of gravitas secundum quid, or positional heaviness, had a powerful explanatory function, most notably in the Aristotelian treatment of weights by Jordanus Nemorarius (fl. thirteenth century), and continued to be essential during the Renaissance, for instance, in reflections on mechanics by scholars such as Niccolò Tartaglia, Girolamo Cardano, and Giovanni Battista Benedetti.16 The meaning and function of contingency in mechanics was parallel to that in other disciplines such as ethics and logic. In ethics it was assumed that, whereas there can be no obstacle impeding the realization of God’s will, which is “absolute” (voluntas absoluta), human will, or voluntas secundum quid, is conditioned by

Contingens, quod non necessario existit, cum vero ponitur, nihil accidit impossibile. Quanquam igitur iuxta Ecclesiae doctrinam, Coelum libere et contingenter movetur, tamen cum nos in philosophia dicimus necessario moveri coelum, intelligimus, hanc necessitatem physicam, loquimur enim de ordine iam instituto.” 14  Ibid., 33r-v. 15  Ibid., 35r: “Aliter agit artifex, aliter materiam quam adhibet. Medicus libere agit, remedium vero naturaliter.” 16  See Renn and Damerow (2012), especially Sections from 3.6 to 3.8.

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circumstances.17 In other words, the realization of human will’s higher aims, revealed by God and reason, is intrinsically contingent, as Dante expressed in verses in the Divina commedia: Yet it is true that, even as a shape may, often, not accord with art’s intent, since matter may be unresponsive, deaf, so, from this course, the creature strays at times because he has the power, once impelled, to swerve elsewhere; as lightning from a cloud is seen to fall, so does the first impulse, when man has been diverted by false pleasure, turn him toward earth.

Apart from ethical contingency, Scholasticism also used secundum quid in logic. For instance, Petrus Hispanus (fl. thirteenth century), explained the meaning of the so-called fallacy secundum quid in his Tractatus sive summule logicales, commenting on Aristotle’s On Sophistical Refutations V (166b36–167a14).18 In logic, secundum quid meant either a “diminution” of a concept through restriction of its definition (secundum quid et simpliciter) or the designation of a subject through one of its parts or characteristics (denominatio totius per partem).19 In mechanics, the “limitation” or “determination” secundum quid implied that the dynamic tendency of a body was reduced or enhanced depending on intervening constraints or circumstances, in particular mechanical ones. The rotations of a lever around a pivot or of a balance around its fulcrum were conceptualized as constrained motions. In such displacements, the necessary vertical tendency of a weight resulted into a circular motion due to external constraints. At the same time, the heaviness (gravitas) of the bodies suspended at the extremities of a simple machine varied in relation to their changing positions within the system. In such cases, a necessary straightforward motion in accordance with natural order resulted contingently into a circular one. The implicit mental model for this kind of displacement was that circular motion is constrained rectilinear motion. This means that, in the sublunary sphere of contingency, straightforwardness and rectilinear tendency had a higher onto-epistemological status than circularity since straightforwardness was necessarily rooted in natural order. By contrast, circularity, as the deviation from such order, had to be explained. As a consequence, circularity (in the elementary sphere) was allotted a derived and subordinated onto-epistemological status. In other words, ­circularity was an instance of necessitas secundum quid. From this viewpoint, it was seen as a deviant realization of determined potentialities, similar to moral deviation from the necessary laws of uprightness or to the external regulation of physiological processes through medical intervention. In order to stress the embedding of the  Cf. ibid., Paradiso IV 87, IV 109, and IV 113 and Purgatorio VII 57.  Hispanus (1972), 157–158. 19  A fallacy secundum quid occurs if an identity is established between something considered in a particular respect and the same thing considered absolutely (or simpliciter). For instance, the existence of a depicted animal does not imply the existence of the animal simpliciter. Thus, the argument “est animal pictum, ergo est animal” is not correct. 17 18

