bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Oxford Calculators
Authors: Sylla Edith Dudley 
Published: September 2018

‘Oxford Calculators’ is a modern label for a group of thinkers at Oxford in the mid-fourteenth century, whose approach to problems was noticed in the immediately succeeding centuries because of their tendency to solve by ‘calculations’ all sorts of problems previously addressed by other methods. If for example the question was, what must a monk do to obey the precept of his abbot to pray night and day, a ‘calculator’ might immediately rephrase the question to ask whether there is a minimum time spent in prayer that would be sufficient to fulfil the abbot’s precept, or a maximum time spent that would be insufficient to fulfil the precept. Or, if grace was supposed to be both what enables a Christian to act meritoriously and a reward for having so acted, then a calculator might ask whether the degree of grace correlated with a meritorious act occurs at the moment of the meritorious act, before the act when the decision to act is being made, or after the act when the reward of increased grace is given. If a body was hot at one end but cold at the other, then a calculator might ask not whether it is to be labelled hot or cold, but how hot it is as a whole. Finally, if it was asked whether a heavy body acts as a whole or as the sum of its parts, then a calculator might take the case of a long thin rod falling through a tunnel pierced through the centre of the earth and attempt to calculate how the rod’s velocity would decrease as parts of the rod passed the center of the cosmos, if it acted as the sum of its parts.
Of these four questions, the last two were asked by Richard Swineshead, a mid-fourteenth century fellow of Merton College, Oxford, whose Liber calculationum (Book of Calculations) led to his being given the name ‘Calculator’. By association with Richard Swineshead, other Oxford masters including Thomas Bradwardine, Richard Kilvington, William Heytesbury, Roger Swineshead and John Dumbleton have been labelled the ‘Oxford Calculators’. Their work contains a distinctive combination of logical and quantitative techniques, which results from the fact that it was often utilized in disputations on sophismata (de sophismatibus). This same group of thinkers, with emphasis on their mathematical rather than logical work, has been called the ‘Merton School’, because many but not all of the Calculators were associated with Merton College, Oxford. Besides calculatory works, the same authors wrote works in which calculatory techniques are not so prominent, including commentaries on Aristotle, mathematical compendia and commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences.
Platonism, medieval
Authors: Moran Dermot 
Published: September 2018

Medieval Platonism includes the medieval biographical tradition, the transmission of the dialogues, a general outlook spanning commitment to extramental ideas, intellectualism in cognition, emphasis on self-knowledge as the source of philosophizing, and employment of the dialogue form. Platonism permeated the philosophy of the Church Fathers, the writings of Anselm and Abelard, the twelfth-century renaissance, the Italian Renaissance and the northern renaissance. Indeed the mathematical treatment of nature, which inspired the birth of modern science in the works of Kepler and Galileo, stems in part from late medieval Pythagorean Platonism.
The term ‘Platonism’ is of seventeenth-century origin. Medieval authors spoke not of Platonism but rather of Plato and of Platonists (platonici), applying the term ‘Platonist’ to an extreme extramental realism about universals, or a commitment to the extramental existence of the Ideas. Thus John of Salisbury characterized Bernard of Chartres as ‘the foremost Platonist of our time’ in regard to his theory of ideas. For Aquinas, Platonists hold an overly intellectualist account of human knowledge, ignoring the mediation of the senses. In general, medieval writers agreed with Cassiodorus’ maxim, Plato theologus, Aristoteles logicus. Plato was primarily a theologian, an expert on the divine, eternal, immaterial and intelligible realm, a classifier of the orders of angelic and demonic beings, whereas Aristotle was primarily a logician and classifier of the forms of argument.
Medieval Platonism combines elements drawn from Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism. It generally assumes a dualistic opposition of the divine and temporal worlds, with the sensible world patterned on unchanging immaterial forms, often expressed as numbers. It also affirms the soul’s immortality and direct knowledge of intelligible truths, combined with a suspicion of the mortal body and a distrust of the evidence of the senses. Neoplatonists sympathized with Porphyry’s aim (in his lost De harmonia Platonis et Aristotelis) of harmonizing Plato with Aristotle. A Platonic outlook (largely inspired by the Timaeus) dominates the early Middle Ages from the sixth to twelfth centuries, whereas the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the age of scholasticism, witnessed an explosion in the knowledge of Aristotelian texts, often transmitted through Arabic intermediaries. The new interest in Aristotle was such that, although the Timaeus was widely lectured on during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, by 1255 it was no longer required reading at the University of Paris. Interest in Plato re-emerged in the Italian Renaissance with the availability of genuine works of Plato, Plotinus and Proclus. Nevertheless, through Pseudo-Dionysius in particular, Platonism reverberates in many thirteenth-century authors, especially in theology.
Pseudo-Dionysius (fl. c. AD 500)
Authors: Jarka-Sellers Hannes 
Published: September 2018

