A Circle Without a Circle: Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus’s Natural Scientific Method

In his Medicina mentis (1686/87; 2nd ed. 1695), Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus claims to have found an ‘intermediary path’ between a priori and a posteriori methods in natural philosophy—a three-step method of introspection, deduction, and experimentation. In this paper, I offer a systematic reconstruction of this method, showing how it was developed in the [...]