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What Was the Relation of Baroque Culture to the
Trajectory of Early Modern Natural Philosophy?:
An Historiographical Reflection, Inspired by
1
Maravall’s Culture of the Baroque–Analysis of a Historical Structure
John A. Schuster
Program in History and Philosophy of Science
School of History and Philosophy
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
University of New South Wales
Sydney
[Abstract] José Antonio Maravall’s core thesis is that the Baroque was a fully fledged, western Europe wide culture (not a set
of style analogies, or particular cultural products or outcomes), and that this culture was manufactured by elites, themselves
worried by phenomena we would identify as the ‘general crisis of the 17th century’. (Once established, of course, everyone was
living, perceiving and acting within its categories.) I am modelling the structure and dynamics of natural philosophy, a subculture, and looking especially at the modes and rules of competitive engagement during its own ‘critical’ phase which occurred
at the same time that Maravall’s events transpired—the first two or three generations of the 17th century.
I am suggesting this natural philosophical period be seen therefore as a ‘crisis within a crisis’. Furthermore, on analogy to
Maravall but in a smaller arena, I ask what in natural philosophy at that time was particularly manufactured by players
concerned with larger ‘crisis’ phenomena, and whether in all this certain modes of behaviour, notions of reason and frames of
identity were recruited from the just then arising Baroque culture.
I also suggest, more in tune with the announced problematic of the Baroque Science Project, that this phase in natural
philosophising bequeathed to the next phase, and indeed to the successor more narrow sciences, certain modes of
competition, and of rhetorically accounting for same, that look like residues of the Baroquely tinged earlier crisis period. Hence,
ironically, modern sciences and the Baroque share some cognitive and social DNA, originally transcribed into natural
philosophising during its turbulent, contested phase.
Maravall’s notion of an historical structure, a constructed interpretive framework taken to have real reference, which
coordinates, explains and takes account of the relevant known phenomena and manifestations, and whose own trajectory is in
turn historically explicable, is very close to what I have been pursuing in regard to natural philosophy (and related categories).
Hence the appeal to me of his project, and my sense that it relates to and advances my own.
1.0 Thinking about the Baroque Science Project: Is there any relation between ‘the Baroque’ and (the
process of) the ‘Scientific Revolution’?
Let’s start with the Baroque Science Project Description, which presumably doubles as the riding orders for this
Symposium. Reading down through the opening sentence of the third and final paragraph, we have:
‘Baroque’ refers to the preoccupation with paradox and contrast, with asymmetry and distortion,
with imagery and sensual detail. ‘Science’ is the search for simple, universal structures, eschewing
rhetorical embellishment for logical rigor and sense qualities for the austerity of matter in motion.
This opposition owes its air of self-evidence to the still-prevalent notion that the main achievement
of the new science was the submission of all phenomena to a small set of exact mathematical laws.
Recent scholarship, however, suggests another perspective on the development of mathematicised
natural philosophy through the seventeenth century. Its early canons indeed aspired to decipher
God’s perfect design by means of mathematics—the science of simple, perfect structures. But the
final success of the endeavor they initiated was predicated on the gradual abandonment of this
aspiration. In its place came an approach to the universe as an imperfect machine; an erratic
assemblage of isolated laws and constants. Correspondingly, natural philosophy came to treat
mathematics not as an instrument for revealing the divine harmony of the universe, but as means to
approximate it into human-scale local order.
1
Preliminary draft, not for quotation or redistribution without the express consent of the author. Prepared for the Second
International Workshop on the ARC ‘Baroque Science Project’, HPS Unit, University of Sydney, February 2008.
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From this perspective the emergence of the new science appears as a thoroughly Baroque
phenomenon….
This focuses more on the end product of the Scientific Revolution than upon its process or dynamics, and that
end product, modern science (singular nota bene), is glossed as to its putative style and the structure of its
content, so that the gloss can then be equated to a rubric about ‘the Baroque’. As such, it corresponds to one of
the two main ways of dealing in general with the problem of the Baroque:
Either, with historians of fine art, music, literature and architecture, one is trying to define a style and trace some
filiations or analogies of expression across creative domains; or, with more generalist social and political
historians, one is attempting to delineate a social or cultural epoch or period as Baroque, meaning much more
than that some of its art is, or is not, arguably Baroque in style. In a culture or social formation more than artistic
expression, or styles of beards and wigs is at stake—for example, forms and norms of social interaction,
resources for self-understanding and public expression by actors, organisational forms and styles, any and all of
which might affect how non-artistic intellectual disciplines—such as philosophy and theology—might be
pursued. The Baroque Science Project statement of aim seems to want to draw the study of history of science
into the former ambit: one will find in the most important products of 17th century science a style or formal figure
similar or identical to that usually attributed to Baroque artistic endeavours and results.
