Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands.
Ann Sci. 2022 Jan;79(1):1-39. doi: 10.1080/00033790.2021.1992502. Epub 2021 Nov 15.
Although natural philosophy underwent dramatic transformations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, studying its evolution as a whole remains problematic. In this paper, we present a method that integrates traditional reading and computational tools in order to distil from different resources (the four existing of early modern philosophers and ) a representative corpus (consisting of 2,535 titles published in Latin, French, English, and German) for mapping the evolution of natural philosophy. In particular, we focus on gathering authors and works that were (directly or indirectly) engaged with the teaching of natural philosophy in the early modern academic milieu. We offer a preliminary assessment of the relevance of our corpus by investigating one aspect of this evolution, namely the trends in the acknowledgments of authorities linked with different and competing approaches to natural philosophy (scholastic, Cartesian, and Newtonian). The results not only corroborate existing knowledge, but they also show distinctive features and differences within these trends that were not observed previously, thus illustrating the heuristic potential of our computational method for corpus collection.
尽管自然哲学在 17 世纪和 18 世纪经历了巨大的变革，但将其作为一个整体进行研究仍然存在问题。在本文中，我们提出了一种方法，将传统阅读和计算工具相结合，从不同的资源（现存的四位早期现代哲学家的全集和 ）中提取一个具有代表性的语料库（由 2535 种以拉丁语、法语、英语和德语出版的著作组成），以绘制自然哲学的演变图。特别是，我们专注于收集那些（直接或间接地）参与早期现代学术环境中自然哲学教学的作者和作品。我们通过研究这种演变的一个方面，即与自然哲学的不同和竞争方法（经院哲学、笛卡尔哲学和牛顿哲学）相关的权威认可的趋势，对我们的语料库的相关性进行了初步评估。研究结果不仅证实了现有知识，而且还展示了这些趋势内部的独特特征和差异，这些特征和差异以前没有被观察到，从而说明了我们用于语料库收集的计算方法的启发潜力。
