These sets of questions are intended to help students attain a basic understanding of difficult texts, by focusing attention on important or revealing questions about the material. Do not worry if you cannot answer all the questions after completing the reading. Do worry if you cannot answer them after lecture. Much of the material that you will be responsible for on examinations is covered in these questions.
Update: Sept. 30th -- Questions marked with a * were not covered in class, and thus will not be on the test.
2. Aristotle's Physics and On the Heavens; Ptolemy's Almagest and Tetrabiblos
3. Hippocratic writers and ancient atomists
4. Ficino, Agrippa, and Paracelsus
5. Copernicus's De Revolutionibus
6. Kepler's Epitome of Copernican Astronomy
7. Galileo's Starry Messenger and Edgerton's "Geometrization of Astronomical Space"
8. Descartes' The World and Treatise on Man
9. Hobbes' Leviathan and Boyle's "About the Excellency and Grounds of the Mechanical Hypothesis"