At the first Baroque Science Workshop, as the audio record and some of the papers reveal, there was some
awareness of this issue and resulting debate. Some participants, including myself, favoured a return to general
historians’ conception of the Baroque—most notably Carl Friedrich was mentioned—to be accompanied by
attempts to think through its possible relations of the natural philosophy of the era. This was preferred to
continuing the trajectory of inquiry into the Baroque as a style or set of stylistic expressions, pursued by analogy
and juxtaposition down various avenues of the fine arts, literature, style and comportment, until, finally, a gloss or
blurb concerning the final outcome of the Scientific Revolution can also be placed in the same category.
I for one remain committed to the first of the two strategies, and chiefly for the reason I enunciated at the first
Workshop: the Scientific Revolution was a complex process of struggle and change played out within the domain
of natural philosophy and its subordinate sciences. Whatever one might mean by a Baroque ‘science’ or
Baroque shaping or influence on science (or on rather natural philosophy and its entourage of narrower
sciences) needs to be found by exploring the structure and dynamics of natural philosophising, whilst
simultaneously working on the problem of what kind of social or cultural animal was the Baroque. Merely
pointing to this or that analogy between this bit of Baroque art and this or that titbit of 17th century ‘science’, is to
repeat the precious history of art games that drove the likes of Friedrich and others to a more seriously social
and political history approach to the Baroque.
At this point another complexity arose. Some of the discussion of this issue at the first Workshop, and certainly
my own writing and verbal argument, conflated attempts to speak about a Baroque cultural or social phase with
scattered bits and pieces of discourse about that old chestnut, a ‘general crisis of the 17th century’ (or any one of
its asserted particular variants). My own training had included much speculation—and confident assertion—
about some such type of crisis, from mentors such as Lawrence Stone and Ted Rabb. And although I many
years ago jettisoned any belief in an hypostatised large 17th century crisis, I certainly have continued to think and
write about stages in the evolution of 17th century natural philosophy in terms of an especially turbulent, critical,
‘civil war’ or even, yes, ‘crisis period’ in the first half of the century. I’ll suggest in a moment that it is possible to
construct and usefully apply categories about smaller crises in particular organisations, traditions or fields of
endeavour, whatever the difficulties (and I think they are not surmountable) in trying to do the same for some
totalising historical crisis or other. To return to the main issue, then, vague intimations of (an
'unconceptualisable') general crisis were conflated with ruminations about the Baroque put forward by myself
and others at the first Workshop.
Part of the problem, I now realise is that social historical discussions of the Baroque, such as Carl Friedrich’s, do
not usually address the issue of crisis on a sustained historiographical level, whilst crisis theorists use evidence
about Baroque art, but do not deal with the Baroque as a social or cultural formation, being too busy with the
mechanics of crisis. So, for example, on the one hand, the admirable Friedrich, upon whom I built some
speculations for the last Workshop, and to whom other people alluded as well, himself continually mixed into his
discussion of a Baroque ‘age’, culture or society, allusions to phenomena that ‘crisis’ theorists’ usually took as
first order political, social and religious evidence of building crisis, quite apart from any worries about what the
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Baroque might have been, or even apart from even mentioning it. Similarly, on the other hand, Ted Rabb in his
first of two sojourns into the territory of the general crisis, described a structural crisis of authority, in all domains
of human experience, gathering steam and maturing from the mid 16th century and reaching its (medical
analogy) climax and relatively quick ‘resolution’, equally in all domains of human endeavour, in the two
generations from around 1640. Rabb discussed Baroque art half a dozen times in his argument, but he never
theorised the Baroque as an ‘age’, culture or epoch in a larger sense. He merely used examples of Baroque art,
theatre and (in recent work) opera, to illustrate the rising temperature of crisis of certainty and authority: Baroque
art represented a premature, worried, unconvincing attempt to reimpose authority and order using every
emotional trick in the book; the real resolution of the general crisis revealed itself in, amongst other things, postBaroque art of the mid and later 17th century. 2
In short, as a relative sceptic about general crises (despite the fact that I am willing to conceptualise a turbulent
or ‘critical’ phase in the history of natural philosophy); and, as a rank amateur in thinking about a wider Baroque
culture or social epoch (despite the fact that I am thoroughly convinced that purveying parallels and analogies
amongst Baroque looking products and expressions will not give us much insight in the history of science), I was
left with little beyond the speculative suggestions that, [1] the critical phase in natural philosophising may have
been a bit ‘Baroque-esque’; and that [2] Descartes, the figure I know best in it, may well have been behaving,
and imagining himself, in his early career, as a rather ‘Baroque Chap Playing Baroque Natural Knowledge
Games in a Baroque Manner’. My accompanying account of Descartes, the aspiring and somewhat self-deluded
‘physico-mathematician’, soon turned ‘universal mathematician’ and then ‘methodologist’, before settling down
as a radical systematic natural philosopher, could easily be read without insertion of the word Baroque or any of
its cognates. Indeed the draft book chapter I submitted as my substantive contribution does not use the word,
although my working paper preface did extensively in relation to Descartes.
