Seventeenth-century Natural Philosophy Research Articles

Baconsche Tatsachen

Not only facts as words and concepts, but also facts as a form of experience have a history. The origins of the scientific fact as a category of experience lie in the legal fact, particularly in the work of the English jurist and natural philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626). The category of the fact, as a bare statement of that which is the case, unembellished by inference, interpretation, or generalization, was the creation of early modern lawyers, and then eagerly taken up by historians, natural philosophers, and even theologians--first in English, then in French, and still later in German. Baconian facts forged a new kind of scientific experience, with distinctive objects, practices, and textures. The legal distinction between matters of fact and matters of law seemed to many seventeenth-century natural philosophers to be eminently useful in driving a wedge between observations and hypotheses, between data and conjecture, especially for controversial issues.

Reading through Galileo's Telescope: Margaret Cavendish and the Experience of Reading*

This essay reassesses the role of reading in the context of seventeenth-century natural philosophy by analyzing Galileo Galilei's Starry Messenger and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World. The unreliability of telescopic vision becomes a dominant metaphor for the unreliability of reading printed texts. Where Galileo sought to put the reader in his own position as a scientific observer by making reading a form of observation, Cavendish used the telescopic image to show how readers become the makers of their own fictions. From the recognition that reading and observation finally reveal our relationship to the world rather than the world itself comes what will ultimately be the modern assumption that acts of observation are also acts of reading.

Mechanical and "organical" models in seventeenth-century explanations of biological reproduction.

The ArgumentThe claim that Jan Swammerdam's empirical research did not support his theory of biological preformation is shown to rest on a notion of evidence narrower than that used by many seventeenth-century natural philosophers. The principles of evidence behind the use of mechanical models are developed. It is then shown that the Cartesian theory of biological reproduction and embryology failed to gain acceptance because it did not meet the evidential requirements of these principles. The problems in this and other mechanistic theories prior to Swammerdam are found to arise from certain difficulties and tensions in the mechanical conception of nature, which Swammerdam's theory is able to resolve. The relation between Swammerdam's empirical research and his theory is examined and shown to satisfy the required notion of evidence.Leibniz' puzzling appeals to Swammerdam's research in support of his metaphysical doctrine of the spontaneous development of individual substances are then examined and shown to fall within the parameters of the notion of evidence.

Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural Philosophy

The ArgumentRecent historiography of the Scientific Revolution has challenged the assumption that the achievements of seventeenth-century natural philosophy can easily be described as the ‘mechanization of the world-picture.’ That assumption licensed a story which took mechanization as self-evidently progressive and so in no need of further historical analysis. The clock-work world was triumphant and inevitably so. However, a close examination of one key group of natural philosophers working in England during the 1670s shows that their program necessarily incorporated souls and spirits, attractions and congruities, within both their ontology and their epistemology. Any natural philosophical strategy which excluded spirits and sympathies from its world was condemned as tending to subversion and irreligion. This examination shows that the term ‘mechanical philosophy’ was a category given its meanings within local contexts and carries no universal sense separate from that accomplished by these natural philosophers. It also shows how the experimental praxis was compelled to treat souls and spirits, to produce them through experimental labor, and then to extend these experimentally developed entities throughout the cosmos, both social and natural. The development of mechanical philosophy cannot be used to explain the cognitive and social structure of this program, nor its success: instead, the historical setting of experimental work shows how a philosophy of matter and spirit was deliberately constructed by the end of the seventeenth century.

The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate and its Relation to the Scientific Revolution

The strong claims made in the seventeenth century for the existence of extraterrestrial life, the equally vociferous denials of this claim, and the ensuing controversy which continues unabated to the present day are of historical interest for many reasons. Not only does the debate involve a determination of the nature of the planets and their conditions for life-a planetary physics whose history has heretofore largely been ignored-it also clearly reflects and illuminates contemporary religious and metaphysical themes, many of which still echo in present-day discussions of the subject. Moreover, it raises questions of method and of the cognitive status of an idea at the fringes of science. In this study we examine the corpus of knowledge brought to bear on the question by seventeenth-century natural philosophers, the relative role of physical and metaphysical reasoning, and the importance of the debate in the context of the scientific revolution. Role of the Copernican Theory.-There is historical logic in the fact that the controversy over the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life began in earnest only at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Although a few had earlier discussed and even professed a belief in the reality of such living beings,1 it was not until that time that the Copernican theory began to gain acceptance and to provide a physical framework within which the existence of other earth-like worlds became possible. The heliocentric theory as set forth in De revolutionibus of 1543 was crucial in setting the stage for the discussion of other worlds in two interrelated ways. The first, the necessity for a new theory of motion of falling bodies based on a mobile earth, was destructive of the major Aristotelian argument which had been used to deny the possibility of other worlds for almost 2000 years; the second, the abandonment of the Aristotelian precept of a qualitative dichotomy between earth and heavens, opened