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mechanical treatment of the scientia de ponderibus in the Scholastic framework of contingency, one could also formulate the principle as follows: “circular motion is contingented rectilinear motion.” At the beginning of his treatise “On weights,” Nemorarius pointed to his Aristotelian background. As one reads, his approach is based on the opposition between the natural vertical motion of the elements and the violent hindrances producing circular deviation. At the same time, he introduced the key concept of gravitas secundum quid (and, in some cases, also of levitas secundum quid), which could be referred to as “positional heaviness”: […] if equal arcs are taken on a greater circle, and on a smaller one, the chord of the arc of the greater circle is longer. From this I can then show that a weight on the arm of a balance becomes lighter, to the extent that it descends along the semicircle. For let it descend from the upper end of the semicircle, descending continuously. I then say that since the longer arc of the circle is more contrary to a straight line, than is the shorter arc, the fall of the heavy body along the greater arc is more contrary to the fall which the heavy body would have along the straight line, than is a fall through a shorter arc. It is therefore clear that there is more violence in the movement over the longer arc, than over the shorter one; otherwise the motion would become heavier. Since something moves with more violence in the ascent [along the arc], it is apparent that there is more positional heaviness [gravitas secundum situm] and, as it is like that depending on position [secundum situationem], one can aptly call it ‘positional heaviness’ [gravitas secundum situm].20

In its circular descent along a circular path, a weight deviates from its natural tendency, or intentio. The more the arm of the balance departs from the horizontal position, the more it departs from the natural tendency. It is assumed therefore that the greater the “violence,” the longer the arc of displacement, while the weight progressively loses its weight if the vertical component in its motion is reduced (Fig. 8.1). Nemorarius argued that a weight that reaches the bottom of the circular arc described by the arm in its displacement is not “at rest” but only “lighter.” In fact, a natural being is at rest only if it fully realizes the aim (or act) toward which its power is directed teleologically. By contrast, a body is always in motion, or strives to move, if it has not reached its end: “All motion strives toward its aim—indeed the whole nature strives towards actuality and is realized [in it]—hence the opposition

 Nemorarius (1533), A3v (emphasis added): “[…] si sumantur de circulo maiori et minori arcus aequales, corda arcum maioris circuli longior est. Propeterea posset ex hoc ostendi, quod pondus in libra tanto sit levius, quanto plus descendit in semicirculo. Incipiat igitur mobile descendere a summo semicirculi, et descendat continue. Dico tunc quod maior arcus circuli plus contrariatur rectae lineae quam minor, et casus gravis per arcum maiorem, plus contrariatur casui gravis, qui per rectam fieri debet, quam casus per arcum minorem. Patet ergo maior est violentiam in motus secundum arcum maiorem, quam secundum minorem. Aliter enim fieret motus magis gravis. Cum ergo plus in ascensu aliquod movetur violentiae, patet, quam maiore est gravitas secundum situm, et quia secundum situationem talium sic sit, dicatur gravitas secundum situm.” Here and in the following, Latin grammar, capitalization and punctuation have been modernized and standardized.

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Fig. 8.1  Diagram accompanying preposition two in Apianus’s 1533 edition of Nemorarius’s Liber de ponderibus (1533, f. B2r)

occurs against [a displacement] contrary [to the natural tendency].”21 If a body on one arm of the balance becomes lighter during its downward motion than an equal one located on the other extremity, as Nemorarius takes pains to demonstrate, then a balance removed from its state of equilibrium will tend to restore the original state. As one reads in the propositio secunda (second proposition, which is referred to the diagram in Fig. 8.1), which is the second of a series of propositions developing the details of Nemorarius’s doctrine of weights: Suppose now that the descent occurs on the side B and the ascent on the side C. I say that both will go back to the [horizontal] position of equality. In fact, B will not further descend, because its descent towards D is more oblique than the ascent of C towards the [horizontal position of] equality; in fact, B and C are equidistant from the place of equality.22

 Ibid., A4r: “In termino enim cuiscunque motus intenditur, intenditur et viget tota natura in actu, qui in motu sit quasi in potentia, secundum quem fiebat contrarietatis suae oppositio.” 22  Ibid., B2r-v: “Ponatur nunc, quod fiat descensus a parte B, et ascensus a parte C, dico quod redibunt ad situm aequalitatis. Non enim ulterius descendet B, eo quod descensus eius versus D magis obliquus est, quam ascensus C ad aequalitatem; B enim et C iam aequaliter distant a situ aequalitatis.” 21

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Fig. 8.2  In the Quesiti et inventioni diverse, Tartaglia argued that the relative positional heaviness of the weights A and B on a balance could be determined on the basis of the “mixed” angles of contact HAF and DBF.  Since it is argued that DBF