The study presents the first critical edition of Grosseteste’s renewed treatise On light, where the English philosopher proposes an original cosmology based on the doctrine of light as first form of all bodies. The introduction to the edition provides a thorough account of the extant witnesses and establishes them in their stemmatic families. In so doing, it fills the lacunae of the edition published in 1912 by Ludwig Baur and addresses the central problem of the text, that is Grosseteste’s first (...) meeting with Aristotle’s natural philosophy. (shrink)

According to Robert Grosseteste, bodily nature (corporeitas) is first form and light, capable (by its infinite auto-multiplication) of engendering dimensions in the matter. This thesis is a pivotal one of Grosseteste’s philosophical treatises, nonetheless, it is absent from his main theological works which, as well, deal with the structure of physical bodies. Indeed, these last works consider the first form as the simple and separated “exemplar” of every thing in the divine mind. The study discusses the philosophical and theological implications (...) of this significant doctrinal evolution, assuming that the correspondence of corporeity and light is fundamental to link Platonic mathematics with Aristotelian physics, a problem no (more) faced in Grosseteste’s theological works of maturity. (shrink)

Since Fechner set the basis for psychophysics, psychology of sound and musical perception started its course as a scientific discipline. During less than two centuries of history, anyway, it passed through many different epistemological paradigms, influenced by the changes occurred into the historical and philosophical panorama. Starting from Fechner's 1860 volume Elemente der Psychophysik, we explore these paradigm shifts, tracking some of the principal steps made by psychology of sound and music in its attempts to offer a model for discovering (...) and explaining the scientific phenomena and laws underlying acoustic sensations and perception, “in tune” with the different theoretical frames of the most influent psychological theories of the XIXth and XXth century. (shrink)