The Capuchin monk Valeriano Magni tried to create a new Christian, anti-Aristotelian philosophy, which also includes an alternative concept of sense perception. The main source of his approach is St. Augustine’s and St. Bonaventure’s theory of illumination and the metaphysics of light. Magni emphasizes the seeing is the only sense by means of which one can attain cognition of bodies, i.e., their extension and colour. At the same time, through an analysis of the inner processes of sensation, cognition and intellection, seeing leads to self-awareness. Cognition is intentional in character. The object of sense perception is not an actual external object but an image of it originating from the object, received by the sense organ and grasped by the soul vitalizing the sense organ. Despite that Magni regards the sense data provided by seeing as per se nota, which is made possible by the metaphysics of light. For Magni, light is an epistemological, ontological, and physical principle. His emphasis on seeing is a part of his ontological programme.
The article addresses the issue of one of the more intense and captivating European scientific disputes, likewise common to Poland, in the era of the seventeenth-century transformation of knowledge formation, which centered around the possibility of the existence of vacuum, and which culminated in 1647. The fundamental aim of the article comes down to an attempt to determine a position in the scientific-cognitive debate, from which the pro and anti-Polish and European representatives of The Republic of Letters (Respublica literaria) could voice their opinions. In the course of the analysis of the mid-seventeenth century scientific discourse, the reflections of Valeriano Magni, Torricelli, Jan Brożek, Wojciech Wijuk Kojałowicz, Blaise Pascal, Giovanni Elefantuzzi, Jacob Pierius, and Pierre Guiffart are subjected to close scrutiny. From the perspective of contextualism in the history of science, experiments demonstrating the existence of vacuum are perceived as anomalies that fall into the crisis of normal science, largely based on Aristotle’s physics. The conflict between the old and the new is not, however, presented as a battle of progression with epigonism, but merely as a contest between opposing individual views and the concept of science, which before the formation of the new paradigm was accompanied by ambiguous verification criteria.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.