Speaker
Description
This paper aims to recover a neglected chapter in the long and complex history of the rejection of astrology as a legitimate form of knowledge. The appearance of the comets of 1664 and 1665 provided the occasion for significant epistemological debates concerning the validity of astrological prognostication, as exemplified by the largely overlooked controversy between the astrologer-physician Livio Ignazio Conti and the physician-natural philosopher Paolo Bravi regarding the alleged significance of these celestial phenomena. The debate began with the publication of Conti’s Anatomia della Cometa (Venice, 1664), which defended the prognostic value traditionally attributed to comets. Bravi responded with his Anticometa (Venice, 1665), initiating a sustained exchange on the legitimacy of cometary predictions. A second round of printed replies followed: Conti published the Anatomia dell’Anticometa (Venice, 1665), to which Bravi answered with the Antilogia Astrologica (Venice, 1666), whose second part was issued separately under the title La Cometa decomata. The Bravi–Conti exchange displays several distinctive features that merit close investigation. Most of the works involved in this neglected debate survive in only a single known copy, while some have not yet been digitized and remain difficult to access. Consequently, neither the individual texts nor the controversy as a whole have ever been studied comprehensively. This paper proposes the first systematic examination of the entire exchange, treating its constituent works as interconnected contributions to a single intellectual and epistemological debate.