Baroque Science
352 pages
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51 halftones
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6 x 9
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© 2012
In Baroque Science, Ofer Gal and Raz D. Chen-Morris present a radically new perspective on the study of early modern science. Instead of the triumph of reason and rationality and the celebration of the discoveries and breakthroughs of the period, they examine science in the context of the baroque, analyzing the tensions, paradoxes, and compromises that shaped the New Science of the seventeenth century and enabled its spectacular success.
Gal and Chen-Morris show how scientists during the seventeenth century turned away from the trust in the acquisition of knowledge through the senses towards a growing reliance on the mediation of artificial instruments, such as lenses and mirrors for observation and mechanical and pneumatic devices for experimentation. Likewise, the mathematical techniques and procedures that allowed the success of mathematical natural philosophy turned increasingly obscure and artificial, and in place of divine harmonies they revealed an assemblage of isolated, contingent laws and constants.
In its attempts to enforce order in the face of threatening chaos, blur the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, and mobilize passions in the service of objective knowledge, Gal and Chen-Morris reveal, the New Science is a baroque phenomenon.
Matthew L. Jones, Columbia University
“A new grand narrative of the mathematical Scientific Revolution, Baroque Science binds together the early modern challenges of finding epistemic order, of creating new artifices for knowledge, and of profiting from the imagination in a lucid gem of a book both technically sophisticated and accessible. Through its deft readings of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Hooke, and Newton, and challenging retellings of the development of optics and the inverse square law of gravitation, Baroque Science forces us anew to attend the cultural and philosophical shifts that made different mathematicizations of the world possible, compelling—as well as limiting. Passionate in subject matter and form, the book will enliven and inspire many a seminar and many a scholar.”
Paula Findlen, Stanford University
“How did Kepler, Descartes, Newton, and their contemporaries envision the mathematical and physical complexity of the world? In this impressive rethinking of seventeenth-century science, Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris offer a new interpretation of the birth of modern science as a baroque subject born from paradox, unleashed by instruments, and reassembled in the imagination. A highly original and interdisciplinary study of the early modern natural philosopher’s anxious quest to order the world.”
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I OBSERVATION
1 Science’s Disappearing Observer: Baroque Optics and the Enlightenment of Vision
2 Per aenigmate: Mirrors and Lenses as Cognitive Tools in Medieval and Renaissance Europe
3 The Specter of the Telescope: Radical Instrumentalism from Galileo to Hooke
II MATHEMATIZATION
4 Nature’s Drawing: Problems and Resolutions in the Mathematization of Motion
5 From Divine Order to Human Approximation: Mathematics in Baroque Science
6 The Emergence of Baroque Mathematical Natural Philosophy: An Archeology of the Inverse Square Law
III PASSIONS
7 Passions, Imagination, and the Persona of the New Savant
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Art: European Art
History: History of Ideas
Physical Sciences: History and Philosophy of Physical Sciences
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