HIPS 17400

Science, Culture, and Society IIAdrian Johns

Teaching Assistants:

Ryan Dahn (rwdahn@uchicago.edu)Gilad Nir (giladnir@uchicago.edu

Parysa Mostair (parysa@uchicago.edu)

Fall Quarter, 2014

Syllabus

This course addresses one of the great transformations in Western history. During the period from the early sixteenth century to the late seventeenth, European understandings of the natural world – and ways of achieving such understandings – underwent a series of radical and far-reaching transformations. The process affected every aspect of life as it was then lived, and as it has been lived since. It is often called the Scientific Revolution. Many people think that it was the central process in the development of modern culture itself.

At the outset of our period, if you wanted authoritative knowledge about nature then you would usually turn to a discipline called “natural philosophy.” Natural philosophy was based on ancient texts – especially those by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle – and pursued in universities. It told you that the earth sat at the center of the universe, that everything beneath the Moon was composed of four elements and was subject to constant change, and that the proper way to understand natural changes was qualitatively, in terms of four ‘causes’. It was a sophisticated, well-founded, and – generally speaking – successful enterprise.

From around 1500, an array of new experiences called this discipline into question. The invention of printing, the discovery of the new world, and the development of new machines and methods led to its fragmentation. Radical ideas about the physical world

proliferated, at the hands of new kinds of investigator armed with new kinds of tools. From the very large (cosmology) to the extremely small (microscopy), existing conceptions were challenged, transformed, and finally repudiated wholesale. Now, the earth itself was in motion. It was made up of tiny particles. The proper way of investigating nature was by systematic experimentation, often carried out in the world beyond university walls. And the most important language for the whole enterprise was that of mathematics. Such novel ideas, modes of investigation, and practices of communication combined to produce far-reaching cultural consequences. One of those consequences would be the modern enterprise of Science.

But for those who lived in the period, that distant outcome was very hard to foresee. They had to make their own choices between a bewildering array of approaches to and ideas about nature. Which approach among the many on offer – atomism, alchemy, mechanical philosophy, magic, experimentalism, neoplatonism, and many more – might end up providing the most reliable, powerful, or accurate knowledge was vigorously contested. Decisions had to be made without reference to what we may now, much later, think of as the various options’ scientific virtues (or lack of them). Much of the interest of the period lies in appreciating how those decisions were in fact made according to the very different criteria available at the time. What we call “science” may eventually have emerged from those choices, but it did so as their consequence, not their cause. In other words, we discover from looking at these events that science is a thoroughly historical achievement.

Course RequirementsClass sessions meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12:00-1:20 in HM 140. This is really a lecture course, but I shall try to incorporate opportunities for students to speak up at these sessions. You are expected to attend all sessions.

Written work. This falls into three categories. In each case, essays should be written about some topic assigned by the course staff. Generally you will be given a choice of several options.

1. Students are to prepare a one-page paper every week (except for weeks 1, 2, 5, and 10), due at the time of the class on Tuesdays. They will generally be returned at the Thursday class. Those for weeks 3 and 4 will not count toward the grade; the ones that will are those in weeks 6, 7, 8, and 9. Each will be marked out of 10, making a total possible score of 40. In total these papers amount to 20% of your final grade.

2. A longer (5-7 page) paper is due on October 28 (week 5). It will be marked out of 60, for 30% of the final grade. This should be an analysis of an issue or subject raised in the first half of the course, and a choice of questions will be circulated.

3. A substantial (12-15 page) paper is due on December 8 (the first Monday after the reading period). It will be marked out of 100, for 50% of the grade. This should be a more extensive study of an issue or subject addressed in the course; it cannot be on the same subject as the short paper. A choice of topics will be circulated, but you may also do a topic of your own choosing if you get it approved beforehand by a TA or me. Students graduating this quarter – and therefore needing to get their grades submitted early – should contact me to determine a different schedule.

The one-page papers may be submitted via the Chalk site. The two longer papers must be handed in as stapled printouts. You must retain copies of them. (We can make other arrangements if need be, but this is the default requirement.)

