ABSTRACT
The recovery and ongoing enrichment of the Greek corpus in both mathematical science and natural philosophy that took place in Renaissance Europe were accompanied by a specific coloring around its edges (p. 113). On a far larger scale than in either Islamic civilization or medieval Europe certain subjects were pursued in ways marked by the culture, leading to a specifically control-oriented mode of empiricism that reflected specifically European drives and values. During the late 15th and the 16th centuries, an urge for accurate, factual description and a search for ways and means to blend understanding with action in the sense of manual operations greatly furthered endeavors as far removed from each other as the making of maps, chemical operations, and the preparation of herbals and anatomical atlases. Here and there, now and then, with men like Leonardo da Vinci or João de Castro or Vincenzo Galilei all this even gave rise to the setting up of coherent series of experiments aimed chiefly at the discovery of phenomena as yet unknown. How did such somewhat-disjointed activities fare over the first four decades of the 17th century, at a time, that is, of Scientific Revolution, when the Greek corpus, in the margin of which all this took place, was itself subject to two distinct, near-simultaneous transformations of a very drastic kind?
