Abstract
All sources quoted in the text and documented in this chapter are cited in English translation. Wherever a good translation was already available we have adopted its rendering as far as possible. Almost every adopted translation has undergone some significant changes, which are not indicated individually. The extensive quotations from Galileo’s De motu (Drabkin) and Discorsi (Drake) have, however, been taken over largely unchanged.
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The translation given here is by John Cottingham, taken from The Philosophical Writings of Descartes,(transl. by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch) Cambridge University Press, 1985 (vol. 1, pp. 156–162); it is used with permission of Cambridge University Press. We have made some minor changes to standardize terminology.13AT VI, 95; see Fig. 5.16. Figure 5.25 given here was originally published in Clerselier’s edition of Descartes’ correspondence in 1664.
The passages translated here from Hobbes’s (Latin) optical manuscript of 1640 (Tractatus opticus II) were transcribed by the late Karl Schuhmann and were to be published in a new Hobbes edition. We are grateful to him for allowing us to make use of these transcriptions and for providing us with photocopies of the figures.
Porphyrius: Isagoge et in Aristotelis categorias commentarium. Hobbes writes “Isagoge ad Artem”; Malcolm (HC 1, 103) conjectures: “Isagoge ad Ar[istote]lem,” but Hobbes may simply have conflated Porphyry’s title with the similar title of Vieta’s In artem analyticam isagoge.
This letter was published only in French by Clerselier but is said by him to be a translation (“voici la version”). The Latin edition of Descartes correspondence contained what is apparently a retranslation of the French into Latin; it was therefore not included in the AT edition. The original is lost.
Hobbes had spoken of line HF (see Fig. 5.17) as being “double AH” in length. Although Descartes here actually says “double proportion,” he obviously means
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Damerow, P., Freudenthal, G., McLaughlin, P., Renn, J. (2004). Documents. In: Exploring the Limits of Preclassical Mechanics. Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3992-3_6
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