For both of the two longer papers, in particular, students should use academic conventions. They should cite full bibliographic and page information for any source from which they quote or employ ideas, using footnotes or endnotes. They should also include bibliographies. Take care over grammar, syntax, and spelling, as poor writing will affect grades. Essays should try to do more than simply describe; they should attempt some critical engagement with ideas and issues. The assigned topics are designed to facilitate this.

Students who submit papers late without prior approval should expect to be penalized at the discretion of graders. In general, approval is readily given for unpredictable problems like illnesses or family crises, or for new opportunities like job interviews. It is not given under any circumstances for issues foreseeable in advance – which includes clashes with sports events or deadlines in other classes. It is each student’s responsibility to manage such predictable things successfully. If you have a chemistry practical in the final week, for example, it is your responsibility to tackle the paper for this class early enough to do both on time. The key point is this: unpredictable things may be grounds for an extension; predictable things aren’t.

ReadingsThe events covered in this class have attracted a vast literature, beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and continuing to this day. Debates on their nature, course, and consequences have always been fierce. The recommendations given here are my own, and others might well have come up with different ones. You are welcome – indeed, encouraged – to supplement them with other sources that you may find in Regenstein or Crerar. You should be aware, however, that some of the older secondary texts you may encounter in the library are likely to be seriously outdated, or worse. So be curious, but at the same time be cautious and critical – as historians are meant to be.

There are three required texts. You should have read through all three of the following by the end of the quarter:

* P. Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences (2nd edition, 2009)* S. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (1996).* R. Iliffe, Newton: A Very Short Introduction (2007).

In addition, students interested in the earlier material in the course should read:* D. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (2007)All four of these books are affordable, and they will be available at the Seminary Co-op.I have also made more specific recommendations for each week’s topic, as listed below. All titles can be found on the course Chalk site, either in the library’s course reserves section or in the Course Documents section. They combine works by modern historians (that is, “secondary sources”) with texts by participants in the events we shall be examining (“primary sources”). It is important to sample both. In particular, please resist the temptation to skimp on the primary sources. One of the most exciting things about the history of science is that, because it is a relatively young and sparsely populated discipline, newcomers hit the ‘research front’ quite quickly. You may well be able to find something new in primary materials, because most haven’t been worked to death. I encourage you to make the most of the opportunity. But do be aware that in order to do that successfully, you’ll need to read these texts with an eye to their historical contexts: identifying flaws in seventeenth-century claims by the light of what we now know about physics, chemistry, or biology is almost never going to be a good strategy.

The reading lists given here are substantial. To help navigate them, I have marked the highest-priority items with a double-asterisk (**) and the next most important with a single asterisk (*). You don’t necessarily have to read everything every week. A good rule of thumb is that you should manage around 100 pages a week.

AppointmentsMy office is in Social Sciences 505. I have office hours on Fridays at 10-12 (with a few gaps this quarter because of travel outside Chicago). You are welcome to come by at this time and ask me anything about the course. If you plan to do so, please try to email me or sign up on the sheet at my office door beforehand to let me know. You are also welcome to schedule appointments at other times. My phone number is 702-2334. My email address is johns@uchicago.edu. I try to answer emails within 24 hours, but cannot guarantee to be faster than that. Occasionally I may be slower, depending on how busy I am. I don’t tweet or blog, and although I suppose I must still have a Facebook page it has been dormant for years. I do have a website hosted by the university (http://home.uchicago.edu/~johns/), on which this and other syllabi can be found.

Schedule of TopicsThis is a provisional schedule. The subjects we actually address may differ from these,

depending on the state of the field, student interests, etc.

Week 1

9/30/2014

Introduction to the Course

In week 1 you are not expected to have read the texts before class.

This first session is introductory. It will articulate the questions that the suc-ceeding meetings are designed to address, explain why those questions are so important, and suggest means by which their answers may be found. Beginning with what educated people of the mid-sixteenth century knew about the universe in which they lived, we shall be examining the emergence of important alternatives to that knowledge, including those proposed by figures such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. In order to understand their composition and consequences, we shall try to place these rival approaches in their different historical contexts and to understand their appeal to different audiences. This session explains why the effort to do all this is worthwhile.

* Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences, 10-46.** Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 1-14.D.C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago, 2007), 286-320.

