HIPS 17400
Science, Culture, and Society II
Adrian 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 Requirements
Class 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.
Readings
The 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.
Appointments
My 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 Topics
This 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 succeeding 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, 32942; 482-9, 502-11, 656-7, 994-1000 (i.e., Physics, II; On the Heavens, II:13-14; IV:1, 36; 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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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
***
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.
***
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.
***
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), 14171
[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.
***
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.
***
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
***
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 EighteenthCentury 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.