Seventeenth-century Science Research Articles

The Ingenious Mr Towneley: Collaborator, Patron, and Pioneer in Seventeenth-century Science

The Ingenious Mr Towneley: Collaborator, Patron, and Pioneer in Seventeenth-century Science

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.

Cosmological, Astronomical and Astrological Elements in Sermons of Seventeenth-Century Ruthenian Authors

The development of oral preaching and the genre of sermon in seventeenth-century Russia was primarily brought about by Ruthenian authors influenced by the Latin tradition, e.g., Ioannikiy Galyatovsky, Lazar Baranovych and Simeon Polotsky. These authors incorporated their general knowledge of cosmology, astronomy and astrology into their homilies, which present a valuable insight into the intellectual background of the period through the prism of cosmological elements used mostly as parts of rhetoric constructions. While the functions of the particular elements of natural philosophy varied in different authors, they shared certain concepts common to both scholastic thought and Baroque aesthetics. Despite being considerably distant from seventeenth-century science, the homilies also served educational purposes and may be perceived as a step towards the Westernisation and secularisation of Russian culture.

Science, Natural Magic, and the Subaltern Worldview in Postwar Italian Historiography

Focusing on the work of the historians of early modern science and philosophy Eugenio Garin and Paolo Rossi, the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, and the historian Carlo Ginzburg, this essay aims to frame the relationship between science and magic in postwar Italian historiography within the context of the Cold War. In the 1950s, Garin and Rossi investigated the seventeenth-century science’s roots in Renaissance authors. In the same years, De Martino carried out fieldwork on the magical worldview of farmers of southern Italy, aiming to explain how such doctrines had been connected and somehow shaped by the culture of the elites since the Renaissance. Some years later, Ginzburg, explicitly inspired by De Martino’s work, investigated the popular magic of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Friulan peasants and its relationship with the culture of the elites. This essay aims to show how the ideas of these historians was influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s ideas and how they were connected with the cultural policies of the Italian Communist Party, which indirectly affected the view of historians on science, magic, popular culture and the culture of the elites, and modernity in postwar Italy. This essay also highlights the differences between contemporary Italian, British, and US historians in light of their different cultural agendas.

Experimental science: Joseph Priestley’s influence in the infrastructure of the seventeenth-century science education

This paper discusses the emergence of science education in the seventeenth century with the influences of Joseph Priestley on the Dissenting Academies. Primarily, this paper analyses Priestley’s ideas from some of his letters to scientists during his time and his ideas from his books Miscellaneous Observations Relating to Education (1778) and the Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (1765). As an expository essay, analysis shows that the inclusion of experimental science education dates back from the Dissenting Academies when they explicitly aligned science education for practical life. With Priestley’s advocacy on experimental learning in science, his idea of hands-on science education encouraged other dissenters to seek and understand the changing natural world. His advocacy states that knowledge and understanding of the natural world builds the foundation for rationally evaluating the developments derived from permissible scientific theories. Not setting aside religious studies, Priestley promoted a radical education which ended the restrictions to the privileged and powerful few so that it opened up the access of learning for everyone whose capacity may range from scientific, religious, political, or educational propensities.

The Germ of an Idea: Contagionism, Religion, and Society in Britain, 1660-1730 by Margaret DeLacy

