Harmonia Philosophica

The goal of this book is to show that dogmatism, under any form, is wrong. And even though dogmatism had for a long time been associated with religion, things have drastically changed in the last centuries. Nowadays science has replaced religion in the throne of doctrinaire thinking and the poison of materialism has dominated human intellect to a great extend. In this work one can read how separate opinions on crucial philosophical matters can be merged into one single "truth", if such thing even exists. The point of every chapter is to illustrate that one-way thinking is never correct – most of the times a combination of science and religion, measurements and theoretical thinking, logic and intuition, is required to draw a conclusion.

How Latin philosophical vocabulary developed through the translation of Greek sources, the varieties of translation practices Roman philosophers favoured, and how these practices evolved over time are the overarching themes of this monograph. A first of its kind, this comparative study analyzes the creation of philosophical vocabulary in Lucretius, Cicero, Apuleius, Calcidius, and Boethius. It highlights a Latin literary tradition in which the dominance of Greek philosophical expression was challenged and renovated over time through the individual translation choices of different Latin authors. Included are full glossaries of Latin and Greek philosophical terms with explanatory notes for the reader.

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The Aspiring Adept presents a provocative new view of Robert Boyle (1627-1691), one of the leading figures of the Scientific Revolution, by revealing for the first time his avid and lifelong pursuit of alchemy. Boyle has traditionally been considered, along with Newton, a founder of modern science because of his mechanical philosophy and his experimentation with the air-pump and other early scientific apparatus. However, Lawrence Principe shows that his alchemical quest--hidden first by Boyle's own codes and secrecy, and later suppressed or ignored--positions him more accurately in the intellectual and cultural crossroads of the seventeenth century. Principe radically reinterprets Boyle's most famous work, The Sceptical Chymist, to show that it criticizes not alchemists, as has been thought, but "unphilosophical" pharmacists and textbook writers. He then shows Boyle's unambiguous enthusiasm for alchemy in his "lost" Dialogue on the Transmutation and Melioration of Metals, now reconstructed from scattered fragments and presented here in full for the first time. Intriguingly, Boyle believed that the goal of his quest, the Philosopher's Stone, could not only transmute base metals into gold, but could also attract angels. Alchemy could thus act both as a source of knowledge and as a defense against the growing tide of atheism that tormented him. In seeking to integrate the seemingly contradictory facets of Boyle's work, Principe also illuminates how alchemy and other "unscientific" pursuits had a far greater impact on early modern science than has previously been thought.