Baroque Science Research Articles

Los hombres del saber de indios y cristianos en los sermones de Francisco de Avila (Lima, siglo XVII)

The analysis of the sermons of the Tratado de los Evangelios by the Cuzco priest Francisco de Ávila allows us to problematize the conception and characterization of the literary man beyond its political role within colonial knowledge as ecclesiastical institutions defined from the relationship with the indigenous populations. Avila incorporates the epistemological dimension into the narrative of the political and value-based justification of the Hispanic conquest of the Incas and he introduces the subjects of knowledge and their knowledge as part of the conflict between Indians and Christians. The relationship between knowledge and power that Avila presents are aspects to be discussed about the characteristics of the literate elite in the mid-17th century located as cross-cultural agent on the borderline between the subject of baroque science and the colonial intellectual.

Baroque Science, Experimental Art? Jusepe de Ribera and other Neapolitan Sceptics.

Current attempts by historians of science to revise the narrative of the Scientific Revolution by using the concept of the Baroque have important implications for art history. Correspondences between baroque art and baroque science gain new complexity when the rational, epistemologically optimistic image of the New Science is put in doubt. Rather than a method of objective observation, early seventeenth-century science and art share an acceptance of the constructed nature of reality, of human epistemological limitations and of the role of passions in the observation of the world. While Caravaggio has revolutionised art precisely through his interest in questions of knowledge and sensorial perception and by his subversive transformation of Renaissance epistemological values and ideals, this article concentrates on the work of Jusepe de Ribera, who made the senses and their shortcomings a major theme of his pictorial research. Ribera's epistemology is examined in the context of contemporary Neapolitan philosophy and science. Through the confrontation of some of the Spagnoletto's paintings with the work of figures such as Giovanni Battista della Porta, Federico Cesi and particularly Colantonio Stigliola, it becomes clear that early modern Neapolitan faith in rational knowledge was more ambiguous than is sometimes assumed.

Baroque Science Fiction in Cervantes: A Proposal

Este ensayo propone delinear un concepto de ciencia ficción barroca,partiendo del pensamiento de Luis de Molina, Bruno Latour y WilliamEgginton. La idea principal es enseñar cómo estos pensadores de latemprana y tardía modernidad privilegian la realidad de las acciones yelecciones discursivas de actores concretos con el fin de contrarrestar lasmaneras en que la física moderna y la metafísica escolástica erigen unadistinción entre el conocimiento científico y una realidad estable, peroinaccesible, a la cual se dirige y se refiere el conocimiento científico. Demanera similar, el desafío que presenta Cervantes gira en torno al hecho deque no haya ningún terreno epistemológico u ontológico exterior a su ficciónen donde se pueda juzgar con certeza los mundos y performances expuestosen las dos últimas piezas de las Novelas ejemplares, “El casamientoengañoso” y “El coloquio de los perros”. Al contrario, encontramos diversasperspectivas o aspectos según los cuales se ve y se mide la falta que subyace ymotiva toda la acción y su expresión y exposición. Latour llama estosaspectos modos (“modes”), cada uno de los cuales se define como unapostura en vez de un paradigma epistemológico.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Baroque Science by Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris (review)

Reviewed by: Baroque Science by Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris Mary Henninger-Voss (bio) Baroque Science. By Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. xiv+ 333. $45. Baroque Science is an ambitious attempt to re-cast our notions of seventeenth-century science entirely. The authors, Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris, specifically eschew the grand narratives of the “scientific revolution.” Instead, they root that revolution’s main protagonists—Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton—within a particular vision of baroque culture, one fraught with paradox and the tensions of the natural/artificial divide. In doing so, they re-inscribe the “revolution” they specifically mention only in passing. Baroque Science is a work of impressive scholarship, enjoyable to read, and an important interpretation for anyone in dialogue with the historiography of seventeenth-century science. The great originality of this book is that Gal and Chen-Morris look at the emergence of an observation-based mathematical natural philosophy with new eyes. They do not fall under the spell of the promoters of this new science, or take as obvious Galileo’s famous dictum that nature is written “in the language of mathematics.” Rather, they unveil seventeenth-century justifications of the new science as “feigning” the pathways between the imputed mathematical structures of nature, new scientific apparatus, and rationality itself. Their fascination is for the ways in which baroque science enforced, rather than uncovered, a mathematical order of physical experience. In Baroque Science, the key to new attitudes toward empirical observation and the mathematization of nature is found in seventeenth-century optics. The authors show that theoretical and practical advances in baroque optics changed what it meant to observe, affected what it meant to imagine, and offered a bridge between the mathematical and physical more immediate and universal than did other “mixed sciences.” Here, both the astronomical revolution and the mechanization of nature are extensions of the new optical sciences and technologies of the century. [End Page 533] In Gal and Chen-Morris’s narrative, Kepler—with his writings on optics and his announcement in Astronomia Nova that mathematicians will invade the territory of physicists—is the central founding father of baroque science. The book covers all the main characters one might find in any standard scientific revolution textbook, but rarely resists overturning conventional interpretations of their work. Gal and Chen-Morris redefine Kepler’s discursive optics against his scholastic forebears and his Aristotelian contemporaries; they re-cast the comet controversy between Galileo and Orazio Grassi as one over optical instrumentation and re-examine Galileo’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities; they invert wisdom on Descartes’ method of doubt; they reexamine the correspondence between Hooke and Newton on the inverse square law as it pertains to commonplaces of optics, and recast Newton as not so much a unifier of seventeenth-century physics as a discursive thinker. In a final chapter, they examine the key role of imagination in the new conceptions of seventeenth-century knowledge, with special attention to the correspondence between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth on the passions. In fact, it is in the imagination, “this most Baroque of the faculties,” that Gal and Chen-Morris claim the real power of the new science lies. As the authors point out, few historians of science have attempted to locate seventeenth-century science on the same canvas with baroque art and culture. Their book is framed by references to art and literature—by Vermeer and Rubens on the art of seeing and Shakespeare on the art of the imagination—and is peppered with the techniques of cultural history. However, these discussions have an illustrative rather than structural role in the argument. Indeed, the interest in capturing motion, in the play of art and nature, in blurring the line between the fantastic and the real, all characterize works of baroque art. Yet we are not really meant to focus on any bleeding between the creative arts and scientific practice, but brought to a better understanding of a broad tapestry that might have grounded the epistemological issues that are the real core of Gal and Chen-Morris’s discourse. This is a rich and ambitious book, but it should not...