Reviewed by: The Germ of an Idea: Contagionism, Religion, and Society in Britain, 1660-1730 by Margaret DeLacy Kevin Siena Margaret DeLacy. The Germ of an Idea: Contagionism, Religion, and Society in Britain, 1660-1730. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. xviii + 305 pp. $100.00 ( 978-1-137-57527-2). Margaret DeLacy has been studying the early roots of contagion theory for many years and has now produced the most important book on the topic to appear for quite some time. Following Edwin Ackerknecht's groundbreaking work, considerable scholarship has explored debates between contagionists and anticontagionists in the nineteenth century, while plague has drawn equal interest in the topic for the Renaissance. In between these poles, however, the issue has been far less studied. DeLacy explores the oft-neglected period of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to chart the development of ideas that anticipate—but which remained a long way off and quite distinct from—modern germ theory. Right off the top Delacy must be commended for tackling such an intricate and frankly messy intellectual world. By the Restoration the British medical scene had been strongly influenced by iatrochemistry and would soon feel the impact of Newtonian mechanism but yet still held on to vestiges of humouralism. Contagion [End Page 444] was not a new idea, but DeLacy makes a good case that it took greater form by 1730, thanks to a series of factors that included the influence of the Helmonto-nian belief that diseases were independent entities invading the body, advances in microscopy that led some doctors to believe in animate microorganisms (usually termed animalcules), and the increased presence of medical taxonomies that presented diseases as entities with greater specificity. She points to epidemics like the 1720 Marseilles plague scare and the worrying spread of the cattle disease rinderplast a decade earlier, as well as the advent of inoculation as key events that drew greater attention to the value of contagionism. Readers unfamiliar with the period will likely be astonished at how modern seems a treatise like Benjamin Marten's New Theory of Consumptions, which as long ago as 1720 argued that phthisis (later tuberculosis) was a specific disease spread by contagion thanks to a microscopic organism. But DeLacy correctly resists anachronism. While many of the tools of modern germ theory were at their disposal, almost no seventeenth- or eighteenth-century doctor put them all together. Instead, belief in animalcules, disease-specificity, or medical taxonomy appear here and there, appearing in fits and starts, and almost always contested. What allows DeLacy to make sense of this intellectual stew, and what must be considered her most valuable contribution, is her ability to link proponents of early contagionism to heterodox religion and unconventional medical education. Contagionists were often medical outsiders, especially those who studied abroad because as dissenters they were barred from Oxford and Cambridge and therefore from becoming Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians. Here DeLacy's work follows on the tradition of Charles Webster (in linking seventeenth-century science to radical religion) as well as Hal Cook (by foregrounding the political struggles of the heterogeneous medical world of Restoration London).1 Her careful prosopography demonstrates how doctors with nontraditional backgrounds and education—especially those who had been exposed to Helmontian chemistry—tended to advance contagionist ideas most clearly. Some of her figures may not seem like "outsiders"—eminent doctors like Hans Sloane, Richard Mead, or Thomas Sydenham—but in each case she teases out their backgrounds and demonstrates their similar intellectual roots. My only quibble with this fine book is that the Great London Plague of 1665/6 gets almost no coverage. Surely if there was an event that drew attention to the question of contagion after 1660 this was it. It is notable that during the much later 1720 plague scare (to which DeLacy devotes chap. 9) many of the treatises that rolled off the press were reissues of texts from the earlier crisis, such as Nathaniel Hodges' Loimologia, or, an historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665, With precautionary Directions against the like Contagion (1720, originally 1672). Indeed, the well-known pamphlet war between Hodges and Helmontonian physicians like George Thomson...

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...

Qualitative novelty in seventeenth-century science: Hydrostatics from Stevin to Pascal

Two works on hydrostatics, by Simon Stevin in 1586 and by Blaise Pascal in 1654, are analysed and compared. The contrast between the two serves to highlight aspects of the qualitative novelty involved in changes within science in the first half of the seventeenth century. Stevin attempted to derive his theory from unproblematic postulates drawn from common sense but failed to achieve his goal insofar as he needed to incorporate assumptions involved in his engineering practice but not sanctioned by his postulates. Pascal's theory went beyond common sense by introducing a novel concept, pressure. Theoretical reflection on novel experiments was involved in the construction of the new concept and experiment also provided important evidence for the theory that deployed it. The new experimental reasoning was qualitatively different from the Euclidean style of reasoning adopted by Stevin. The fact that a conceptualization of a technical sense of pressure adequate for hydrostatics was far from obvious is evident from the work of those, such as Galileo and Descartes, who did not make significant moves in that direction.

Domains of study and genres in late seventeenth-century science: evidence from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1675)

AbstractThe

The Rise of the “Mechanical Philosophy”: Current Scholarship on Seventeenth-Century ScienceDaniel Garber and Sophie Roux. The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 300. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. Pp. xviii+327. $139.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessEssay ReviewThe Rise of the “Mechanical Philosophy”: Current Scholarship on Seventeenth-Century Science Daniel Garber and Sophie Roux. The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 300. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. Pp. xviii+327. $139.00 (cloth).Doug JessephDoug JessephUniversity of South Florida Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HOPOS Volume 4, Number 2Fall 2014 Sponsored by The International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/676672 Views: 85Total views on this site HistoryPublished online August 19, 2014 © 2014 by the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Causality as individual essence: its bearing on synchronicity.

Causality, time, and number are subjectively lived realities and need to be noticed as such. Fundamental to the wide range of living experience, they are also basic to scientific knowing. In this article I examine causality in relation to an article on synchronicity by Harald Atmanspacher and Wolfgang Fach. My examination is neither scientific nor metaphysical, but rather phenomenological, as it is a clarification of form as individual essence of a thing. This non-material form of an individual thing in the widest sense of the word 'thing' was rejected and so lost during modern seventeenth-century science but, renewed now, can help describe synchronicity. A commentary by William Willeford follows.

