Rivka Feldhay

Jesuit Conceptions of Impetus After Galileo: Honoré Fabri, Paolo Casati, and Francesco Eschinardi

The fourteenth-century concept of impetus denotes an impressed force and was used to explain the continuation of the motion of projectiles and the acceleration of falling bodies. This chapter deals with the use of this concept in the period between Galileo’s death (1642) and the publication of Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687). Focusing on three major figures among contemporary Jesuit thinkers, the French Honore Fabri (1608–1688) and the Italians Paolo Casati (1617–1707) and Francesco Eschinardi (1623–1703), this chapter shows how these Jesuits employed the concept of impetus in their own versions of preclassical mechanics.

The humanities through the lens of migration: Richard Koebner’s transition from Germany to Jerusalem

Abstract The present article turns the spotlight onto epistemic-normative dilemmas that, in my estimation, stand at the heart of the humanities as a field of study (the reason for the hyphen between epistemic and normative will become evident as we progress). For the sake of elucidating these productive tensions, we will delve into the thought of Richard Koebner (1885–1958) – a Jewish historian that emigrated from Germany to Palestine in 1934. This transition crystallized the above-mentioned dilemmas in his own mind, from both a personal and theoretical standpoint. More specifically, he developed a critical historiographic outlook on the past and present alike. A major focus of his deliberations was the nature of humanistic knowledge, not least historiography. Though this question preoccupied Koebner throughout his academic career, the new circumstances in Palestine/Israel sharpened and shaped his perspective.

The Global and the Local in the Study of the Humanities

This chapter focuses on some tensions—inherent to the humanities as a field of studies—between an epistemic commitment to truth, an ethical and political commitment to reflexivity and critique, and the quest of the arts and sciences for institutional autonomy. In the first part I delineate a quick genealogy of the problem of the humanities in three stations: the Studia Humanitatis of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries; Kant’s ideas of the freedom of philosophy; and Humboldt’s conceptualization of the position of the university vis-a-vis the state and the nation. In the second part I present the migration of the tradition of Geisteswissenschaften to Palestine and its transformation into Madaei Haruah at the Hebrew University. I conclude with a few words about the present and future of the humanities in Israel.

The Simulation of Nature and the Dissimulation of the Law on a Baroque Stage: Galileo and the Church Revisited

This paper presents the way Galileo’s telescopic observations were woven into a new kind of astronomical discourse that provoked extreme reactions by the Catholic establishment of those days. Galileo, I shall argue, invented his own strategies for dealing with the gap opened up by the telescope between appearances and being – between what seemed to be the case and what actually was out there. In doing so, Galileo added a dimension to the practices of signification common in the political, theological and theatrical arenas of Baroque culture. In each of these areas, the gap between “seem and be” was haunting political actors and courtiers, theologians and playwrights. Obviously, the need to cope with such gap gave birth to new or modified cultural forms, among them new forms of representation and allegory. Following Louis Marin’s work on the discourse of representation around the King’s portrait (Marin 1988), as well as Walter Benjamin’s argument on the centrality of allegorical practices in Baroque theatre (Benjamin 1977), I shall isolate two additional arenas in which Baroque forms of representation and allegory were used: in Galileo’s attempt to cope with the visual evidence about the heavens on the one hand; and in the Inquisition trial of the Medici mathematician-philosopher on the other. My aim is to show that the constitution of a new kind of scientific discourse and the challenge it posed to Catholic hegemony took active part in Baroque rituals of representation and allegory, and that those should not be read as mere literary techniques. Rather, Galileo’s use of representation and allegory involved him in a highly sophisticated system of communication relevant for understanding different dimensions of a baroque scholar’s life. In the last part of the paper I will point out how, during the trial of Galileo, allegorical practices were stretched beyond the limit of signification and transformed into a mode of dissimulation – a recognized practice defined by contemporaries as “dissimulazione onesta”.

Critical Reactions to the Occult A Comment

It is an honor and a great pleasure for me to comment on Brian Vickers’ stimulating paper. First because I have to admit, somewhat to my embarrassment, that the occult itself appeals to my imagination, as it has always done to many naive minds, who have also perhaps felt the need for “a little magic” to cope with the incongruities of reality. Second, more seriously, because the problem of the occult sciences, their revival during the Renaissance, and their decline in the seventeenth century seems to me central to the understanding of the much wider issue of the transition of European culture from traditionalism to modernity. I think that, like Vickers, I am rather struck by the difficulty of reducing this phenomenon to simple terms, and like him I feel a kind of dissatisfaction with recurrent attempts to analyze its different aspects, attempts which, in spite of growing sophistication, have failed to capture it in its totality. In spite of the proliferation of attempts to analyze that transition, many of them are still characterized by a kind of one-sidedness which leaves enough space for further discussion.