I now believe, however that there is, a way out of this bind; that is, a way of working with a large conception of
Baroque culture, properly related to the turbulence we denominate by the term ‘general crisis of the 17th century’
in such a way that they can be related to my own more central concerns with the structure and dynamics of
natural philosophy, with the result that some progress may be made on our basic problem ‘Is there any relation
between ‘the Baroque’ and (the process of) the ‘Scientific Revolution?’ Historiographically we needed to get
beyond where Friedrich and Rabb leave us, and that has been provided, as far as I am concerned, for the sake
of the argument of this paper, by the profound and interesting work of José Antonio Maravall, in his Culture of the
Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. 3
Maravall is a widely published, highly distinguished expert on the Spanish Baroque. He insists that there are
generic properties of his interpretation applicable, with local national twists, to ‘Baroque culture’ as a panWestern European phenomenon, constructed from early in the 17th century and in place for the better part of a
century. Broadly speaking, Maravall sees Baroque culture as a largely deliberate construct or program of culture,
put forward, in slightly differing fashions in different states, by elite blocks of monarchical and aristocratic
interests who perceived threats to status, social hierarchy, social order and religious orthodoxy from mainly
urban ‘middling’ classes and groups, exercising resistance to political and religious centralisation and in favour of
2
And in what Rabb conceives as the emergence of ‘Science’, capital S, which along with the settling down of state structures
and establishment of the post-Westphalia framework of international relations and law, are the most prominent features of the
‘resolution’ of the previous ‘general crisis’. (Rabb, 1975) Rabb’s recent work, embodied in a more popular and textbook
type format, The Last Days of the Renaissance (2006) effectively does away with the term crisis, and his previous sense of
parallel crisis and resolution trajectories in various historical dimensions. Instead, marshalling much the same evidence, in an
accordingly less tendentious manner, he argues for an early 17th century phase of turbulence within, and inflection of, various
‘Renaissance’ structures and processes, leading to different (not uniformly ‘resolved’) conditions in the later 17th century.
This post-Renaissance period is not seen as modern, or enlightenment, but as an ‘age of revolutions’, itself lasting into the
early 20th century, when what Rabb terms modernity sets in. It must be said that within this scheme, very sophisticated for
the history of art, music, religion and the state, Rabb still holds to a rather essentialist notion of ‘Science’, as he did in his
‘crisis’ theory and still lacks a sense of its contested and complex history AFTER the ‘last days of the Renaissance’.
3
I owe this reference in the first instance to the redoubtable Simon Schaffer, who pointed out its potential relevance to the
Baroque Science Project problematic in conversation, Cambridge—the Eagle Pub to be precise—October 23 2007. Schaffer
was pointing to the possible relevance to my natural philosophy ruminations of Maravall’s (1973) notion of kitsch,
commodified, dramatic display, a staple of Baroque culture, as redeployed by Bill Clark (1992) in relation to kitsch
experimental displays in university teaching in late Baroque Germany. I subsequently found a deeper set of possible
connections, further embedded in Maravall’s historiographical vision, as developed at length in the present paper.
