I’m very happy to announce the publication of this book on the quantification of forms in the Middle Ages. The book tells the story of how philosophers from the 13th century onward were gradually led to conceptualize qualitative properties in quantitative terms. This theme has a long and complex history but the terminus a quo of the book is the problem over the “intensity of forms”, as it was intensely debated in the mid-13th century. It is then shown how the interactions between different sciences (natural philosophy, metaohysics, theology, medicine and mathematics) eventually resulted in quantification and measurement techniques that were applied to a broad range of topics, eventually reaching their broadest extension with the controversies over the perfection of species from the mid-14th century onward.
One of the main theses of the book is that the evolution of the problem de intensione formarum – and, thus, the tendency to quantify forms (substantial forms as well as accidental ones) – cannot be properly understood without taking into account its connections with other ‘problems of forms’ (the debate over the plurality of forms, the forma fluens/fluxus formae problem, the status of forms as universals).
The book is to a large extent a revised version of my PhD dissertation (in French), which explains that I didn’t have the courage to re-write the whole thing in English. However, the terminus ad quem is only 1370 — I still plan to write chapter 2 of this story, which continued until the early modern period, and I’ll do that in English this time! Informations and table of contents may be found here: https://brill.com/view/title/61204.
Sylvain