ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the general influence the 'form' had on the 'content', and it mentions scientific theses or results only as examples. It focuses on a homogeneous sub-tradition, namely Jesuit Aristotelianism in Italy up to about 1700. The history of mathematical and experimental physics during the 'Scientific Revolution' has been studied in terms of a change in content and in methods. The relationship between mathematics and physics was not interpreted as one between the study of forms and that of real objects, because both disciplines were considered as the study of 'real' entities or properties. The acceptance of Honore Fabri's scheme – though not of the details of it – was very prompt in the treatises of physico-mathesis, which in form, too, assumed many characteristics of the new physics. In order to characterize Jesuit physica structurally, one also needs to consider it in connection with the other theoretical disciplines in scholastic tradition, that is, mathematics, metaphysics and theology.