‘Pseudo-Dionysius’ was a Christian Neoplatonist who wrote in the late fifth or early sixth century and who presented himself as Dionysius the Areopagite, an Athenian converted by St Paul. This pretence – or literary device – was so convincing that Pseudo-Dionysius acquired something close to apostolic authority, giving his writings tremendous influence throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.
The extant four treatises and ten letters articulate a metaphysical view of the cosmos, as well as a religious path of purification and perfection, that are grounded in the Neoplatonism developed in the Platonic Academy in Athens. Although this strand of Neoplatonist thought, in contrast to that developed at the school in Alexandria, was deliberately pagan in its religious orientation, Pseudo-Dionysius used its conceptual resources (drawing especially on Proclus) to give precision and depth to the philosophical principles of a Christian world view. Cardinal points of Pseudo-Dionysius’ thought are the transcendence of a first cause of the universe, the immediacy of divine causality in the world and a hierarchically ordered cosmos.
Wodeham, Adam (c.1298–1358)
Authors: Wood Rega 
Published: September 2018

An English Franciscan theologian, Wodeham was preoccupied with logical and semantic questions. He lectured for about a decade on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, first at London, then at Norwich and finally at Oxford. His lectures emphasized the dependence of the created world on God and the contingency of nature and salvation.
John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham exerted the most important influences on Wodeham. He regarded Scotus as a vigorous thinker and respected him enough to accept his opinion in case of doubt. Proud to have learned logic from Ockham, Wodeham devoted considerable time to defending Ockham’s views from Walter Chatton, whom he saw as someone whose errors in logic arose from malice as well as ignorance. However, despite Wodeham’s reservations about Chatton, he was considerably influenced by him. Similarly, Wodeham modified his own opinion about sensory illusions in response to Peter Aureol, whom he saw as skilled and prudent but often mistaken, sometimes as a result of faulty logic.
Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henricus Cornelius (1486–1535)
Authors: Keefer Michael H. 
Published: September 2018

Famous in the sixteenth century for writings in which he steps forward variously as magician, occultist, evangelical humanist and philosopher, Agrippa shared with other humanist writers a thoroughgoing contempt for the philosophy of the scholastics. In his more evangelical moods Agrippa could be taken for a radical exponent of the philosophia Christi of his older contemporary Erasmus, or mistaken for a follower of Luther, whose early writings he actively disseminated in humanist circles. However, his deepest affinities are with magically inflected philosophies: the Neoplatonism and Hermetism of Marsilio Ficino, and the syncretic Christian Kabbalah of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin and Johannes Trithemius.
As well as expounding an influential magical view of language, Agrippa contributed to the sixteenth-century revival of scepticism, denounced the ‘tyranny’ of those who obstructed a free search for truth, criticized the subjection of women and (with a courage unusual in his time) resisted and mocked the instigators of the witch-craze. Finding in Hermetic–Kabbalistic doctrines the inner truth both of religion and of philosophy, Agrippa was also aware of parallels between these magical doctrines and the Gnostic heresies. His heterodoxy made him a target for pious slanders: within several decades of his death he became the protagonist of demonological fictions which were soon absorbed into the legend of Dr Faustus.
Campanella, Tommaso (1568–1639)
Authors: Headley John M. 
Published: September 2018

Tommaso Campanella was a Counter-Reformation theologian, a Renaissance magus, a prophet, a poet and an astrologer, as well as a philosopher whose speculations assumed encyclopedic proportions. As a late Renaissance philosopher of nature, Campanella is notable for his early, and continuous, opposition to Aristotle. He rejected the fundamental Aristotelian principle of hylomorphism, namely the understanding of all physical substance in terms of form and matter. In its place he appropriated Telesio’s understanding of reality in terms of the dialectical principles of heat and cold; and he adopted a form of empiricism found in Telesio’s work that included pansensism, the doctrine that all things in nature are endowed with sense. Especially after 1602, Campanella’s exposure to Renaissance Platonism also involved him in panpsychism, the view that all reality has a mental aspect. Thus his empiricism came to show a distinctly metaphysical and spiritualistic dimension that transformed his philosophy. At the same time his epistemology embraced a universal doubt and an emphasis on individual self-consciousness that are suggestive of Descartes’ views.
Campanella’s career as a religious dissident, radical reformer and leader of an apocalyptic movement presents a political radicalism that was oddly associated with more traditional notions of universal monarchy and the need for theocracy. The only one of his numerous writings that receives attention today, La Città del Sole (The City of the Sun) (composed 1602, but not published until 1623), has come to occupy a prominent place in the literature of utopias though Campanella himself seems to have expected some form of astronomical/apocalyptic realization.
Campanella’s naturalism, especially its pansensism and panpsychism, enjoyed some currency in Germany and France during the 1620s, but in the last five years of his life it was emphatically rejected by the intellectual communities headed by Mersenne and Descartes, as well as by Galileo.
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni (1463–94)
Authors: Hankins James 
Published: September 2018

