Pores, Parts, and Powers in Sixteenth-Century Commentaries on Meteorologica IV

The Italian polymath and polemicist Scipione Chiaramonti, in his 1654 commentary on Meteorologica IV, offered potential solutions to the objection that Aristotle’s employment of pores and particles contradicted his dismissals of similar explanations in De generatione et corruptione. He contended that it might be possible to argue that Aristotle’s views changed over time and Meteorologica IV reflects the historical development of his thought; or, that some of the solutions presented in Aristotle’s works should be understood as only probable. Indeed, a decade earlier Joachim Jungius endorsed the first of Chiaramonti’s proposed solutions, maintaining that Meteorologica IV adopted a syndiacritical natural philosophy in opposition to his earlier polemics against Democritus and Empedocles. Chiaramonti’s and Jungius’s views testify to the difficulty of early modern natural philosophers in reconciling the pores of Meteorologica IV with the rest of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, a difficulty that corresponds to the contentions, brought forth by Hammer-Jensen at the beginning of the twentieth century, that the book is not genuine. The argument for historical development as key to its interpretation, however, arose after over a century of commentaries on this work, including those of Pietro Pomponazzi, Francesco Vimercato, and Francisco Vallés, that noted similarities between the argument of pores and particles with the corpuscular and atomist theories of Democritus, Epicureans, and Plato. Accordingly, these sixteenth-century commentators used Meteorologica IV to theorize about the structure and functioning of biological material. For example, these commentators on Meteorologica IV discussed how blood, a seemingly homeomerous substance, contains fibers that play a role in physiological functioning and the determination of temperament. Furthermore, they understood that elemental or vaporous particles enter into pores of living bodies and alter their composition and the qualities of their parts. Thus, without admitting the existence of indivisible atoms or void, they contended that small particles, endowed with the active powers, were agents of qualitative change.