Worldviews - Ptolemaic, Copernican/Newtonian, Buffon

Ancient

• Plato (420s - 347 B.C.)
• Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
• Ptolemy, Almagest (2c A.D.)
• medicine
  • Empedocles (440s B.C.)
  • Hippocrates (460-370 B.C.)
  • Galen (2c A.D.)

Aristotelianism

• aequivoca (spontaneous)
• succus (or vis) lapidificus (force, property)

Neo-Platonism
resemblances

cosmology
sublunary
elements
humoral theory
quintessence

Ptolemy, Almagest (2c A.D.)

• eccentric
• epicycle
• equant

Copernicus, 1543

corpustular theory

• Democritus, Epicurus, Lucritius
• Galileo, Gassendi, Descartes, Boyle
  • volume, mass, motion

occult qualities
forces, properties
horror vacui (nature abhors a vacuum)

Theory of the Earth

• Descartes
  • Le monde (1633)
  • Principia philosophiae (1644)
    • res extensa
    • res cogitans
• Athanasius Kircher, S.J., Mundus Subterraneus, 1665
• Johann Becher, Physica Subterranea, 1667
  • terra fluida (mercury)
  • terra lapida (salt)
  • terra pinguis (sulphur)
• Nicolas Steno (1638-86)
  • De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus (1669)
  • glossopetrae / Natterzungen
• Thomas Burnet, Telluris theoria sacra (1681)
• Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687)
• Leibniz, Protogaea (1694, pub. 1749)

Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707-88), Histoire naturelle (1749-88)

1. Théorie de la Terre (incl. prefatory essay de la manière d'étudier l'histoire naturelle)
2. Histoire générale des animaux
3. Histoire naturelle de l'homme

• short chronology
• long chronology
• human chronology