10/2/2014

What a Renaissance Student Knew: Natural Philosophy and its Challenges

In this second session we shall examine some of the challenges to prevailing systems of knowledge that arose in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These challenges included the discovery of the New World, the invention of printing, the development of sophisticated artisanal practices, and the recovery of ancient wisdom. It was not easy to accommodate any of these in the existing enterprise of natural philosophy.

* J. Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle (2 v. Princeton, 1995 [1984]), I, 329-42; 482-9, 502-11, 656-7, 994-1000 (i.e., Physics, II; On the Heavens, II:13-14; IV:1, 3-6; On the Soul, II:1; Parts of Animals, I:1).

* Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly (trans. C.H. Miller. 1979 [1511-32]), 78-98.** A.T. Grafton, A. Shelford, N. Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts (1992), 13-58.*T.S. Kuhn, “Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science,” in Kuhn, The Essential Tension (1977), 31-65.J. Bennett, “The Challenge of Practical Mathematics,” in S. Pumfrey, P. Rossi, and M. Slawinksi (eds.), Science, culture and popular belief in Renaissance Europe (1991), 176–90.P. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (2004), 59-93.

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Week 2

10/7/2014

Neoplatonism, Natural Magic, and Hermetic Philosophy

Some of the most aggressive challenges to Aristotelian natural philosophy came from practitioners of “natural magic” – a craft that involved using knowledge of nature’s powers to produce profitable, healing, or just spectacular effects. Natural magic had its own set of ancient authorities to set against Aristotle, among whom stood out Hermes Trismegistus, supposedly an Egyptian contemporary of Moses. At the same time, its claims to practical efficacy meant that its practitioners represented a very different ideal of the knower from that upheld in scholasticism.

* Marsilio Ficino, Book of Life (trans. C. Boer. 1994), 85-126.** B. Copenhaver, “Astrology and Magic,” in Q. Skinner and E. Kessler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (1988), 264-300.

10/9/2014

Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus, an otherwise rather obscure cleric from Frombork (Frauenburg), created the single most renowned argument against the Aristotelian world. Copernicus published his De Revolutionibus (“On the revolutions”) in 1543. It argued in very technical terms for a very different system of the heavens from that in Aristotle and Ptolemy. Copernicus’s system had the earth in motion, both around its own axis and around the Sun. To support his argument Copernicus drew upon some of the aesthetic, historical, and rhetorical principles of the neoplatonists. He also acknowledged that many would see his book as throwing not just astronomy but all the disciplines into confusion, by implying a license for mathematicians to pronounce on matters of natural philosophy.

** N. Copernicus, On the Revolutions (De Revolutionibus, 1978), XV-XVII, 3-22.* T.S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (1957), 155-81.R.S. Westman, “Proof, Poetics, and Patronage: Copernicus’s Preface to De Revolutionibus,” in D.C. Lindberg and R.S. Westman (eds.), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (1990), 167-205.

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Week 3

10/14/2014

Paracelsus , Paracelsianism, and “Chymistry”

Although Copernicanism proved a radical transformation, Copernicus himself had not been a revolutionary. That was not true of Paracelsus. One of many practitioners to travel the roads and rivers of Europe touting their knowledge of nature and its powers, Paracelsus found extraordinary notoriety as a physician, religious radical, and “chymist.” Everywhere he went, he launched ferocious diatribes against Aristotle and his scholastic interpreters, and against the licensed physicians. After his death, Paracelsus’s published works generated a movement, Paracelsianism, that threatened to overturn medical and philosophical authority.

*Paracelsus, Selected Writings (ed. J. Jacobi) (1979 [1942]), 99-156.** Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences, 47-55.B.T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (2005), 67-98.C. Webster, Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic, and Mission at the End of Time (2008), 1-33.

10/16/2014

Places of Knowledge

Paracelsianism and Copernicanism found converts, but often those converts did not reside in the universities. They could be found in new centers of economic and political power: cities and royal courts. There, they could work on their projects and defend their positions without having to take account every day of scholastic counterblasts. With new forms of knowledge arising in new places, the question arose of what sort of place knowledge should reside in. Was it to be found in seclusion, in monastic spaces and college halls – or should one look instead to places of practice, to city streets and gardens, to ships, and to alchemists’ dens? The origins of the “laboratory” are to be found in answers to that question.

