![]() The letters reproduced in Volume IV of The Correspondence of John Wallis (OUP), to which our Research Fellow Philip Beeley is putting the finishing touches, largely reinforce this impression. John Wallis (1616–1703) is best known to early modern intellectual historians and fans of Cultures of Knowledge as an archetypal Republic of Letters polymath Oxford’s Savilian Professor of Geometry, a gifted cryptographer, and keeper of the University Archives who corresponded extensively with the leading continental luminaries of the age. This entry was posted in Letters in Focus, Project Updates, Publications on Apby Miranda Lewis. This common conviction bonded scholars of disparate religious and philosophical outlooks to the citizenship of a republic of learning. As Schott’s mentor and hero Athanasius Kircher says: ‘All philosophy unless grounded in experiment is empty fallacious and useless…Experiment alone is the arbiter of disputed questions, the reconciler of difficulties and the one teacher of the truth’ 1. ![]() ![]() They did not know exactly where they were headed, nor did they particularly foresee the magnitude of their impact what they did know with blazing conviction was that the long tradition of philosophical theorising without the support of quantitative experiment was bankrupt. (1608-1666) is a remarkable representative of the passion for scientific knowledge that, in the first two thirds of the seventeenth century, possessed enough educated people across Europe as to create a new social entity – the Republic of Letters – the service of which became their primary loyalty.
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