The Janus Faces of Science in the Seventeenth Century: Athanasius Kircher and Isaac Newton
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Roberto still did not understand what Father Caspar Wanderdrossel was. A sage? That, certainly, or at least a scholar, a man curious about both natural and divine science. An eccentric? To be sure. Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before During the second half of the seventeenth century two men in particular occupied a prominent place in the world of natural philosophy. Inhabiting respectively the capital cities of Rome and London, they had much in common. Both were deeply religious men, committed to the study of nature as a sure path toward the revelation of divine wisdom, who began their academic careers as professors of mathematics. Both valued the learning of the ancients, searching ever further into the pagan and Christian past in hope of illumination. For significant portions of their respective careers, that knowledge was found in the occult sciences. In all these respects, they typified the Christian encyclopedic approach to nature that humanists had practiced since the fifteenth century. They were quite probably, along with Leibniz, the last great humanist natural philosophers of the early modern period. Despite these many similarities we do not usually place the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–80) and the English philosopher Isaac Newton (1642–1727) side by side. For almost two centuries, they have inhabited the separate worlds created by modern histories of science and, to a lesser degree, articulated by intellectuals at the end of the seventeenth century who had begun to make these distinctions themselves.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".