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their own interests, under conditions, emergent in the later 16th century and heightening in the next, of urban
population expansion and more readily available new communication technology, which helped create more
acute and transmissible senses of both problems and of their possible subjection to human solution. These and
other phenomena are nominally packaged under the shorthand label ‘general crisis’. 4 He is interested in what
went into this manufactured, commodified culture product, and also in the lived experience of people born
into/living in it, because, once it was widely established, of course, individuals lived and experienced their world
through its forms and categories. (A point that would apply to individuals recruited into the sub-culture and
institution of natural philosophy at the time as well.)
In this way Maravall squares the circle; that is, puts a large interpretation of the Baroque into relation with the
idea of a general crisis of the seventeenth century, by making the former the overall unintended result of
concatenations of particular, intentional elite responses/ perceptions of the latter. Broadly accepting this, at least
for purposes of exploration in this paper, is going to allow us further to link Maravall’s concerns to our own with
‘the Baroque and the history of science, that is natural philosophy, in our period.’ But in order to do this we need
to be aware of a number of key points about Maravall’s historiography.
[1] Maravall, like Friedrich before him, rejects the study of the Baroque as the exploration of stylistic filiations and
parallels in the arts, as well as the notion that the Baroque was simply the culture of the counter reformation
Church or of Catholic courts of the time. For Maravall both notions, widely explored in the existing literature, fall
far short of capturing the Baroque as a culture graspable as an historical structure, for which he book is the
argument.
[2] Baroque culture for Maravall is what he calls an historical structure, by which he means, a constructed
interpretive framework taken to have real reference, which coordinates, explains and takes account of the
relevant known phenomena and manifestations, and whose own trajectory is in turn historically explicable. One
constructs this conceptual object using prior concepts of others and one’s own, along with appeals historical
evidence and analogy. It then becomes an object of inquiry and tool of explanation and interpretation. I hold,
with Maravall, that this sort of categorical construction is possible and necessary in the writing of history: For
example, Kuhn’s original notion of ‘normal science’ was such an ideal typical model of the structure and
dynamics of how ‘a mature science’ functions over time and may change and be affected by endogenous and
exogenous forces. Similarly, this paper will develop a model of the structure and dynamics of natural philosophy
as a field of contestation, institution, tradition and sub-culture of the larger culture. It is clear, to me at least, that
the kinds of claims the Baroque Science Project intends to make require historical work on this level, and that if
this sort of work does not appeal to you, that is fine, but cancels one’s ticket to this particular conversation.
[3] There is a categorical difference at the level of historiographical conception between Maravall’s idea of
Baroque culture and his idea of the ‘general crisis of the 17th century’. At no point does Maravall claim that the
general crisis of the 17th century is a similar sort of ‘structure’, which in my language means, unsurprisingly, that
there is no convincing model of this event or process. Maravall seems to be saying, quite plausibly in the light of
the long debate about a crisis of the seventeenth century, that the best we can do is take the most appropriate
and best documented types of turbulence and conflict in the period, the ones most likely being taken notice of by
Baroque actors, and label them the general crisis.
In other words, I take Maravall to be saying that ‘Baroque culture’ is a seriously constructed and hard working
historical category or structure; but that talk about a general crisis is a case of nominal labelling of a preferred
and relevant collection of evidence and generalisation. Hence what Maravall takes to be included in his general
crisis is very close in description, given social and state structure differences, to what Trevor-Roper long ago
termed the ‘crisis of court vs. country’ in England (in opposition to Hobsbawm’s Marxist construal of a crisis of
primitive accumulation at the onset of early modern European expansion). Similarly the trends in state
structure, inter and intra state conflict, religious fission and warfare, and cultural pessimism that Rabb built into
his crisis thesis, have chords and echoes in Maravall’s vision. (Rabb’s book came out after the original Spanish
edition of Maravall—both are reflections and gleanings from the previous crisis literature). Therefore, one could
4
Maravall (1973, Eng trans 1986) like many other commentators since the mid 1950s rejects the idea of any singular,
definable economic crisis in the period of the sort advocated by the early, Marxist advocates of a 17th century crisis, seeing
instead a number of cyclical subsistence and commercial crises across the entire period. In the crisis thesis debate, even nonMarxists have broadly accepted that the sixteenth century saw both population increase and price inflation, both of which
levelled or stagnated in the second quarter of the 17th century, before taking off again later in the century.
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safely delete in Maravall the merely nominal term ‘general crisis’ and plug in in each case something like “I here
appeal to the following well documented examples, events and processes displaying conflict and turbulence”.
