Richard Swineshead and Continuously Varying Quantities
George Molland · 2024
If we can take one of the principal rallying cries of seventeenth century experimental philosophy to be, « Things not words », then perhaps the corresponding slogan for fourteenth century mathematical natural philosophy should be, « Imaginations not words »; for it was characteristic of this period to treat physical problems secundum imaginationem ( 1 ). As I have argued elsewhere ( 2 ), this method of treatment may be closely associated with the use of mathematics in natural philosophy, for mathematics, and particularly geometry, was held to receive its material from the imaginative faculty, and much of the fourteenth century « mathematical physics » may be seen as the projecting of geometric imaginations onto physical objects. The method did not confine itself to spatially extended quantities, but also brought under its sway such things as the intensities of heats, the speeds of motions, and time.