Biography

Abram Kaplan is a historian of science and humanism. He earned his PhD in history from Columbia University (2018) and was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows before taking up his current position as a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. He has published articles in Isis, the Journal of the History of Ideas, Renaissance Quarterly, and Notes and Records, and is wrapping up a book on the reception and transformation of ancient mathematics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, focusing on the relationship between popular and expert opinion and on progress as a mode of historical thinking.

Project Summary

Niccolò Machiavelli’s importance for the emergence of modern epistemology and the new science has not been sufficiently recognized. He was a founder both in his focus on the effectual truth and for his related assault on authority. It can be hard to appreciate the central role that the testimony of the auctores played in premodern philosophy. Machiavelli, if he did not inaugurate it, gave form to the critique of authority tout court that underlay early modern philosophy, politics, and science. This project looks at both Machiavelli’s reception of authors from Aristotle to Xenophon and at the later reception, by authors from Agostino Nifo to Montaigne, of the style of reading and interrelating that he inaugurated. It gives form to the Renaissance effort to occupy the sciences by appropriating and transfiguring commonplaces from ancient authors and accommodating them to new ends.