The Mathematical Minister: John Wallis (1616-1703) at the Intersection of Science, Mathematics, and Religion (2018)
Richter, Adam (Author)
Fehige, Yiftach (Advisor)
University of Toronto
Fehige, Yiftach
Physical Details: 261 pp.
Language: English
John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, is primarily known for his contributions to seventeenth-century mathematics. However, as a founder member of the Royal Society and an Anglican minister, Wallis also had a productive career in both natural philosophy and theology. This thesis considers Wallis as a “clerical practitioner” of science—a member of the clergy who studied natural philosophy as well as divinity—and seeks to articulate his unique perspective on the relationship between God and nature. This account of Wallis serves as a case study in the history of science and religion, establishing several novel connections between secular and sacred studies in seventeenth-century England. In particular, Wallis blends elements of experimental philosophy, Calvinist theology, and Scholastic philosophy in creative ways to make connections between the natural and the divine. This thesis has three main goals. First, it traces Wallis’s unique and idiosyncratic role in the history of science and religion. Second, it complicates two common narratives about Wallis: first, that he is historically significant mostly because his mathematics served as a precursor to Isaac Newton’s development of calculus, and second, that his successful career is the result of his ambition and political savvy rather than his original contributions to mathematics, natural philosophy, theology, and other fields. Third, it emphasizes how Wallis interacted with the ideas of the major intellectual figures of his time, including Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Boyle, Newton, and Leibniz, in order to suggest how the interaction between the natural and the divine in his works might impact our understanding of the broader history of science and religion in the seventeenth century. Each of the five chapters in this thesis contributes to these goals by identifying and analyzing connections—methodological, epistemological, and rhetorical—between Wallis’s natural philosophy and theology.
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