The term is nominal shorthand, and is not conceptualised as a structure; that is, is not related to a working
conceptually constructed model or theory.
Now, I intend to follow something like Maravall’s strategy, whilst trying concretely to relate my interpretation of
natural philosophy and the process of the scientific revolution to his interpretation of Baroque culture and the
general crisis. Like Maravall, I now realise, I deal with natural philosophy in historiographical fashion as a model;
and, like Maravall, I can denote turbulent, worrying phenomena by the term general crisis. But, because natural
philosophy is a small thing, a mere sub-culture, and subject to modelling, one can, I think speak more pertinently
of a critical, turbulent or even ‘crisis’ phase in its seventeenth century development, because ‘crisis’ would here
denote a specified and evidentially supported phase or state of play in the sub-culture. Having lived and read
through several decades of debate about the dynamics of science in HPS, and about large crises in early
modern history, leads me to conclude that you can’t profitably model a crisis of society, economy or culture writ
large. You can label turbulent phenomena in them. But if you have a model of something smaller, natural
philosophy for example, you can explicate via your model what you mean by a crisis in it.
If we explore the structure and dynamics of early modern natural philosophising and its attendant more narrow
sciences, we find that the so-called Scientific Revolution falls into several phases and stages. We shall see that
one of these, in the early to mid seventeenth century, had a particularly turbulent, even ‘crisis-like complexion’,
and it also had a number of important consequences, mainly unintended by any player or collection of players,
for the subsequent late 17th century concluding phase of the Scientific Revolution. Because this turbulent or
critical period took place well within the space and time of Maravall’s rise and sedimentation of Baroque culture
and the ‘general crisis’ which was eliciting its construction, the critical period in natural philosophising will be
termed the phase of natural philosophical ‘crisis within a crisis’. This means a crisis that we can well theorise,
taking place in and of the field of natural philosophy, which in turn occurred inside that wider turbulence we,
following Maravall and others, can denominate the general crisis. Accordingly there are three key valencies to
watch in the natural philosophy of the critical period: [1] the ways natural philosophers may have intentionally or
unintentionally recruited Baroque cultural forms into their comportment, self-images and public expressions
thereof, and their struggles with each other; [2] the ways, possibly coloured by [1], that some natural
philosophers tried to address challenges and opportunities they perceived in, as we nominally say, the larger
crisis; and finally, very importantly [3] the ways in which the natural philosophical crisis may have been largely
engendered endogenously, by dynamics set in train by the preceding phase of later 16th century natural
philosophy. After all, a sub-culture can be subject of its own internally generated turbulence and storms, as well
as those originating outside.
Thus, to conclude this overly long (and perhaps Baroque) introduction, we have in this paper two goals in view in
relation to the problematic of the Baroque Science Project: First, we aim to show, by extension and articulation
of Maravall’s approach, linked to our model of structure and process in natural philosophising, that there was an
early to mid 17th century watershed crisis of natural philosophy inside the more general crisis (that itself was
eliciting and supporting the large Baroque culture). Natural philosophy did not become Baroque in any simple or
straightforward sense: it was like other social institutions and practices variously impacted by aspects of the
coming to prevail Baroque culture. It is more important to understand how the sub-culture or field of natural
philosophising worked, and how its structure and dynamics, including its modes of relation to wider, contextual
features, led to, and were inflected by, this crisis phase in its history.
Now, quite obviously, this first of our findings is quite averse to the substance and tenor of the main line claims of
the Baroque Science Project—that there is something about the ultimate products of the Scientific Revolution
that is essentially Baroque, and that that Baroqueness is present in all of subsequent science. As noted, our
approach follows the path of interpretation of the Baroque as an epoch or culture, not a set of congruencies of
styles or expressions, on the one hand, and not one institution or type of site on the other.
However, in partial approximation to the claims of the Baroque Science Project, we have a second goal in view
as well. It is to show that the crisis phase in natural philosophising (itself partaking variously and diffusely of the
surrounding Baroque culture) did leave in the dynamics and culture of natural philosophising certain practices,
expectations and accounting rhetorics that survived, and even came to the fore, in the ultimate descendants of
early modern natural philosophy, the modern sciences, shaping their historically uniqueness as traditions that
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subsist through a dynamic demanding constant, peer-adjudged significant change (termed ‘discoveries’) in the
very terms and conditions of the traditions’ practice.