Sentiments of Devotion and Experimental Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century England

Historians of science have become increasingly aware of the connections between religion and science in the early modern period. Science, or more strictly “natural philosophy,” is understood as having pointed to the existence of a designing deity. Conversely, religion is seen as providing a fledgling science with social legitimation. Another connection between seventeenth-century science and religion is less well known, and that is the way in which the experimental practices of the new science were then thought to promote a particular kind of moral and religious formation. As Robert Boyle put it, the study of nature would instill “sentiments of devotion and particular virtues.” This feature of experimental science represents a significant link with the classical notion of philosophy (including natural philosophy), which stressed the importance of the moral formation of the philosopher. The intellectual labors of the experimentalist could thus be understood as a form of spiritual exercises.

Book Review: Fictional Tools in Seventeenth-Century Science, Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century

FICTIONAL TOOLS IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE Fictions of Cosmos: Science and Literature in Seventeenth Century. Frederique Ait-Touati, translated by Susan Emanuel (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 201 1). Pp. ? + 261. $45. ISBN 978-0-226-01 122-6.It is a truism that nothing can exasperate us like things or people we love. And there is much indeed to love in a book by an observant scholar immersed in some of most bracing seventeenth-century writing about space travel, lunar and stellar prospects, and a universe in which a planetary Earth is truly conceived to move. Thus I shall begin here by admiring Frederique Ait-Touati's contributions to our understanding of literature and history of astronomy, only afterwards glancing briefly at her book's exasperating faults.Ait-Touati surveys how fictional tools employed by Johannes Kepler, John Wilkins, William Godwin, Cyrano de Bergerac, Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle, Christiaan Huygens, Robert Hooke, and Margaret Cavendish enriched and to a degree enabled science in seventeenth century. Recognizing the incertitude inherent in cosmological discourse, Ait-Touati sketches how fictional poetic . . . were adopted to accredit a discourse with a fragile epistemological and ontological status (p. 191). The poetic responses to which she refers are closely akin to thought experiments such as Einstein's famous imaginative account a century ago of the man in accelerated chest, which illustrates, as well as lending credibility to, his theory of relativity (p. 191). For her part, Ait-Touati aims to describe role played in seventeenth century by what she denominates as imaginary, theoretical, and optical voyages, principal among them lunar tale recounted by Kepler, story-teller par excellence.Kepler's posthumous Somnium (or Dream), according to Ait-Touati, functions as a hypotyposis - a vivid description of a scene, event, or situation, bringing it, as it were, before eyes of hearer or reader (OED). That imagined voyage to Moon delivers a vision of moving Earth, an autopsy in that word's etymological sense of firsthand observation. Thus fiction of Dream servesto dramatize, to visualize, an experiment that cannot be performed on Earth, by imagining physical consequences of displacement of a body in space. In this sense, Dream's fable is a thought-experiment. The role of lunar fiction is then a textual test . . .: What would be consequences of sending a human body into space? What would traveler see from Moon? . . . While it can be realized only in form of a game of fiction, this is a game played according to laws of physics (p. …

Who Wrote What When: The Bible, Science and Criticism

According to the traditional (or ‘whig’) interpretation of history, sometime in the seventeenth century science was born in the form that we know today, in a new spirit that can best be summed up by the motto of the Royal Society: nullius in verba, take nobody's word for it. In the next few centuries this new critical way of looking at reality was instrumental in the creation of a coherent view of the world, and of that world's history, which was found to be increasingly at odds with traditional claims, most famously in the case of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. By the end of the nineteenth century, the divide between science and religion was described by means of words such as ‘conflict’ and ‘warfare,’ the terms used by John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White in the titles of their respective books: History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).

Seventeenth-Century Science and Spinoza’s Break with Judaism

This section of Robert M. Seltzer’s book “Jewish People, Jewish Thought” centers in on a period in history known as “The Enlightenment”. Here it seems that Seltzer’s first goal is to provide a context for which to place this section’s main character, Baruch Spinoza. Thus, with broad strokes Seltzer’s paints a picture of history during it’s a period of religious strife. He points to men like Copernicus's, Isaac Newton and their ideological conflict with Aristotelian science. In other words, Aristotle’s belief that the earth was the center of the universe was being challenged by new mathematical principles combined with modern philosophy, which indicated that the sun was the center of the universe; and also suggested that reason knowledge would offer humanity a more reliable formula for salvation. Hence, a salvation not dependent on God’s actions but simply on mans intellectual progressive procession generally accepted theory of the day. Seltzer writes, “Seventeenth-century science fostered a feeling of liberation from the authority of the past” (548).

