The natural philosophy of Thomas Harriot

Abstract

Thomas Harriot, the most brilliant and renowned of the scientific practitioners maintained by Northumberland in his household, did not live to see his patron's release. His status as a philosopher is less clearly established, and as a theologian he has hardly been considered. Both terms would have carried with them wider connotations than they do today. His natural philosophy would include his physics and his series of alchemical experiments as well as his astronomy and cosmology. Although there is something in Harriot, as in most of his contemporaries, of the erudite and pedantic scholar, it would be a mistake to see his book-learning as keeping him anchored to a traditional and outmoded natural philosophy which he left behind in his more experimental scientific inquiries. Harriot himself left no ordered and coherent body of philosophical speculation. His working manuscripts remain fragmented documents, which testify nevertheless to a remarkable process of thought in progress.

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