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, today the best known of Renaissance philosophers, was a child prodigy and gentleman scholar who studied humanities, Aristotelianism and Platonism with the greatest teachers of his day. He claimed to have mastered, by the age of twenty-four, all known theological systems, Christian and non-Christian, from Moses to his own time. He was the first important Christian student of the Jewish mystical theology known as Kabbalah. The purpose of Pico’s philosophical and theological studies was to produce a grand synthesis of religious wisdom which would both deepen understanding of Christian truth and also serve as an apologetic weapon against non-Christians. This was the project outlined in Pico’s most famous work, De dignitate hominis (On the Dignity of Man) (1486), and further illuminated by his Conclusiones (1486) and Apologia (1487). As part of this larger project, Pico planned to write a concord of Plato and Aristotle, of which only a fragment, the treatise De ente et uno (On Being and the One) (1491), was ever finished. Although he proposed to found a new theological school based on an esoteric reading of all theologies past and present, he did not believe that these theologies were the same in substance, differing only in expression. He insisted on the differences between Platonism and Christianity, while holding that every major theological tradition did contain some elements of truth.
In addition to other, non-philosophical works, Pico wrote the Commento (1486), a commentary on a Neoplatonic poem that in effect constituted a critique of Marsilio Ficino’s most famous work, the dialogue De amore (On Love) (1469). He criticized Ficino as too literary and defended the use of precise technical language in philosophy. Pico used Neoplatonic metaphysics to rediscover the ‘secret mysteries’ of pagan theology (though he sometimes criticized the reliability of the Neoplatonists as guides to Plato’s thought) and offered a fresh interpretation of the metaphysics of love based on his own reading of Platonic sources, seeing human erotic love as a psychological process distinct from cosmic love.
Ramus, Petrus (1515–72)
Authors: Mack Peter 
Published: September 2018

Petrus Ramus, for many years a professor of philosophy and eloquence at the University of Paris, wrote textbooks and controversial works in grammar, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, physics and philosophy. He was also a university reformer. His followers were prolific with commentaries, Ramist analyses of classical texts and handbooks of their own. His logical works and those of his school exercised a large influence between 1550 and 1650.
His formation was humanist, in that he attacked scholasticism and encouraged the study (and logical analysis) of classical texts, as Agricola, Sturm and Melanchthon had done. But he was far more independent-minded than them, a stern critic of the textbooks of Aristotle and Cicero, as well as an admirer of their style and intellect. His most important innovation was the method, a theory of organization which he used to simplify his textbooks. He emphasized the need for learning to be comprehensible and useful, with a particular stress on the practical aspect of mathematics. His critics would say he oversimplified. He was also a student of Gaulish pseudo-antiquities and an important proponent of the French language. His Dialectique (1555) was the first book on dialectic in French.
Bacon, Francis (1561–1626)
Authors: Milton J.R. 
Published: September 2018

Along with Descartes, Bacon was the most original and most profound of the intellectual reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He had little respect for the work of his predecessors, which he saw as having been vitiated by a misplaced reverence for authority, and a consequent neglect of experience. Bacon’s dream was one of power over nature, based on experiment, embodied in appropriate institutions and used for the amelioration of human life; this could be achieved only if the rational speculations of philosophers were united with the craft-skills employed in the practical arts.
The route to success lay in a new method, one based not on deductive logic or mathematics, but on eliminative induction. This method would draw on data extracted from extensive and elaborately constructed natural histories. Unlike the old induction by simple enumeration of the logic textbooks, it would be able to make use of negative as well as positive instances, allowing conclusions to be established with certainty, and thus enabling a firm and lasting structure of knowledge to be built.
Bacon never completed his project, and even the account of the new method in the Novum Organum (1620) remained unfinished. His writings nevertheless had an immense influence on later seventeenth-century thinkers, above all in stimulating the belief that natural philosophy ought to be founded on a systematic programme of experiment. Perhaps his most enduring legacy, however, has been the modern concept of technology – the union of rational theory and empirical practice – and its application to human welfare.
Berkeley, George (1685–1753)
Authors: Tipton Ian 
Published: September 2018