To begin our examination we need to set down some conceptual and interpretative foundations in the next three
sections. Of these, Section 3, deals with the structure/dynamics of natural philosophy, whilst Section 4 deals
with basic periodisation of the Scientific Revolution as stages and phases in the evolution of natural
philosophising and its attendant more narrow sciences. Both of these are crucial to our subsequent argument
about the peculiarly turbulent and contested nature of natural philosophy in the crisis period, which we take up in
Section 5, before exploring in Section 6 possible recruitments of bits of Baroque culture into natural
philosophising during that period. But, even before that, we need in Section 2 to examine something that at first
may appear slightly tangential: the nature of modern sciences as unique, agonal traditions in process. We shall
see later that this section provides material useful in our analysis of the ‘crisis within crisis’ period of natural
philosophy, and it will fully come into its own when in Section 7 we turn to the ways in which the modern
sciences inherited genes of tradition dynamics and accounting rhetorics from the crisis in crisis phase of natural
philosophy in the early to mid 17th century.
2.0 Modern Sciences as Unique, Agonal Traditions in Process
It is an obvious and trivial claim to assert some kind of link between the culture and dynamics of the modern
sciences and the Scientific Revolution. But what if one could convincingly and fruitfully link the culture and
dynamics of the modern sciences to some specific moment or process in the Scientific Revolution, and even to
some key elements of the structure and dynamics of natural philosophising (including possibly some of Baroque
provenance), that were in play therein? This arguably it would be a non-trivial payoff of the type sought by the
Baroque Science Project, and this is precisely what I seek to do. We therefore need to acquaint ourselves with
those traits of modern sciences which, I shall suggest, express competitive, cognitive and rhetorical accounting
genes first implanted in Western seeking of natural knowledge during the ‘natural philosophical crisis within a
general crisis’. This was a period of extraordinarily heated natural philosophical contestation in the early to mid
17th century, during Maravall and Friedrich’s ‘age’ or ‘culture’ of the Baroque, and perhaps in part flavoured by
specifically Baroque cultural phenomena and practices. To that end we have to examine an ideal typical model
of the agonal dynamics of modern scientific disciplines, grounded, I shall argue, in reflection on state of the art
findings in contemporary HPS and sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). 5
We need to grasp the historically unique and, on reflection, quite peculiar tradition dynamics of the modern
sciences. Indeed, to think of the modern sciences as consisting in social, cognitive and rhetorical accounting
traditions grates upon three centuries of both popular and elite Enlightenment rhetoric emphasising the antiauthority, anti-tradition essence of ‘Science’, and focussing attention upon heroic discoveries by (most often)
isolated individuals struggling with the sole help of ‘scientific method’ to extract from nature discoveries of
significant fact and theory. But, the realisation that each of the sciences is in some fashion a tradition of
theorising, material practice, social organisation and communication is one of the lasting achievements of critical
history, philosophy and social studies of science of the mid to late 20th century 6 — as is the realisation that the
discourse concerning isolated, non-tradition bound and method-wielding heroic discovers is not an accurate
representation of how the sciences work as agonal, novelty producing traditions, but rather an accounting
5
The model presented below is ideal typical. It is not meant to capture the precise social and cognitive dynamics of any
particular modern (that is, post early 19th century) scientific discipline. As an ideal model, it invites complexification on a
case by case basis by considering variants, deviances and even emerging long term shifts affecting the sciences as a whole.
One suspects that the sorts of ideal models arising from post-Kuhnian thinking in HPS and SSK are better attuned to what
Ravetz (1971) called the classical academic science of the late 19th and early 20th century, rather than the industrial/military
science of the mid and late 20th century or the emerging post-modern transdisciplinary sciences of today, which are more than
ever deeply engrafted onto government and corporate funding drivers, and strongly tinged by deliberate plays for attention
from the educated public and elite policy makers, thus diluting and shifting the classical point of reference in peer
competition and approval, via expert communication networks and status systems.
6
I put the matter this way, because where the writ of ‘revolution and rupture’ has not run in imaging Science, it has not been
unusual to think of Science, or the sciences as old fashioned history of ideas traditions, consisting in so-called filiations of
ideas, plays of ‘forerunners’ and ‘final accomplishers’ and the like.
