The Mathematics of Natural Action in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Scholasticism (Hurtado, Arriaga, Oviedo, Compton)

This paper discusses the notion of the “sphere of action” (sphaera activitatis) as developed by a group of seventeenth-century Jesuit intellectuals: Hurtado, Arriaga, Oviedo, and Compton. The problem inherited from fourteenth-century natural philosophers was to describe natural action which is spatially limited and decreases with distance at a regular rate. To capture natural patterns, scholastic philosophers introduced various forms of regularity or “uniformity,” the relevant type for the present context being “uniform difformity.” While the scholastic tradition also defined more sophisticated forms of regularity, these were not part of the discussion in the analyzed corpus.