Galilei, Galileo (1564–1642)

By McMullin, Ernan

Galileo Galilei, one of the most colourful figures in the long history of the natural sciences, is remembered best today for two quite different sorts of reason. He ...

Fardella, Michelangelo (c.1646–1718)

By Floridi, Luciano

Fardella was one of the first and most famous Italian Cartesians. Influenced by Malebranche and Leibniz, he rejected materialism in metaphysics, and endorsed a strongly Augustinian form of ...

Hanson, Norwood Russell (1924–67)

By MacKinnon, Edward

Hanson was a philosopher of science who introduced novel ways of relating logical, historical and linguistic analyses. His best-known book, Patterns of Discovery, stressed the theory-ladeness of observational ...

Villari, Pasquale (1827–1917)

By Patriarca, Silvana

Pasquale Villari was the most famous Italian historian of the second half of the nineteenth century and the author of what is considered the first ‘manifesto’ of positivism ...

Ardigò, Roberto (1828–1920)

By Urbinati, Nadia

Roberto Ardigò was the most prominent Italian philosopher of the nineteenth century. A priest and an academic, he was subjected to an ecclesiastical trial for his naturalistic philosophy ...

Heytesbury, William (before 1313–1372/3)

By Longeway, John

William Heytesbury, an English logician of the mid-fourteenth century, is, with Richard Kilvington, Richard Swineshead, Thomas Bradwardine and John Dumbleton, one of several philosophers known as the Oxford ...

Aristotle Commentators

By Sorabji, Richard

Aristotle’s school treatises were given renewed prominence by Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century bc, and from then on numerous commentaries were written on them. The ...

Aristotle Commentators

Aristotle’s school treatises were given renewed prominence by Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century bc, and from then on numerous commentaries were written on them. The ...

Unity of science

By Cat, Jordi

How should our scientific knowledge be organized? Is scientific knowledge unified and, if so, does it mirror a unity of the world as a whole? Or is it ...