** O. Hannaway, “Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science: Andreas Libavius versus Tycho Brahe,” Isis 77 (1986), 585–610.D. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (2007), 15-56.P. Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (1994), 17-47.** R.S. Westman, “The Astronomer’s Role in the Sixteenth Century: A Preliminary Study,” History of Science 18 (1980), 105-47.J.A. Bennett, “The Mechanics’ Philosophy and the Mechanical Philosophy,” History of Science 24 (1986), 1-27.

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Week 4

10/21/2014

The Crisis of Knowledge

By about 1600, Europeans faced a profound crisis of knowledge. Natural philosophy was no longer one thing; scholastics and neo-Aristotelians were everywhere fighting against a panoply of alternative claimants to expertise, many of whom could base themselves in courts or cities from where they could not easily be dislodged. Some European monarchs even created new universities to sustain the teaching of these new enterprises. How could someone living in that time decide what and who to believe? This became a key question of the period. It loomed even larger as the radical practical implications of some of the new knowledge programs became clear: Tommaso Campanella led a magical revolt in southern Italy, Giordano Bruno was burned for heresy in Rome, and Michael Servetus died for the same offense in Calvin’s Geneva. In the first half of the seventeenth century, it was urgent to come up with a solution to this crisis. Among those who proposed answers were Francis Bacon and René Descartes.

** Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 123-55.P. Findlen, Possessing Nature (1994), 97-154.P. Smith, The Business of Alchemy (1994), 173-227.* M. Biagioli, “Scientific Revolution, Social Bricolage, and Etiquette,” in R. Porter and M. Teich (eds.), The Scientific Revolution in National Context (1992), 11-54.Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun (trans. D.J. Donno. 1981), 27-51 (alternate pages).* Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper (ed and trans. E.A. Gosselin and L.S. Lerner. 1995), 135-65.

10/23/2014

No Meeting

I have a meeting at Stanford on this day so there will be no class meeting

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Week 5

10/28/2014

Magnetic Philosophy

If there was one phenomenon that seemed to vindicate the claims of natural magicians and Paracelsians (and Copernicans, too), it was magnetism. Its effects were obvious, but its causes hidden (or, in the early modern sense, “occult”). Nobody could doubt that it existed, and it seemed to reach as far as the Pole Star. But no scholastic could explain it, and mechanical accounts were notoriously problematic too. So Elizabeth I’s physician, William Gilbert, set out to rescue magnetism from the magicians. He created a “magnetic philosophy,” based on experiments, in terms of which the motions of the planets – and much else besides – could be explained. The magnetic philosophy was to endure for several generations as a viable, flourishing enterprise, and a battleground between the various parties of the time.

** W. Gilbert, De Magnete (trans. P.F. Mottelay., 1958 [1600]), xlvii-li, 64-71, 105-125, 313-43.S. Pumfrey, Latitude and the Magnetic Earth (2002), 109-35, 213-23.

10/30/2014

Johannes Kepler and Causal Astronomy

One of Gilbert’s most enthusiastic readers was to be found in Prague at the royal court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, patron of alchemists, artists, and other wandering scholars. Johannes Kepler was a brilliant mathematician, convinced Copernican, and one-time protégé of Tycho Brahe. Kepler was committed to solving the problem of the motions of the trickiest of planets, Mars. He insisted on doing so by appeal to physically conceivable “causes”, which had also to be mathematically rigorous and “harmonious.” He appealed to Gilbert’s magnetic philosophy to do so. The result, published in Kepler’s New Astronomy and expanded upon in The Harmony of the World, introduced what became known as Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion. But it was much more than that: it was a comprehensive system of the world that explained such things as musical harmonies and human affairs as well as planetary movements.

** J. Kepler, New Astronomy (trans. W.H. Donohue. 1993 [1609]), 27-35, 45-69.

J. Kepler, Harmony of the World (trans. E.J. Aiton, A.M. Duncan, J.V. Field. 1997 [1619]), 403-30.* J.R. Voelkel, Johannes Kepler and the New Astronomy (1999), 47-73.