From Royal Representation to Scientific Aspiration: Charles V’s Columnar Device and the Dynamics of Appropriation (16th-18th Centuries)

This contribution deals with the Nachleben of the famous columnar device of emperor Charles V (1500-1558). Until recently, research on royal representations mainly focused on art forms like portraits or literary panegyrics. Nevertheless, the more abstract imagery of devices constituted the most expanded type of the visualization of power. Their polysemic nature made them into dynamic signs, who were subjected to a continuous process of appropriation and reinterpretation. Particular symbolism was constantly merged with other (textual) signifiers and iconographic elements, creating different meanings in different contexts. I will argue that this process of appropriation turned Charles’ device into a dynamic symbol serving the agenda of various groups in society, rather than the static representation of rulership. The possibility to detach from the individual connotation ensured that it remained a potent iconographic theme throughout the studied period. The iconographic production can be grouped into three ‘traditions’: the use of the device in the political field – by successors or political rivals − the application as a ‘sacral emblem’, and the discourse of seventeenth century science. Nevertheless, these various interpretations were all united by the same expression of an essential theme deeply rooted in early modern culture: transgressing boundaries and the search for divine truth.

Water in use and philosophy at Wotton House: John Evelyn and the History of the Trades

John Evelyn (1620–1706) is a prominent character in the historiography of seventeenth-century science. His friendships with Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren and Sir Thomas Browne, to name a few, ensure this, as does the huge volume of relevant archival material that he left behind. He was not particularly accomplished as a scientist, or natural philosopher to use the contemporary term, but he did engage earnestly with the project of establishing new experimentalist directions for the investigation of nature, both in the Royal Society after its establishment in the early 1660s, and in other milieux in the lead up to that event. As a figure in garden historiography, Evelyn is equally important. He was not a professional gardener, but a gentleman educated for public office. However, until the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, the year he turned forty, he was excluded from public service because of his political allegiances – he was a Royalist. The 1650s were for Evelyn a decade of retirement, and from this time come both the gardens at Wotton – the topic of this paper – and his own famous garden at Sayes Court in Deptford, established in 1653. It was also the time when he composed much of the material on gardening and other virtuoso topics that he published both during that decade and subsequently.

Hunting Robert Boyle: Michael Hunter and Boyle's Life and LettersHunterMichael, Boyle: between God and science. Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv + 366. £25.00 (hardback). ISBN 978-0300123814.

Michael Hunter, Boyle: between God and science. Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv + 366. £25.00 (hardback). ISBN 978-0300123814. Robert Boyle (1627–1691) was the dominant figure in late seventeenth-century English science, his reputation only later overshadowed by Newton in the early 1700s.

Weighing Experience: Experimental Histories and Francis Bacon's Quantitative Program

AbstractWeighing of experience was a central concern of what Bacon called the "literate" stage of experimentation. As early as 1608, Bacon devised precise tenets for standard, quantitative reporting of experiments. These ideas were later integrated into his experimental histories proper. Bacon's enquiry of dense and rare is the best example of experientia literata developed in a quantitative fashion. I suggest that Bacon's ideas on this issue can be tied to experiments for the determination of specific gravities born in a monetary context: Bacon's investigation was very likely a generalization of Jean Bodin's experiments in Universae naturae theatrum (1596). Overall, Bacon's program of quantification calls for a revision of established historiographical notions, especially Thomas Kuhn's sharp dichotomy between a mathematical and a Baconian experimental tradition in seventeenth-century science.

Who invents life: intelligent designers, blind watchmakers, or genetic engineers?

The mechanization of the natural world became such a feature of late seventeenth-century science that historians have sometimes spoken of the death of nature, as organic analogies were displaced by images of clockwork. The impact of mechanical analogies varied from science to science, often proving premature in the study of living systems. In the long run, however, there was scarcely any branch of science that was not affected. Despite the revolution in physics, which in our own century has made the image of a rigidly deterministic universe less secure, the assimilation of natural processes to machinery continues to be a conspicuous feature of scientific investigation. The legacy of the seventeenth century mechanical philosophy is apparent in such terms as genetic engineering and in the description of computers capable of simulating aspects of human intelligence.