This book offers a collection of contributions that identify and exemplify a wide range of overlooked, subversive changes in the history of natural philosophy, spanning from antiquity to modernity. The guiding principle of the volume is to address questions that arise from Kuhn's approach to the problem of paradigmatic change. While it is tempting to follow in Kuhn's footsteps and see the history of natural philosophy as a series of revolutions led by giant figures - theoretical watersheds diverging from the `normal' course of events - an accurate picture seems to be more complex and nuanced. By blending philosophy, science, mathematics, this book offers a rich perspective on intellectual progress and is of interest to a broad array of scientists.

Elżbieta Jung is a Professor of History of Philosophy. She holds the position of Chair of the History of Philosophy, and the Director of the Center for the Philosophy of Nature at the University of Lodz. Her research primarily concentrates on the history of natural philosophy and late medieval theology, particularly emphasising the philosophical concepts developed by 14th-century philosophers and theologians associated with the so-called School of Oxford Calculators. Her most recent books are: Richard Kilvington’s “Quaestiones super libros Physicorum.” A Critical Edition with an Introduction, (Lodz, 2025); with Monika Michałowska, Richard Kilvington Talks to Thomas Bradwardine about Future Contingents, Free Will, and Predestination. A Critical Edition of Question 4 from “Quaestiones super libros sententiarum” (Leiden/Boston, 2023); with Robert Podkoński, Towards the Modern Theory of Motion. Oxford Calculators and the New Interpretation of Aristotle (Lodz, 2020). 

Joanna Papiernik is a scholar specialising in Renaissance philosophy and medieval natural philosophy at the University of Łódź, Poland. Her research focuses on the immortality of the soul in Italian Renaissance thought, with particular attention to the works of Marsilio Ficino and fifteenth-century humanist and natural philosophers. She is the author of Philosophies of the Afterlife in the Early Italian Renaissance: Fifteenth-Century Sources on the Immortality of the Soul (Bloomsbury, 2024), a study of Quattrocento debates on personal immortality, as well as articles on various aspects of Renaissance intellectual traditions. Her research also addresses medieval natural philosophy, especially the Oxford Calculators’ interpretations of Aristotelian physics. She is the author (and co-author) of articles on this subject, such as: How to Measure Different Movements? The Fourteenth-Century Treatise De sex inconvenientibus, Przegląd Tomistyczny (2019), and The Influence of Richard Kilvington’s Commentary on the Physics on the Anonymous Treatise De sex inconvenientibus, Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales (2025, no. 2).

Bartosz Żukowski is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lodz. He specialises in early modern philosophy, mainly within the British tradition, with a particular focus on the history and theory of idealism (especially Richard Burthogge, George Berkeley, and Arthur Collier), and ontological pluralism (the Cartesian tradition; John Sergeant). His work also spans theory of knowledge (including non-standard epistemologies, most notably knowing-by-being), philosophy of language, and cognitive science. He is the author of Unnoticed Revolution: Richard Burthogge’s Constructive Idealism (2019, in Polish) and Esse est percipi? George Berkeley’s Metaphysics of Ideas (2012, in Polish), and co-editor of Cognition, Meaning and Action. Lodz–Lund Studies in Cognitive Science (2015). He has translated into Polish George Berkeley’s Philosophical Notebooks (2007) and Charles H. Kahn’s Language and Ontology (2008). Most recently, he completed the translation of The Philosophical Works of Richard Burthogge, with an extensive scholarly commentary.