The Nature of the Early Royal Society: Part I

The foundation of the Royal Society marks an important step in the institutionalization of seventeenth-century British natural philosophy. The society's existence and activities provided a focus for the exchange of opinions, while its meetings and publications became forums for scientific debate. Some writers, however, have claimed much more than this for the society and have seen its establishment as marking a real watershed between, on the one hand, intellectually ‘conservative elements’ and, on the other, a set of ‘definite philosophical principles … inspiring … progressive minds’. Others have gone still further and argued not only that the society's activities ‘enormously’ accelerated ‘the development of natural sciences’, but that these activities were the result of the ‘working out of a conscious, deliberately-conceived ideal’. But views which see a single, logically consistent conception of the nature of the scientific enterprise informing the work and outlook of the Royal Society and its members involve a serious oversimplification of the complexity of natural philosophy in the late seventeenth century. Despite some important work published in recent years, we are still far from achieving a satisfactory understanding of the complicated web of traditions, sources, and intellectual systems that provided both an inspirational dynamic for the work of natural philosophers such as those in the Royal Society and patterns of expression through which their preoccupations could be articulated. Thus the many studies which have been devoted to establishing connexions between the scientific movement and patterns of religious or political belief have been flawed from the start by unreal assumptions about the degree of intellectual coherence presented by the natural philosophy of the time. And until we can present a more three-dimensional picture of what the 'scientific movement’ was in fact all about, and until wider agreement has been reached as to satisfactory definitions of various types of socio-theological attitude and behaviour, such studies are no more than attempts to tie together two unknowns by means of a rope of sand.

Gold and the atomic theories of the seventeenth century

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century there was a growing feeling that the way to gain an understanding of nature was not to consult the ancient authorities but to turn to the world of experience. An increasing concern with observational evidence led to attempts to modify experience in some way to gain greater knowledge. This modification of experience led to the development of the experimental method. Aristotle's considerable influence in western civilisation opposed the idea of matter consisting of atoms but in the early seventeenth century his influence was declining. In this Galileo played no small part. Yet even before Galileo, scholars were looking again at the old texts and rediscovering the ancient atomists. The idea of matter consisting of corpuscles was to be an immensely fruitful concept in seventeenth century natural philosophy but before the idea could be taken seriously it had to overcome various objections. Two quite different barriers to acceptance were religious and experimental. The French priest Pierre Gassendi had to show his contemporaries that, although atomism had been part of the doctrine of the atheist Lucretius, a belief in atoms in no way implied the undermining of Christianity. The second obstacle was more per-

On Hooke: Robert Hooke's Contributions to Mechanics . A Study in Seventeenth Century Natural Philosophy. F. F. Centore. Nijhoff, The Hague, 1970. xvi, 136 pp., illus. Paper.

On Hooke: <i>Robert Hooke's Contributions to Mechanics</i> . A Study in Seventeenth Century Natural Philosophy. F. F. Centore. Nijhoff, The Hague, 1970. xvi, 136 pp., illus. Paper.

Henry More and Descartes: Some New Sources

From the time of the publication of Henry More's first work, the collection of poems, ΨγΧΩΔΙΑ Platonica (1642), Platonism provided the dominant theme in his philosophy. At Cambridge, More, his colleague, Ralph Cudworth, and their disciples, were responsible for a considerable revival of English Platonism, which became an important factor in late seventeenth-century natural philosophy. This movement is noted for its active and influential opposition to the mechanical world view, characterized in the writings of Hobbes and Descartes.

The Recognition of Plant Sensitivity by English Botanists in the Seventeeth Century

THE detailed experimental study of plant and the examination of the nature of plant sensitivity were two of the important achievements of nineteenth-century plant physiologists. These subjects occupied the attention of many of the most distinguished botanists of the time, including Charles Darwin in England, Julius von Sachs in Germany, and Asa Gray in America. Sachs also wrote a historical account of the investigations of plant in his famous History of Botany,' in which he recognized that plant had been recorded since antiquityparticularly by the herbalists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sachs found no evidence that the concept of plant sensitivity was used before the nineteenth century; his assessment has been accepted by subsequent historians of botany. However, it has recently been pointed out 2 that plant received attention in the eighteenth century and that the notion of plant sensitivity was familiar to many biologists by the end of that century, including Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin.3 This article demonstrates that the contributions of seventeenth-century natural philosophers have been seriously underestimated. During this period an experimental study of plant was promoted, which led to the postulation of a theory of plant sensitivity. While the Renaissance herbalists were familiar with plant movements, they had little interest in the explanation of this phenomenon. Thus, they noticed that sleep movements were characteristic of the leaves and flowers of certain species, but they were predominantly concerned with