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Week 6

11/4/2014

The Jesuits: Global Science, Mathematics, and a Revived Aristotle

The most systematic response to the crisis in knowledge came from the Catholic Church, in the form of the Jesuit order. Headquartered in Rome and owing allegiance to the Pope, the Jesuits developed a system of educational institutions across Catholic Europe that was without peer. The purpose was to generate a lay population trained in the latest philosophical and mathematical arguments so as to resist Protestantism and strengthen the Counter-Reformation Roman church. As part of the same endeavor, the Jesuits created the first global knowledge networks, sending representatives as far away as China, Japan, and South America. At the heart of their system was a revived, rigorous and vigorous Aristotelianism, which the Jesuits successfully allied to magnetic philosophy, the mathematical sciences, and a new conception of systematic experience (or, as they sometimes called it, experiment). Among the products of the Jesuits’ knowledge system were to be figures as differently influential as René Descartes and, a century later, David Hume.

* P. Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (1995), 32-62.P. Findlen (ed.), Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (2004), 1-48.S.J. Harris, “Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge,” in J.W. O’Malley et al. (eds.), The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773 (1999), Ch. 9.

11/6/2014

Galileo Galilei: Philosopher, Mathematician, Courtier, Heretic

Galileo Galilei also saw Gilbert’s De Magnete, but he repudiated magnetic explanations of the heavens as occult. Instead, he wanted to pioneer and personify a combination of what were usually two distinct roles - those of mathematician and philosopher. To do that, Galileo took advantage of the invention of the telescope to announce sensational discoveries in the heavens. These discoveries, he believed, argued strongly for

Copernicanism. Galileo was able to secure for himself a position as the first philosopher-mathematician. His prominence meant than when he tried to publish what he thought of as the proof of Copernican cosmology – an argument from the phenomena of tides – he fell afoul of the Catholic authorities.

** Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius (trans. A. Van Helden. 1989 [1610]), 29-57.** Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences, 64-78.Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 15-30.M. Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier (1993), 103-57.

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Week 7

11/11/2014

William Harvey, Anatomy, and the Natural Philosophy of the Body

While debate raged about the heavens and the earth, arguments were scarcely less fierce about the human body. Paracelsians insisted that the body was a “microcosm,” paralleling in miniature the patterns of the cosmos, and proposed to use the analogy to investigate earthly medicaments (that is, chemical medicines). Galenists spoke of an economy of humors – a radically antagonistic notion. Anatomists had their own research programs, often devoted to explaining the structures of the body itself in causal terms. For William Harvey, physician to Charles I (a man so scholarly that he read a book on the battlefield of Edgehill), the need was for a revived natural philosophy of the body. This program inspired his argument that the heart was a pump, and that blood circulated throughout the body.

** W. Harvey, The Anatomical Exercises (ed. G. Keynes. 1995 [1628]), vii-xiii, 57-80.A. Cunningham, “William Harvey,” in P. Harman and S. Mitton (eds.), Cambridge

Scientific Minds (2002), 21-35.

11/13/2014

The Great Instauration

Francis Bacon’s expansive program for renewing natural philosophy can be thought of as another response to the crisis of knowledge. As Lord Chancellor of England, Bacon brought an experienced legal and political mind to bear on what he called his “province.” He advanced a coherent

scheme for setting natural knowledge on a firm foundation, based on practical work and collective judgment, carried out under the policing influence of “method.” Although he died with none of his plans realized, in succeeding generations they would inspire a range of projects, including what became the Royal Society of London – the world’s oldest surviving scientific academy. This impact was shaped by a political situation of extraordinary chaos. The traditional political order collapsed in a disastrous civil war, at the climax of which the king himself was tried and put to death. The creation of “Baconian science” reflected the desperate need for some response to this catastrophe.

* Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences, 55-63.** Francis Bacon, The New Organon (ed. L. Jardine and M. Silverthorne. 2000), 6-24, 40-56.J. Martin, Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (1992), 141-71 [Gabriel Plattes], Macaria (1641) [in “Course Documents” section of Chalk site], whole pamphlet.C. Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform 1626-1660 (1975), 355-402.

