#histphil — Public Fediverse posts

Yves-Marie André's (1675–1764) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Marie_André] ‘Essay on Beauty’ (‘Essai sur le beau’, 1741) was an important work of 18th-century aesthetics. In the article on beauty in the 2nd volume (1752) of the ‘Encylopédie’, Denis Diderot praised André's system as the best he knew, elevating it above the work of Plato, Augustine, Wolff, Crousaz, Shaftesbury.

In 2010, I released a #CreativeCommons-licensed annotated English translation [https://archive.org/details/EssayOnBeauty]. I have just made an update: the PDF is now an accessible #TaggedPDF.

(The LaTeX tagging system is still under development [https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/], but I have been adapting my LaTeX styles to be tagging-compatible.)

Although I was a much less practised typographer 16 years ago, I have left the overall design of ‘Essay on Beauty’ unchanged, contenting myself with minor improvements offered by an updated version of the Baskervald font, ensuring that line-end hyphenations follow the OUP standard, and a few other localized improvements.

#accessibility #OpenAccess #aesthetics #HistPhil

Evangelista Torricelli’s (1608–47) solid is defined by rotating the hyperbola $y = 1/x$ about the $x$ axis and truncating it at $x=1$ (see attached image).

It has infinite length and infinite surface area but finite volume.

This counter-intuitive discovery caused philosophical disturbance, for it seemed to violate the distinction between finite and infinite.

Torricelli, foreseeing the scrutiny to which his work would be subjected, took the precaution of preempting some criticisms by supplying two different proofs, one by ‘indivisibles’, one by exhaustion.

But René Descartes (1596–1650) seems not to have been provoked to any philosophical objections and thought that Torricelli's discovery was beautiful.

Henry Needler (fl. 1690–1718), a perhaps slightly obscure figure who foreshadowed 18th-century discussions of the sublime, seemed to be impressed by the solid's ‘Grandeur and Magnificence’ and thought that it would ‘afford the greatest Delight and Satisfaction to curious Minds’.

(Today, Torricelli's solid is also called ‘Gabriel's horn’ or ‘Torricelli's trumpet’.)

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#infinite #Descartes #HistMath #HistPhil #Torricelli #MathematicalBeauty #sublime #aesthetics