Dilemmas and Uncertainties : The Sciences at the Early Modern University

The authors of this volume bring new insights to the intellectual history of knowledge and belief in sciences, and they do so by focusing on the presence of debates and multiple truths in university context. It has been observed that “in the past two decades, scholars have come to value uncertainty as an important key to seventeenth-century Catholicism”, and this statement could be easily extended to Protestant intellectual traditions, as well. After that earlier research had focused on skepticism and doubt in the early modern era for a long time, recent scholarship has come to understand the importance of multiple truths, and the practices of choosing between more or less probable options. Probabilism, choosing the more probable option seems to have been a wide-reaching and pervasive intellectual behavior that has been often overlooked. Multiple, diverse truths did not necessarily imply a skeptic attitude to scientific or theological questions: instead, they taught the reader, the student, to argue for or against, and to understand the importance of choosing between the options. Moreover, they maintained a space for another notion of central importance in early modern intellectual traditions: belief.

From Paris to Prague, from Tartu to Padua, these papers revolve around problems that raised uncertainties in the early modern mind. In some cases, these were born out of new experiences and insights that shaped existing sets of knowledge, while in other cases, they were based on theoretical concerns. But they all clearly show that uncertainty was a central – and productive – element of early modern scholarship, which was transmitted to the students already during their years of study.