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Week 8

11/18/2014

The Principles of Mechanical Philosophy

Another response to the crisis of knowledge came from René Descartes, at the time a mercenary soldier. Seeking for solid ground on which to base a system of knowledge in the wake of attacks on existing authorities by skeptics, Paracelsians, Rosicrucians, and others, Descartes elaborated a rich “mechanical philosophy” that sought to explain natural phenomena by invoking the behavior of comprehensible, macroscopic machines. In the process, he coined many terms that became central to later philosophy and science. But Descartes’s thought was stranger than we tend now to remember – and in the wake of Galileo’s trial he feared that he too would be subject to attack by militant Catholic forces.

** R. Descartes (ed. S. Gaukroger), The World and Other Writings (1998), 3-8, 16-37.* Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences, 79-98.Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 30-57.

11/20/2014

The invention of Experimental Philosophy

In 1660, the British republic came to an end as the monarchy was restored to power. At the same time, Robert Boyle and a group of like-minded English gentlemen came together to create a forum in which to pursue what they called “experimental philosophy.” They looked to Bacon as their ideal, as Hartlib had; but their view of Bacon was rather different. Where Hartlib had wanted to create revolutionary new ventures in agriculture and commerce, the experimentalists saw Baconian method as a tool for securing the peaceful advance of knowledge. The institution they founded, the Royal Society, still exists today. Its experimental philosophy – exemplified above all by experiments on air in a new “air pump” – came to stand as the origin of modern experimental science.

* Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665), Preface (sigs. ar-g2v).Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences, 127-44.* Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 80-117.

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Week 9

11/25/2014

Isaac Newton: The System of the World

The Royal Society’s most famous figure was also someone who in important ways departed from the ideals established by Boyle and the early experimental philosophers. In his early exchanges with the Society, Isaac Newton voiced skepticism about the need to replicate experiments repeatedly, and insisted on the geometrical certainty his own experimental work generated. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Newton worked tirelessly on issues of alchemy and scriptural interpretation (in which his views were very heterodox), producing an understanding of the world that was chymical at least as much as it was mechanical. His Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687) was immediately recognized as extraordinary; so too was his Opticks (1705). Here we will look at how these works originated, and how readers created from them the “Newtonianism” of the Enlightenment.

Isaac Newton, Opticks (1979 [1705]), 389-406.** Isaac Newton, Principia (trans. I.B. Cohen and A. Whitman. 1999 [1687]), 381-3, 403-15, 939-44.* Isaac Newton, “Hypothesis of Light”: letter to Henry Oldenburg, January 25, 1676: in I.B. Cohen and R.S. Westfall (eds.), Newton (NY: Norton, 1995), 12-34.* Iliffe, Newton, Chapter 5.W. Newman, “The background to Newton’s Chymistry,” in I.B. Cohen and G.E. Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Newton (2002), 358-69.

11/27/2014

No Meeting

Thanksgiving Day

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Week 10

12/2/2014

What an Enlightened Student Knew

We began this course by asking what a Renaissance student knew: he knew, broadly, Aristotelian natural philosophy (if he got that far – many students never bothered learning very much, and left without graduating). We end it by asking what an Enlightened student of about 300 years later knew. In some ways, the answer is not as different as we may suppose. Medical practice in particular remained surprisingly unchanged. But in terms of natural philosophy and mathematics there had been a transformation. Natural knowledge was itself becoming mathematical. The earth was in motion, and the old doctrines of natural places and the four causes had been replaced, either by Cartesian mechanisms or by Newton’s laws and the principle of universal gravitation. Chymistry still existed, but it too was being reconstituted as a mechanical or Newtonian enterprise, cast in terms of attractions and repulsions on a microscopic scale. This was not yet modern science, because the concept of the scientist did not yet exist. But that concept could not have come into being without this prior revolution.

Jean Theophilus Desaguliers, The Newtonian System of the World, the Best Model of Government (1728), to p.34 [in “Course Documents” section of Chalk site].** Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences, 145-66.* Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 155-65.Iliffe, Newton, Chapter 10.L. Stewart, “The Selling of Newton: Science and Technology in early Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986), 178-92. S. Schaffer, “Newtonianism,” in R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie, and M.J.S. Hodge (eds.), Companion to the History of Modern Science (1990), 610-26.