George Berkeley, who was born in Ireland and who eventually became Bishop of Cloyne, is best known for three works that he published while still very young: An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), and in particular for A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). In the Principles he argues for the striking claim that there is no external, material world; that houses, trees and the like are simply collections of ‘ideas’; and that it is God who produces ‘ideas’ or ‘sensations’ in our minds. The New Theory of Vision had gone some way towards preparing the ground for this claim (although that work has interest and value in its own right), and the Dialogues represent Berkeley’s second attempt to defend it. Other works were to follow, including De Motu (1721), Alciphron (1732) and Siris (1744), but the three early works established Berkeley as one of the major figures in the history of modern philosophy.
The basic thesis was certainly striking, and from the start many were tempted to dismiss it outright as so outrageous that even Berkeley himself could not have taken it seriously. In fact, however, Berkeley was very serious, and certainly a very able philosopher. Writing at a time when rapid developments in science appeared to be offering the key to understanding the true nature of the material world and its operations, but when scepticism about the very existence of the material world was also on the philosophical agenda, Berkeley believed that ‘immaterialism’ offered the only hope of defeating scepticism and of understanding the status of scientific explanations. Nor would he accept that his denial of ‘matter’ was outrageous. Indeed, he held that, if properly understood, he would be seen as defending the views of ‘the vulgar’ or ‘the Mob’ against other philosophers, including Locke, whose views posed a threat to much that we would ordinarily take to be common sense. His metaphysics cannot be understood unless we see clearly how he could put this interpretation on it; and neither will we do it justice if we simply dismiss the role he gives to God as emerging from the piety of a future bishop. Religion was under threat; Berkeley can probably be judged prescient in seeing how attractive atheism could become, given the scientific revolution of which we are the heirs; and though it could hardly be claimed that his attempts to ward off the challenge were successful, they merit respectful attention. Whether, however, we see him as the proponent of a fascinating metaphysics about which we must make up our own minds, or as representing merely one stage in the philosophical debate that takes us from Descartes to Locke and then to Hume, Kant and beyond, we must recognize Berkeley as a powerful intellect who had an important contribution to make.
Gassendi, Pierre (1592–1655)
Authors: Osler Margaret J. 
Published: September 2018

Pierre Gassendi, a French Catholic priest, introduced the philosophy of the ancient atomist Epicurus into the mainstream of European thought. Like many of his contemporaries in the first half of the seventeenth century, he sought to articulate a new philosophy of nature to replace the Aristotelianism that had traditionally provided foundations for natural philosophy. Before European intellectuals could accept the philosophy of Epicurus, it had to be purged of various heterodox notions. Accordingly, Gassendi modified the philosophy of his ancient model to make it conform to the demands of Christian theology.
Like Epicurus, Gassendi claimed that the physical world consists of indivisible atoms moving in void space. Unlike the ancient atomist, Gassendi argued that there exists only a finite, though very large number of atoms, that these atoms were created by God, and that the resulting world is ruled by divine providence rather than blind chance. In contrast to Epicurus’ materialism, Gassendi enriched his atomism by arguing for the existence of an immaterial, immortal soul. He also believed in the existence of angels and demons. His theology was voluntarist, emphasizing God’s freedom to impose his will on the Creation.
Gassendi’s empiricist theory of knowledge was an outgrowth of his response to scepticism. Accepting the sceptical critique of sensory knowledge, he denied that we can have certain knowledge of the real essences of things. Rather than falling into sceptical despair, however, he argued that we can acquire knowledge of the way things appear to us. This ‘science of appearances’ is based on sensory experience and can only attain probability. It can, none the less, provide knowledge useful for living in the world. Gassendi denied the existence of essences in either the Platonic or Aristotelian sense and numbered himself among the nominalists.
Adopting the hedonistic ethics of Epicurus, which sought to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, Gassendi reinterpreted the concept of pleasure in a distinctly Christian way. He believed that God endowed humans with free will and an innate desire for pleasure. Thus, by utilizing the calculus of pleasure and pain and by exercising their ability to make free choices, they participate in God’s providential plans for the Creation. The greatest pleasure humans can attain is the beatific vision of God after death. Based on his hedonistic ethics, Gassendi’s political philosophy was a theory of social contract, a view which influenced the writings of Hobbes and Locke.
Gassendi was an active participant in the philosophical and natural philosophical communities of his day. He corresponded with Hobbes and Descartes, and conducted experiments on various topics, wrote about astronomy, corresponded with important natural philosophers, and wrote a treatise defending Galileo’s new science of motion. His philosophy was very influential, particularly on the development of British empiricism and liberalism.