Christoph Lüthy - Selected Publications#

1. Maybe it should be mentioned that Lüthy's impact is not only through his own publication, but also through his editorship. Since the year 2000, he has been the general editor of the Q1 journal "Early Science and Medicine" (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. 6 issues à 100 pp. = 600 pp. per year), and as such as had a major impact on merging the history of science and medicine with that of philosophy. The same may be said about the book series "Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy and Science" (also Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers), of which Lüthy is co-founder and currently single editor. Its 39 volumes to date have been a major force in merging the history of philosophy with the history of science.

2. Christoph Lüthy: David Gorlaeus (1591-1612), A Mysterious Figure in the History of Philosophy and Science. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Amsterdam University Press, 2012.

Impact: This is the first study ever written on a figure who in the history of science had always been thought of as a seventeenth-century chemist. Lüthy shows that Gorlaeus was instead a theology student, who moreover died at age 21! As a consequence, the historiography of atomism has had to adjust to this new evidence and take new factors (such as Protestant theology) into account.

3. Christoph Lüthy & Alexis Smets: “Words, Lines, Diagrams, Images: Towards a History of Scientific Imagery,” Early Science and Medicine 14 (2009): 398-439.

Impact: This essay has become fairly famous for defining four types of challenge that face scholarship on the logic and development of scientific imagery. It is cited in all contemporary literature on scientific visuality and the iconography of scientific reasoning.

4. Christoph Lüthy: “Historical and Philosophical Reflections on Natural, Enhanced and Artificial Men and Women,” in: Engineering the Human. Human Enhancement between Fiction and Fascination, eds. Bert-Jaap Koops, Christoph Lüthy, Annemiek Nelis, Carla Sieburgh, J.P.M. Jansen, Monika Schmid. Berlin: Springer, 2013, 11-28.

Impact: This essay is contained in a book co-edited by Lüthy, which was originally published in Dutch and went through 3 editions before being translated into English. In a concise way, it summarises the discussion on the boundaries between human enhancement, transhumanism, and robotics.

5. Christoph Lüthy: “The Metaphysical Roots of Physics, and the Alleged Link between Taurellus, Gorlaeus, Regius and Descartes,” in Physics and Metaphysics in Descartes’ Philosophy and in Its Reception, eds. Delphine Antoine-Mahut & Sophie Roux. Oxford: Routledge, 2018, pp. 85-116.

Impact: This essay derives Descartes' metaphysics, for the first time, not from anti-scholasticism and mechanistic thinking, but from a succession of German and Dutch metaphysical authors that influenced Descartes. This new derivation has begun to impact the mainstream Descartes scholarship.

6. Christoph Lüthy & Carla Rita Palmerino: “Conceptual and Historical Reflections on Chance (and Related Concepts),” in The Challenge of Chance: A Multidisciplinary Approach from Science and the Humanities, eds. Nikolaas P. Landsman & Ellen J. van Wolde. Berlin: Springer, 2016, pp. 9-47.

Impact: This long introductory article surveys the history of the concept of 'chance' from the Presocratics to Quantum Mechanics, and demonstrates the surprising variety of meanings of the term 'chance' through the ages. This piece has in the meantime generated spin-offs, notably in work dealing with the re-emergence of chance elements in modern biology and physics.

7. Christoph Lüthy: “Atomism,” Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, Marco Sgarbi (ed.). Berlin: Springer International Publishing AG, 2018. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_252-1.

Impact: This 15-page entry is currently the main reference for historians interested in the revival of ancient atomism in the period between the rediscovery of Lucretius in the 15th century and the mechanical philosophers in the seventeenth century.

8. Christoph Lüthy: “What Does a Diagram Prove that Other Images Do Not? Images and Imagination in the Kepler-Fludd Controversy,” in Image, Imagination, and Cognition. Early Modern Theory and Practice, eds. Christoph Lüthy, Claudia Swan, Paul Bakker, and Claus Zittel. Leiden: Brill, 2018, pp. 227-274.

Impact: This long chapter analyses the battle over the meaning of images between the imperial astronomer Johannes Kepler and the Rosicrucian physician Robert Fludd, and demonstrates the interconnection between the logic of images and the theories they purport to prove. It is an exemplification of the lessons of item no. 3, above, and as such, is being much used by historians of scientific imagery.

9. Christoph Lüthy & Andrea Robiglio, eds., Charles H. Lohr and the Aristotelian Tradition (1200-1650): Translations, Themes and Editions, 2 vols. Florence: SISMEL/Galluzzo, 2023.

Impact: Notably vol. 2 [Latin Aristotle Editions (1450-1650), ed. Christoph Lüthy & Davide Cellamare]], will have a major impact. It contains the first published bibliography of all Latin Renaissance Aristotle editions, from the invention of printing to 1650, with thousands of entries documenting the rise and fall of the Aristotelian tradition. This much expected bibliography was started in the 1980s by the famous Charles B. Schmitt, was taken over after the latter's death by Charles H. Lohr, and has now been finished and published by Lüthy, with the help of Cellamare.

10. Christoph Lüthy & Elena Nicoli, eds.: Atoms, Corpuscles and Minima in the Renaissance, Leiden: Brill, 2023.

Impact: In this recent volume, to which Lüthy has contributed the introduction (with Nicoli) plus a lengthy essay on the imperial physician, Nicolaus Biesius, a series of prominent scholars retrace the revival of atomism in the Renaissance, after a 2000-year rejection of atomistic conceptions by Aristotle and his scholastic followers. The impact of this book can not yet be measured, but sales and book reviews seem to indicate that the impact will be substantial. As for the chapter on Biesius, it represents the very first study of this otherwise forgotten, but influential physician, and will constitute the backbone to all future studies on this figure.