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rhetoric used within the sciences, their pedagogy and public representations as part of the mechanisms of
contestation and accounting for change. 7
A corrected, or post-Kuhnian reading of Thomas Kuhn’s model of science dynamics is a good entry point for the
conclusions we need to canvass. Kuhn, properly understood, was fully committed to the idea that the sciences
are many, not one Science, and that his theorising was aimed at providing an ideal typical account of how any
given mature science functions, the motor of tradition dynamics in any given science as it were. He also aimed to
provide a broad, macroscopic mapping of the trajectories of the sciences over time.
In simplistic readings of Thomas Kuhn’s view of this motor or tradition dynamics, as well as in vulgar glosses of
Kuhn, one has rigid—frozen—paradigms facilitating puzzle solving research, until dysfunction, crisis and
revolution install a new puzzle solving paradigm, equally rigid. Against this, Post-Kuhnians, including myself,
have explicated “normal science” dynamics using micro-sociological tools. 8 In this approach the cultural
resources in play in a tradition of research, and constituting that tradition at that moment, are constantly subject to
re-negotiation and modification. Suppose a problem is solved by advocating a shift in some aspect of 'the
paradigm', however so slight. This means the problem solution involves feed-back alterations to the paradigm—
conceptual, instrumental, normative. Such alterations—if negotiated into place by the expert community 9 —carry
over into subsequent rounds of problem-solving, where further alterations may be negotiated. Post-Kuhnian
historians and sociologists of science call such negotiated alterations of the paradigm 'discoveries', especially
when they involve the conceptual/theoretical ‘objects of inquiry’ in the discipline 10 , rather than, say, its
instrumental techniques and standards, or norms of adequate procedure and argument. So, normal scientific
research involves as its core aim and raison d’être, ‘discoveries’, negotiated significant modifications of the
paradigm, or prevailing disciplinary culture at any given moment in its life. 11 Modern sciences are expert
research traditions, in which claims are constantly made about ‘discoveries’, which are contested, debated and
negotiated. 12 The acceptance of such a claim (often in quite revised form) into the working resources of the
tradition affects for the time being both the tradition make up and the nature and directions of immediately
subsequent work. Facts and theories, originating as significant discoveries of this type (and hence themselves
the product of contestation and negotiation at their births) have non-trivial subsequent histories as play continues
in the discipline. 13
7
Literature on politics and rhetoric of method: Schuster (1984, 1986, 1993); Schuster and R.Yeo (1986b), pp.ix-xxxvii.;
Richards and Schuster (1989). Method-talk is flexibly used by players inside science to account for achievements, failures
and allocate credit. It is part of the self-identity of many practicing scientists and an important part of the public imaging of
science and its constituent disciplines.
8
Ravetz (1971); Schuster (1979); Barnes (1982); M. Mulkay (1979). Latour and Woolgar (1979); Knorr-Cetina (1981);
Collins (1985).
9
Of course the form of the discovery claim negotiated into place, and accounted back to the presumed individual discoverer,
can differ greatly from that originally published, let alone imagined, by the first inventor[s] of the claim.
10
The expression “(intellectually constructed) objects of inquiry” is Ravetz’s term of art in his own early and brilliant
sophistication of Kuhn’s original model of ‘normal science’.
11
This post-Kuhnifies the partially separate development of the so-called attributional model of scientific discovery.
(Brannigan 1980, 1981; Schaffer 1986); For a textbook level exposition of a case study of these issues of post-Kuhnian
notions of discovery and ‘revolution’ see Schuster (1995a) chap 4 and 5.
12
Again standard HPS fare: a claim to a significant discovery is not just a claim to have found some atheoretical nugget of
fact in the world (not possible in any case); but a claim simultaneously to introduce new or changed reports about external
affairs linked to some modification/renegotiation of previously accepted conceptual framework: as Kuhn more or less said
many years ago, a discovery claim is not just in the form “that x is the case” but also “what therefore in revised theory terms
is at stake”. (Kuhn 1977) If nobody’s previous or newly minted theories are at stake, the discovery claim is about everyday
trivia stated in ordinary language: e.g., “I found the pencil I lost yesterday”; rather than a really big and significant discovery
claim like this one made by Lavoisier in the late 18th century: “Dudes, ‘phlogiston’ does not exist, but ‘oxygen’ and the
‘weightless fluid of heat’ (caloric) do.” See Schuster (1995a) Chapters 4 and 5.