«Барочная наука»: проблемы применения концепта

«Барочная наука»: проблемы применения концепта

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Baroque Science - by Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris

Baroque Science - by Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris

The birth and death of wonder: History and geography of Baroque science

The birth and death of wonder: History and geography of Baroque science

The Atlantic Vision: Olaus Rudbeck and Baroque Science by Gunnar Eriksson, and: Svensk ingenjörskonst under stormaktstiden: Olof Rudbecks tekniska undervisning och praktiska verksamhet by Per Dahl

246 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE eastern Brazil. After a number of attempts to establish themselves in South America, in 1630 the Dutch succeeded in securing Olinda and in establishing a colonial enterprise comprising the entire northeast of Brazil, and which lasted until 1654. Soon the Dutch started the design of a new city to be the capital of New Holland. The topography of Olinda and nearby Recife resembled that with which the Dutch were experienced, and the new urban center was designed as Mauritiopolis, honoring Governor Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen. There we see a typical adaptation of European, par­ ticularly Dutch, technology to the new environment. Sala Catalâ summarizes the efforts of the Dutch to create an “urbanized para­ dise” in the tropics. Two major works were essential in this project: a dike and a garden. In addition, the construction of a number of bridges that characterize the Dutch presence in Brazil are well de­ scribed by Sala Catalâ. This is a most important contribution to understanding European attempts to bring to the New World the ideals of an urban civiliza­ tion. José Sala Catalâ left for us an important and stimulating study of this as yet unexplored field of research. Ubiratan D’Ambrosio Dr. D’Ambrosio is professor emeritus, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil, and former president of the Sociedad Latinamericana de Historia de las Ciencias y la Tecnologia and of the Sociedade Brasileira de Historia da Ciência. The Atlantic Vision: Olaus Rudbeck and Baroque Science. Uppsala Studies in History ofScience, Vol. 19. By Gunnar Eriksson. Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 1994. Pp. viii+196; illustrations, notes, index. Svensk ingenjôrskonst under stormaktstiden: Olof Rudbecks tekniska undervisning och praktiska verksamhet. Institutionen for idé- och lardomshistoria Uppsala universitet Skrifter nr 14. By Per Dahl. Upp­ sala: Institutionen fôr idé- och lardomshistoria, 1995. Pp. 338; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, summary in English. The 17th century was Sweden’s stormy “Age of Greatness,” with the Baltic Sea as a mare nostrum. The reformed state, its church, and its war machine required able servants. Among other things, this brought about a vitalization of the medieval University of Uppsala. In The Atlantic Vision, Gunnar Eriksson, professor of history of sci­ ence and ideas, deals with a fascinating actor on this scene: Olaus Rudbeck (1630-1702). The son of a prominent bishop, Rudbeck at the age of thirty became a professor at Uppsala, where he worked with energy and force for a modernization of both city and univer­ sity. Despite his discovery of the lymphatic system, as well as contribu­ tions to astronomy and botany, he is best known for the Atlantica, a TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 247 historical work of grandiose patriotism. Eriksson surveys the con­ tents of the four overwhelming volumes for those who read neither Latin nor Swedish. Interpreting a mass of texts and other materials in his own critical way, Rudbeck among other things wanted to show that Sweden was the home of the happy Hyperboreans and that Plato’s description of the capital ofAtlantis in fact fits Old Uppsala. This may not strike one as too surprising an enterprise in an age when genealogy could legitimate power. More surprising is perhaps that it was inspired as much by natural history as by classical scholar­ ship. A scientific modernist in his age, Rudbeck as a historian studied nature and found causal links, e.g., between topography and culture. He conducted experiments and substantiated arguments with statis­ tics; he developed a method of measuring the humus layer that produced surprisingly accurate archaeological datings. Alongside biblical chronology and breakneck etymological arguments was a scientific spirit of skeptical empiricism. Eriksson’s main thesis is that this is not as irreconcilable as it first appears whenjudged by the categories of our age. As a scholar Rud­ beck lived during the period between “renaissance science,” which interpreted texts, and “Newtonian science,” which observed nature. Despite Cartesian inclinations, he was a man of faith, seeking the meaning of creation. Depicting Rudbeck as close to an “ideal type” who was representative ofwhat he calls “baroque science,” Eriksson discusses with profound erudition more well-known representatives of the science of the times. He means...

The Atlantic Vision: Olaus Rudbeck and Baroque Science

The Atlantic Vision: Olaus Rudbeck and Baroque Science

The Atlantic vision: Olaus Rudbeck and baroque science

The Atlantic vision: Olaus Rudbeck and baroque science