Between Demonstration and Imagination: Essays in the History of Science and Philosophy Presented to John D. North

443 Pages·1999·100.124 MB·English

by  Lodi Nauta, Arjo Vanderjagt

BRILL'S STUDIES
IN
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
General Editor
A.J. VANDERJAGT, University of Groningen
Editorial Board
M. COLISH, Oberlin College
J.I. ISRAEL, University College, London
J.D. NORTH, University of Groningen
H.A. OBERMAN, University of Arizona, Tucson
R.H. POPKIN, Washington University, St. Louis-UCLA
VOLUME 96

John D. North
BETWEEN
DEMONSTRATION
AND IMAGINATION
Essays in the History of Science and Philosophy
Presented to John D. North
EDITED BY
LODI NAUTA AND ARJO VANDERJAGT
BRILL
LEIDEN · BOSTON · KÖLN
1999
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Between demonstration and imagination : essays in the history of
science and philosophy presented to John D. North / edited by Lodi
Nauta and Arjo Vanderjagt.
p. cm. — (Brill's studies in intellectual history, ISSN
0920-8607 ; v. 96)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9004114688 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Astronomy—History. 2. Philosophy. I. North, John David.
II. Nauta, Lodi. III. Vanderjagt, Arie Johan. IV. Series.
QB15.B56 1999
520'.9—dc21 99-24783
GIP
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Between demonstration and imagination : essays in the history of
science and philosophy - presented to John D. North / ed. by Lodi
Nauta and Arjo Vanderjagt. - Leiden ; Boston ; Köln : Brill, 1999
(Brill's studies in intellectual history ; Vol. 96)
ISBN 90-04-11468-8
ISSN 0920-8607
ISBN 90 04 11468 8
© Copyright 1999 by Koninklijke Bull NV, Uiden, The Netherlands
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
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PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS
CONTENTS
Due North vii
Contributors xv
List of Illustrations xvii
SECTION ONE
ASTROLABES, HOROSCOPES, AND THE DIVISION OF TIME
1. Bringing Astronomical Instruments Back to Earth—The
Geographical Data on Medieval Astrolabes (to ca. 1100)
DAVID A. KING 3
2. The Treatise on the Astrolabe by Rudolf of Bruges
RICHARD LORCH 55
3. Horoscopes and History: Ibn cAzzOz and His Retrospective
Horoscopes Related to the Battle of El Salado (1340)
JULIO SAMSÓ 101
4. The Names and Faces of the Hours
FRANCIS MADDISON AND ANTHONY TURNER 125
SECTION TWO
MEDIEVAL ASTRONOMY, COSMOLOGY,
AND NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
5. ' Abd al-Masïh of Winchester
CHARLES BURNETT 159
6. Calcidius's Commentary on Plato's Timaeus in Latin Astronomy
of the Ninth to Eleventh Centuries
BRUCE S. EASTWOOD 171
7. Sacrobosco Illustrated
OWEN GINGERICH 211
8. Astronomy in the Medieval Spanish Jewish Community
BERNARD R. GOLDSTEIN 225
9. God, Science, and Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages
EDWARD GRANT 243
vi CONTENTS
10. A Strange Fact About Aristotelian Dynamics
KEITH HUTCHISON ..269
11. The Works and Days of Simon Bredon, a Fourteenth-Century
Astronomer and Physician
K.V. SNEDEGAR 285
SECTION THREE
EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY AND SCHOLARSHIP
12. A Humanist Reading of Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiae:
The Commentary by Murmellius and Agricola (1514)
LODINAUTA 313
13. 1st Tschimhaus' Medicina mentis ein Ableger von Spinozas
Methodologie?
DETLEV PÄTZOLD 339
14. 'Something, I Know Not What'. The Concept of Substance in
Early Modern Thought
HAN VAN RULER 365
15. Les Vite di matematici Arabi de Bernardino
Baldi(Urbino 1553-1617)
G. FEDERICI VESCOVINI 395
Bibliography of John D. North 409
Index of Personal Names 419
DUE NORTH
John North belongs to a class of scholars of which he seems to be the only
member. While most of us are glad to become a specialist in one or two
areas and concentrate on one particular historical period throughout our
careers, North's published works cover the entire history of science from the
long barrows of the Neolithic period to the black holes in modem
cosmology. He employs mathematical astronomy with the same ease with
which he reads medieval astronomical tables, calendars and almanacs, and
he knows the principles of astrolabes as intimately as those of the modem
computer. Whatever subject comes under discussion, he brings to it a histori
cal sensitivity which avoids the Scylla of an analytical approach without
history and the Charybdis of an exegetical approach without analysis. These
essays, written by some of his colleagues for the occasion of his sixty-fifth
birthday, can therefore mirror only a few of his interests.
John David North was bom in Cheltenham in 1934. From an early age he
was interested in mathematics, trying to refute Euler's formula on polyhedra
at the age of 16. He studied mathematics at Merton College in Oxford, but
soon his interests took him further afield to philosophy. He attended the
lectures of Gilbert Ryle, the seminars of J. L. Austin and H. P. Grice, and
those on logic by P. Strawson and W. Kneale. Philosophers with a scientific
background were few in Oxford, and North was lucky to have John Lucas as
one of his tutors. Even more important was his meeting with Alistair Crom-
bie, who had shortly arrived in Oxford to teach the history of science. Crom-
bie's seminars greatly stimulated North's awakening interest in an historical
approach towards philosophical and scientific subjects, an approach
conspicuously absent in analytical philosophy. As North later said, these
seminars were truly memorable occasions, bringing him into contact with
scholars such as Gerd Buchdahl, James Weisheipl, Alexander Koyré, G. J.
Whitrow, H. R. Harré and many others, but above all with Crombie himself,
with whom he became a life-long friend until the latter's death in 1996.
North's thesis, published as The Measure of the Universe. A History of
Modern Cosmology, already showed the features that have been his hallmark
ever since: thoroughness, completeness of exposition, an enviably easy
mastery of the required mathematics, a lucid style and a strong sense of the
historical dimension in which scientific achievements must be viewed. The
book was praised as 'a virtually complete history of modem mathematical
