Abstract
Something very important happened in our knowledge of the physical world in the seventeenth century. A number of very smart people made discoveries about the natural world that fundamentally changed our way of looking at things. But as important as the individual accomplishments of individual seventeenth-century scientists were, an important part of the story lies in the disciplinary and institutional history of that important century. What was new and important was not only Copernicus and Kepler, Descartes and Galileo, Leibniz and Newton, but the changes that happened in the larger framework in which they work.
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Notes
- 1.
Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 3–4.
- 2.
References to Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and De dignitate et augmentis scientarum are given in the text in a way that should allow the reader to find them in any standard edition.
- 3.
Rudolph Goclenius, Lexicon philosophicum, quo tanquam clave philosophiae fores aperiuntur (Frankfurt: 1613), p. 626.
- 4.
Eustachius a Sancto Paolo, Summa philosophiae quadripartita, de rebus Dialecticis, Ethicis, Physicis, & Metaphysicis (Paris: 1609). The quotation is from the edition published in Cambridge, 1648, Physica, p. 111.
- 5.
See Ratio studiorum: Plan raisonée et institution des études dans la Compagnie de Jésus, ed. and trans. by Adrien Demoustier et al. (Paris: Belin, 1997). This contains the Ratio studiorum of 1599, in Latin with French translation, notes and supplementary material.
- 6.
For a good account of the organization and structure of universities in France in the early seventeenth century, see L.W.B. Brockliss, French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
- 7.
See Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) and William Wallace, Galileo and his Sources: The Heritage of the Collegio Romano in Galileo’s Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)
- 8.
See Theo Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesianism (1637–1650) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992).
- 9.
See Mordechai Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship: Science, Universities, and Society in England, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); François de Dainville, L’education des jésuites (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1978), pp. 323–54; Ratio studiorum, p. 132.
- 10.
See Giuseppe Cosentino, “L’insegnamento delle matematiche nei collegi gesuitici nell’Italia settentrionale: Nota introduttiva,” Physis 13 (1971), pp. 205–17.
- 11.
See Robert S. Westman, “The Astronomer’s Role in the Sixteenth Century: A Preliminary Study,” History of Science 18 (1980), pp. 105–47; Mario Biagioli, “The Social Status of Italian Mathematicians, 1450–1600,” History of Science 27 (1989), pp. 41–95; Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
- 12.
On alchemy (or “chymistry” as some current historians prefer) see especially Pamela Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); William Newman, Gehennical Fire, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Lawrence M. Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
- 13.
See L.W.B. Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
- 14.
See Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); N. Jardine, J.A. Secord, and E.C. Spary, eds., The Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 15.
Descartes, Discours de la méthode, in Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes (11 vols.) (Paris: CNRS/Vrin, 1964–1974), vol. VI, pp. 61–62, translated in Descartes, ed. and tr. by John Cottingham et al. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (3 vols.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1991), vol. I pp. 142–3.
- 16.
See Bacon, New Atlantis (London: 1627), pp. 31 ff.
- 17.
Quoted in H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 1.
- 18.
Diderot, Denis; Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’, et al., Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et métiers (Paris: 1751–1772), vol. 6, p. 299.
- 19.
Diderot et al., Encyclopédie, vol 1, p. xxviij.
- 20.
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4.12.10.
- 21.
See Claude-Pierre Goujet, Mémoire Historique et Littéraire sur le Collège Royal de France (Paris: 1758); and Abel Lefranc, Histoire du Collège de France (Paris: Hachette, 1893).
- 22.
See, e.g., W.E. Knowles Middleton, The Experimenters: A Study of the Accademia del Cimento (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); Paolo Galluzzi, “L’Accademia del Cimento: “Gusti” de principe, filosofia e ideologia dell’esperimento,” Quaterni storici 16 (1981), 788–844.
- 23.
See, e.g., J.-R. Armogathe, “Le groupe de Mersenne et la vie académique parisienne,” XVIIe Siècle 1992, 44:131–39.
- 24.
See Dr. E.T.H. Hamy, "William Davisson, intendant des jardins du roi et professeur de chimie," in Nouvelles Archives du Museum 3e S., t. X, Paris, 1898, pp. 1–38; E.C. Spary, Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from the Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
- 25.
Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, D. D. Heath, The Works of Francis Bacon, (14 vols.) (London: Longmans, 1857–1874), vol. III, p. 156.
- 26.
See Roger Hahn, The anatomy of a scientific institution: the Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971).
- 27.
See Michael Hunter, The Roya l Society and its Fellows, 1660–1700: the Morphology of an Early Scientific Institution (Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks, England: British Society for the History of Science, 1982); Michael Hunter, Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Wolfeboro, NH, USA: Boydell Press, 1989).
- 28.
Diderot et al., Encyclopédie, vol. 1, p. xxvij.
- 29.
An earlier version of parts of this essay appeared in Italian as the introduction to Storia della Scienza, volume V, sezione I: L’età della rivoluzione scientifica. (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2002).
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Garber, D. (2010). Philosophia, Historia, Mathematica: Shifting Sands in the Disciplinary Geography of the Seventeenth Century. In: Sorell, T., Rogers, G., Kraye, J. (eds) Scientia in Early Modern Philosophy. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3077-1_1
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