Raz Chen and Ofer Gal (Bar Ilan and Sydney)

“The Wig and the Instrument: Radical Instrumentalism from Galileo to Hooke”

In his famous Assayer Galileo ignores the Jesuits’ explicit support of his telescope and uses a particularly forceful rhetoric to assault their use and understanding of the instrument and its use.  Galileo’s arguments have nothing to do with Copernicanism or Platonism, and they force him to adopt strangely reactionary positions about comets. Rather, they support a new, radical concept of instrumental observation, in which the instrument completely replaces the eye.  To justify this Galileo presents the human sense organ as a fundamentally flawed instrument, whose mediation distorts and deceives, and the instrument, in contrast, as an embodiment of a purely mathematical relation, which allows the intellect to read the “mathematical characters” of nature unmediated.  The Jesuits, on the other hand, approached observation instruments as aids to or extensions of the eye, with the human organ, divinely assigned, being always the final adjudicator, and naked eye observation always the preferred choice.  The controversy between the mild and radical instrumentalism continued along these throughout the 17th century, with its original themes still present, in an elaborate form, in the debate over telescopic sites between Hooke and Hevelius in the 1670s.

Commentary:  Nick Dew

 

Paula Findlen (Stanford) pfindlen@stanford.edu

"Representing Nature:  Agostino Scilla and the Painting of Knowledge 
in Seventeenth-Century Italy"
In 1670 the Sicilian painter Agostino Scilla published a book with the curious title of "Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense." A careful account of the fossil record of Malta and Sicily, Scilla's book participated in debates about the nature of fossils, siding with those who argued for their organic nature.  This paper explores one of the central premises of Scilla's methodology:  namely, his claim to have superior insight into nature as a painter.  In doing so, it also considers his relationship to the legacy of Leonardo da Vinci who made similar claims at the end of fifteenth century.

Commentary: Ofer Gal

 

Rivka Feldhay (Tel Aviv) yoram@netvision.net.il

 “Galilean Science in Jesuit Classes of the 17th Century”

In early modernity the Jesuits became the architects of the first global educational system aspiring to disseminate their version of Catholicism through a common plan of studies applied in a network of hundred of schools and universities. (Ganss 1956; Dainville 1978; O’Malley 1993; Feldhay 1995) One may imagine the impact of the Jesuit project by realizing that until the 18th century, most of the Catholic elite, and Catholic scientists in particular were educated and socialized in Jesuit schools. The Jesuits cared for more than 200,000 children and adolescents each year, and produced Torricelli, Descartes, Mersenne, Fontenelle, Laplace, Volta, Diderot, Helvétius, Condorcet, Turgot, Voltaire, Vico, and Muratori, to name but a few (Feingold 2003, p. 38).

My paper will focus on the Baroque form which the Jesuits used to transmit science in the classes. 1) First, by drawing upon as many examples as I can quote in one lecture, I shall present a few instances of transmission and will analyze its strategies. This will necessarily modify the traditional view that the Jesuits – though brilliant pedagogues – were orthodox Thomist-Aristotelians, and therefore their scientific texts are not relevant for historians of the scientific revolution.

2) However, the transmission of science by Jesuits often took place in a non-sympathetic and sometimes even hostile environment. I shall hence conclude by offering you a few peeps into the “Jesuit way” in fostering a quasi popular culture of science.

Commentary: John Schuster

 

Koen Vermeir (Leuven/Cambridge) Koen.Vermeir@hiw.kuleuven.be

“Magnetic Theology as a Baroque Phenomenon.”

The Baroque was the Age of Magnetism. From the first systematic theory of magnetism, William Gilbert’s De Magnete in 1600, until the breakthrough in the study of electricity in the middle of the 18th century, magnetism was a major paradigm by means of which philosophers conceptualised a broad variety of natural phenomena - especially those that were difficult to explain by traditional theories. Medical treatments, divinatory practices, and even the motions of the heavens were explained by means of magnetic interactions.

