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Infinity in Early Modern Philosophy

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Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences

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Synonyms

Indefinite; Infinite

Introduction

Thinking about infinity tends to evoke wonder and awe as well as bewilderment and a sense of incomprehensibility. Contemplating space that extends beyond limits, or the series of natural numbers progressing without end, or a reiterative division progressing to more and more minute magnitudes, all evoke an alternately sublime and eerie sense of something that lies beyond our grasp. In his Pensées, the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal beautifully expressed the range of sentiments that infinity roused in the early modern mind:

What is a man in the infinite?

But to show him another prodigy equally astonishing, let him examine the most delicate things he knows. Let a mite be given him, with its minute body and parts incomparably more minute, limbs with their joints, veins in the limbs, blood in the veins, humours in the blood, drops in the humours, vapours in the drops. Dividing these last things again, let him exhaust his powers...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Fordham University, Bronx, NY, USA

    Reed Winegar

  2. Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

    Ohad Nachtomy

Authors
  1. Reed Winegar
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  2. Ohad Nachtomy
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Reed Winegar .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Dana Jalobeanu

  2. Dept. of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University Dept. Philosophy & Moral Sci, Ghent, Oost-Vlaanderen, Belgium

    Charles T. Wolfe

Section Editor information

  1. ICUB-Humanities and Department of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Dana Jalobeanu

  2. ERC EarlyModernCosmology (GA 725883), Cá Foscari University, Venice, Italy

    Charles T. Wolfe

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Winegar, R., Nachtomy, O. (2021). Infinity in Early Modern Philosophy. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_590-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_590-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-20791-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-20791-9

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