Early Modern Adaptations and Transformations of Aristotelian Natural Philosophy: Terminology, Key Concepts, and Case Studies

In the development of early modern science, Aristotelian-scholastic natural philosophy provided crucial tools for understanding epistemology, logic, and cosmology, including key insights on quantification and mathematics, qualities, force, matter, atomism and corpuscularianism, the material continuum, and infinity. The new natural philosophy drew on philosophical instruments developed by medieval and postmedieval thinkers, often used to conceive of novelties. The technical and scientific vocabulary that condensed around Aristotelianism and its hybridizations with other traditions served as a fundamental vehicle for science in the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early phase of the Scientific Revolution. This special issue of Aristotelica integrates these two aspects by investigating the development and reconceptualization of Aristotelian notions in early modern natural philosophy and emphasizing the role of terminology and its historical shifts. Without claiming to be exhaustive, and by spotlighting a number of relevant case studies from various periods of the Renaissance and early modern natural thought, we attempt to chart some of these overlaps in concepts and vocabulary, focusing particularly on the significant time period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century.