Marin Mersenne's 'Questions Theologiques, Physiques, Morales, et Mathematiques': Agenda and structure, with an annotated translation

Questions Theologiques, Physiques, Morales, et Mathematiques is one of five books published in 1634 by Marin Mersenne (1588-1648). Mersenne, a priest in the Order of Minims, spent nearly his entire adult life in Paris, at the Minim convent off the Place Royale. Mersenne has been called "the secretary of learned Europe" and "a one-man scientific journal." He is known for his vast correspondence; for his relationship to and correspondence with Descartes; for his role in the rise of the mechanical philosophy; for his translation and promotion of the works of Galileo in France; and for his original work in mechanics, acoustics, and music theory and practice.;Questions Theologiques has been taken to be a collection of detached chapters dealing with disparate topics, without narrative structure or movement from beginning to end. In Chapter 1 of this dissertation, I argue that Questions Theologiques possesses a narrative structure, which is provided by Mersenne's pedagogical-moral agenda. Mersenne moves his learned readers step by step, through the disparate questions and topics of Questions Theologiques, to a more positive moral valuation of the passion of curiosity and its role in scientific practice. In Chapter 2, I propose and explore a novel hypothesis: in the early modern Catholic world, the practice of natural philosophy was influenced by the discipline of textual criticism. More specifically, the practices and patterns of inference which Catholic natural philosophers employed to adjudicate disagreements among observation reports concerning natural effects or objects were influenced and informed by those which textual critics used to resolve differences among extant manuscript copies of ancient texts. An appropriate testing ground for this hypothesis is the work of Mersenne, who was active both as a natural philosopher and as a biblical commentator. On this hypothesis, it becomes possible to provide a unified explanation for important aspects of Mersenne's scientific practice which have been explained diversely or which have not been explained at all. It also becomes possible to reinterpret as epistemological virtues aspects of Mersenne's scientific practice which have been seen as epistemological vices. In Chapter 3, I provide an annotated translation of Questions Theologiques.