Flavia Marcacci

Pontifical Lateran University · Department of Philosophy

Si può dire che nell’Età moderna Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598-1671) abbia fatto parlare spesso di sé. Lo menzionano Johannes Hevelius e Christiaan Huygens, è nota la sua collaborazione con Francesco Maria Grimaldi, è fitta la sua corrispondenza, tra gli altri, tra gli altri, con Giannantonio Rocca, Athanasius Kircher e Giovanni Domenico Cassini...

Species are considered the basic unit of biological classification and evolution. Hence, they are used as a benchmark in several fields, although the ontological status of such a category has always been a matter of debate. This paper aims to discuss the problem of the definition of species within the new mechanistic approach. Nevertheless, the bou...

According to Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598–1671), planets describe orbits in a fluid heaven in a helio-geocentric model of cosmos. In his Almagestum Novum (1651) he stresses the need for a novel and rigorous geometrical explanation for the motion of heavenly bodies, which considers a separate Primum Mobile as an unnecessary hypothesis. Riccioli...

“Truth” and “cause” are essential issues in theology. Truths of faith are meant to remain solid and fundamental and can be traced back to the unique truth of God. The same God is conceived of as the Creator who brought everything into existence before every other cause. Recent discussions about scientific rationality and causality have engaged with...

Conference Poster

In his Histoire de l’astronomie modern (II, 1785, p. 211), J. Bailly argued that the Jesuit astronomer Riccioli had not understood Kepler’s laws. This has been questioned (J.L. Russell, 1964) and deserves consideration. Kepler’s astronomy must have been known in Jesuit circles and Riccioli could have studied it. He played a role in the comprehensio...

The urgency of understanding the pandemic has exponentially increased the circulation of information. The main directions of information transfer have been internal, that is within scholarly communities, and external, that is towards the public. The very manner in which scientific communication is produced has also changed. While the difficulty of...

During the 17th century, the debate over the true world system ( sistema mundi ) was essentially between the heliocentric and geo-heliocentric models. Comparisons were made between tables that recorded more and more celestial observations in various printed astronomical works. Giovanni Battista Riccioli’s Almagestum novum (1651) provides an excelle...

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the logical structure of Melissus philosophy, building on Laks Most’s translation and Barnes’ seminal work on the Samian. This will allow us to shed some light on the subtle argumentations of Melissus. On top of that, we frame Melissus’ metaphysics employing modern logical instruments. On one side, this refor...

Parmenides and Melissus employ different deductive styles for their different kinds of argumentation. The former’s poem flows in an interesting sequence of passages: contents foreword, methodological premises, krisis, conclusions and corollaries. The latter, however, organizes an extensive process of deduction to show the characteristics of what is...

Like in the previous volumes of the series, the book encompasses two parts: Firstly, the main author Livio Rossetti gives three lectures on the Eleatics, aiming to open up new perspectives on them. For instance, he delves into Zeno’s paradoxes – not to attempt to resolve them as has been attempted too many times, but to find how Zeno mounted them a...

In his Almagestum Novum (1651), the Jesuit astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598-1671) presented an elaborate and original semi-geocentric system in which he offered a detailed confrontation between world-systems, which are sometimes referred to as systema and sometimes as hypotheses. This second term occurs when competing various astronomica...

Astronomy and Cosmology at the Pio IX Library Ancient Collection

In Communia Mathematica Roger Bacon (ca. 1214-1294) sketches why and how mathematics can be useful, or useless, for all other sciences, including metaphysics and theology. Bacon's work provides a synthesis of mathematical notions, essentially selected from the Elements by Euclid. In a large part of Communia Mathematica, the Doctor mirabilis especia...

For Llull, one of the most important concepts of thinking and exploring reality is the notion of divine attributes: they serve as a means of understanding and ordering the world, contemplating God and dialoguing with thinkers of other religions. Even in Llull’s early writings one can fi nd an amazingly elaborate concept of divine attributes which L...

The methodology of Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598-1671) is characterized by an examination of prior opinions and arguments, and a discussion of the observational data or the ecclesiastical tradition, depending on whether the problem belongs to physics and astronomy or to philosophy and theology. Riccioli often offers his conclusion as the “most p...

In his historical works, Agazzi explicitly examines some methodological perspectives. As a matter of fact, according to him, the history of science needs methodological perspectives in order to clarify its own contents. Similarly, epistemology needs the history of science to find realistically itself. These are, respectively, a top-down and a botto...

The Jesuit astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598-1671) proposed an original astronomical system as an intermediate solution between the Copernican and the Ptolemaic systems. Many scholars describe his system as “geocentric”, and so does Riccioli. He uses the Tychonic solution by adding a lot of differences, for instance, the order of the orbi...

Although early-modern Franciscans are predominantly known as preachers, theologians, and religious authors, several of them also had scientific interests as well. One of the more intriguing among them was Ilario Altobelli (1560-1637), a friend of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), mentioned by Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) and other famous modern astronome...

Viene offerta una breve rassegna storica della relazione fra logica e ontologia e dell'opposizione fra le concezioni della logica come linguaggio e della logica come calcolo. Argomenteremo che la predicazione è più fondamentale dell'appartenenza e che differenti teorie della predicazione sono basate su differenti teorie degli universali, essendo le...