In this paper, I will study a curious offspring of the magnetic philosophy. In the wake of De Magnete, a thoroughgoing analogy between magnetism and theology was developed by a number of religious writers. From sparse magnetic analogies in the Patristic literature and in later devotional tracts, in the 17th century, a fully systematised magnetic theology was developed by writers from both sides of the religious divide that ran across Europe.

These writers formed a curious mishmash, according to current day standards, and included the poet John Donne, the natural philosopher Robert Boyle, the puritan preacher Samuel Ward, and the Jesuit mathematician Athanasius Kircher. In the course of my paper, I will analyse what these diverse figures had in common, so that they would all be interested to write on magnetic theology, as well as their different approaches to this subject. Beyond the confines of the history of magnetic theology, this will also allow me to detail crucial differences and changes in the early development of natural theology, when it emerged as a specific cultural field at the end of the 17th century.

Magnetic theology is a typically Baroque phenomenon. It is a cultural phenomenon that cannot clearly be subsumed under one of the current day categories of ‘science’ or ‘religion’, and it is symptomatic of the way scientific inquiry and religious contemplation were intertwined during the Baroque. In this paper, I will detail a number of ways in which a study of the history of magnetic theology can clarify a proposed concept of ‘Baroque science’, as well as, vice versa, how the qualification ‘Baroque’ can help us to better understand a curious cultural outgrowth such as magnetic theology.

Commentary: Raz Chen

 

Nick Dew (McGill) Email

“The Hive and the Pendulum: Universal Metrology and Baroque Science”

Early modern scholars and statesmen were acutely aware of the need for improved standards of measurement, albeit for differing reasons.  The variety of man-made units across territories and histories was, by the time of Pascal (Pensées, Lafuma 60) , already a sceptical commonplace, and was understood in terms of the mutability of human institutions.  The late seventeenth century saw many scholars advance possible solutions to the problem. The most well-known of these was the use of a seconds pendulum as a standard for length, a project which was actively pursued by the French Académie des sciences in the 1670s and 1680s. This paper aims to explore the various universal metrological schemes within the context of the period’s conceptions of measurement, in which political, theological, and humanistic concerns were combined, as well as certain themes in seventeenth-century thought (universal language schemes; mathesis universalis) which may (or may not) be thought of as “baroque”. 

Commentary: Peter Dear

 

Peter Dear (Cornell) Prd3@cornell.edu

"The Roots of Modern Reason."

What was the 'reason' that dominated 'the Age of Reason'?  And what constituted its purportedly self-evident power?  This paper investigates the immediate antecedents of Enlightenment reason in the philosophical and apologetic uses of the term, and the analyses of its meaning and justification, found in the seventeenth century.  What reason was, and what it was not, are traced to both theological and pragmatic underpinnings that reveal, among other things, why Artificial Intelligence was an unthinkable concept for many philosophers of the Baroque era.

Commentary: Stephen Gaukroger

 

Antonio Clericuzio (Cassino) antonio.clericuzio@fastwebnet.it

“Chemistry in the 17th Century: practical art or academic discipline?”

In the seventeenth century the status of chemistry changed remarkably. Chemistry was no longer regarded as a manual practice subordinated to medicine, but as an independent discipline. Andreas Libavius gave chemistry a logical method and intellectual legitimacy, in order to make it an academic discipline. In Germany, chymiatria became part of the medical teaching in several universities, while in the rest of Europe the introduction of chemistry in the university curricula was a much slower process. Chemistry was often taught both in private courses and in institutions other from the universities. The latter was the case of France, where a strong opposition from the Medical Faculty prevented the introduction of chemistry in the university curricula. Nonetheless, thanks to the support of the court, chemical teaching spread in Paris, both in private courses and at the Jardin du Roi. A number of influential chemical textbooks saw the light in France and became a model to textbooks published in the rest of Europe. The present paper investigates the changing status of chemistry in the 17th century, namely its transformation from a practical art into a legitimate academic subject. The focus of my enquiry is the definition of the aims of chemistry to be found in the chemical textbooks, as well as its relationships to other disciplines, notably, medicine and natural philosophy.

Commentary: Victor Boantza