cosmological theories', and its reprint as a Dover paperback in 1990 indica-
Vlll DUE NORTH
tes that it has not been surpassed in breadth, scope and attention to technical
detail.
North's intellectual universe had never been a steady-state, but from then
on it was rapidly expanding, or perhaps we should say, contracting, for his
interests took him ever further back in time. In the mid 1960s he was asked
to explain the workings of a scientific instrument sent by The Museum
Boerhave in Leiden. This was the beginning of a fascination with medieval
astronomy and astrology, astrolabes, clocks, calendars, tables, almanacs, and
so forth. Fortunately, he did not pay attention to Lorenzo Minio-Paluello's
advice not to be seduced by the blandishments of the past: 'Look, North,
what it has done to me!' North soon mastered the principles of the instru
ment and was able to explain all its features. His studies of medieval (and in
particular fourteenth-century) astronomy and astrology culminated in his
monumental work in three volumes on Richard of Wallingford (1976), the
fourteenth-century abbot of St Albans who was also an important astronomer
and mathematician. North edited, translated and commented on all of
Richard's extant works. The most important text is the oldest surviving
description of any mechanical clock, which North had found in the Bodleian
Library. The Treatise on the Albion receives a masterful commentary, as
does the Quadripartitum, the first comprehensive treatise on spherical trigo
nometry in Western Europe. Everything is explained: clocks and the impor
tance of mechanical escapements, astronomical tables, calendars, spherical
trigonometry, astrological meteorology and much more. The world of
Richard of Wallingford, in which the craft tradition was united with the
academic, was an unfamiliar one to most historians of science, who were
more interested in the achievements of the Mertonian Calculators, including
Thomas Bradwardine, William Heytesbury, John Dumbleton, and Richard
Swineshead. These scholars were discussed in other publications by North,
notably in his two long chapters written for the History of the University of
Oxford, published in 1992, almost 20 years after their composition.
Much of this work on fourteenth-century science was done during his
years as curator of scientific instruments at the Old Ashmolean Museum
(1968-77), where as a student he had attended Crombie's seminars. He was a
visiting scholar in Frankfurt (1967) and Aarhus (1974), and became close
friends with Willy Hartner and Olaf Pedersen. He came back to Oxford not
so much with a changed perspective on the subject but with an ever-
increasing knowledge of it and of the people who studied it. He was
therefore in a perfect position to take up the job of general editor of the
Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences, which he ran for almost 10
years with great efficiency and tact.
The fourteenth century remained at the centre of North's attention. In the
late sixties he had published a series of articles on Chaucer in which he
DUE NORTH ix
showed that some of Chaucer's poetry is structured around the calendar and
the planetary almanac. Obviously, this has implications for the dating of
Chaucer's works. He continued to work on Chaucer and found out that his
earlier picture had been far too cautious. In Chaucer's Universe (1988),
praised by Alastair Fowler as one of 'the century's monuments of scholars
hip' {Times Literary Supplement, 2 Dec. 1988), North showed that Chaucer
had recourse to a great variety of astronomical techniques and employed
astrological lore for structuring his plots (which had their literary sources, of
course) and dressing up his tales. Some of Chaucer's pilgrims and other
characters are modelled on the stars (for example, Chauntecleer's hens on
the Pleiades), some of the plots are imitations of cosmic events {The
Knight's Tale, for example, is full of correspondences between planets, gods
and human subjects), while other works, such as The Parliament of Fowls,
have several independent forms of chronological reference. To say all this is
to risk, as North himself writes in the preface, 'of being bracketed with those
who try to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, or that the history of the
world is implicit in the music of Bach' (p. x). And this is only mildly put, as
he now knows: In a recent controversy about an astrological interpretation of
Holbein's painting The Ambassadors, he is bracketed with those who claim
that 'Elvis is alive', that a painting of Poussin gives indications where to find
the Holy Grail and that computer analysis of the Mona Lisa shows it to be a
self-portrait of Leonardi da Vinci in old age. He is reconciled with this fate,
and has grown used to letters from astrologers who apparently skipped the
preface to his monograph Horoscopes and History (1986), in which he states
with Nabokovian irony: 'Heaven forbid that the book should be judged as a
manual for astrologers—even though it may be safely expected to become
compulsory reading for all their introductory courses'.
By the time Chaucer's Universe was written, North was already fully
integrated in the social and intellectual life of Groningen, where he had
accepted the chair in the history of science and philosophy in 1977 (the
Dutch formulation may be omitted here for reasons of space). Historians of
science would not have mentioned Groningen as one of the centres of their
interests, but North found a lively and prospering university, which he has
come to like greatly, finding his second home, after Oxford, in Paterswolde.
Paterswolde brought him also something else. When plans of excavations
made on the site of a Bronze Age burial mound at Harenermolen, close to
Paterswolde, were shown to him, North noticed a symmetry which he found
intriguing and which led him to pursue an old interest in archaeo-astronomy.
This fascination resulted eventually in another major work of scholarship,
Stonehenge. Neolithic Man and the Cosmos (1996). Before he comes to
discuss the great monument itself, North gives a thorough survey of long
barrows as well as linear and ditched monuments from the later Neolithic