13
There are other important implications, crucial in comprehending post-Kuhnianism, but less important for our contribution
to the Baroque Science Project in the present paper: We have learned to see paradigms, the working core of a research
tradition at a given point in time, as fluid and constantly open to greater or less renegotiation, around ‘significant
discoveries’. Hence 'revolutions' are merely relatively large renegotiations within continuing traditions, not battles between
armies from incommensurable intellectual planets. Normal practice within a tradition should be seen as a process of social
negotiation of resource change, continually shaped by the distribution of resources and power amongst the players. There are
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According to this sort of ideal model, modern scientific disciplines constitute unusual sorts of traditions: They are
traditions in which tradition modifying alterations are constantly sought, and fought over. The only people who can
accredit, and subsequently make use of, a ‘significant discovery’ are the very peers and competitors of a
claimant; and the highest status and rewards accrue to the members who are credited with the most significant of
such ‘discoveries’. These are not the sorts of hide bound, ‘irrational’, authoritarian and even ‘superstitious’
traditions held up to ridicule by the makers of modern science and their subsequent Enlightenment mouthpieces.
These traditions, by virtue of their own living dynamics, are not and cannot be frozen into shape over any
significant period of time, and even the greatest authority is in principle, and in fact subject to revision or even
rejection as play unfolds. What is taught to initiates in advanced textbooks in one generation is typically radically
different from what is taught in the next. 14 Fundamentals, the equivalent of holy writ, there may be, but only “for
the time being and until further notice”, as the early Edinburgh and Bath ‘Schools’ of SSK taught us always to
remember. Note also that this sort of post-Kuhnian modelling throws into high relief the sorts of rhetorics and
accounting resources that players (and other commentators, popular or expert historians of sciences for example)
use in self-understanding their roles and moves, and in representing them to each other, and to wider publics.
These rhetorics involve resources for story telling about universal scientific methods, heroic, isolated discovers as
well as about the bad influence of this or that sort of bias or prejudgment; but, they do not capture the actual
dynamics of these traditions as we now understand them. Instead they are part of the very weave of how the
traditions function, since they are actor’s possessions.
Post-Kuhnian modelling of scientific tradition dynamics also depends upon and further stimulates inquiry into the
organisational structures and dynamics of such fields. However, in the tradition of SSK research itself, the study
of the institutional frameworks and organisational dynamics of scientific research traditions has often been
embodied in particular case studies, many, but not all of which are limited in time and space, and hence
hampered in addressing challenges of more generalised, ideal modelling. Leading scholars in this area, such as
Latour (1987) and Bourdieu, have, however, offered general schemas as to how to think about social and
organisational processes in the sciences and relate them to their knowledge-making, knowledge-breaking
dialectic. Bourdieu’s approach is particularly striking, especially for our purposes here, because it again
highlights the historical peculiarity of scientific traditions, and because it may even be applied, with care, to certain
moments in the dynamics of the natural philosophical field. 15
Bourdieu places members of a tradition as players in a field, in a peculiar agonistic, ie mutually competitive,
relation, involving an economy of material and symbolic resources, strategies, positions etc. His model is an ideal
type to which empirical fields approximate.16 Bourdieuian players seek a monopoly of the sorts of cognitive and
social power at stake in their particular field: To try to survive in their field they have certain amounts of symbolic
and material resources (or capital) which they can deploy, strategically, in attempts to secure more resources and
more power over the determination of the social and cognitive stakes at risk in the field in the next rounds of play.
It is absolutely critical to understand that for Bourdieu, unlike ethnomethodologists or 'discourse analysts', a
‘system of objective relations’ exists at any given moment among the positions already won and occupied in the
field, via previous rounds of struggle. Bourdieu insists that the system of relations should not be reduced to or
multiple scientific traditions (another point always stressed by Kuhn). We now know that not one of them has an essence—
by rupture or accretion—only endless, competitive claim-making and claim breaking and a shifting consensual tool kit of
theory, standards and hardware. This plays into new understandings about supposedly general, universally efficacious
‘scientific methods’: they cannot explain what they claim to explain, the essence of scientific practice in any and all sciences.
Rather they are attractive, indeed, I would argue mythopoeically seductive accounting resources deployed within these
traditions by the members for self-understanding and for packaging of one’s own claims, and attacking those of opponents.
See literature cited above, Note 7.
14
This should not be read simplistically. At any given moment the cultural package in play in a scientific tradition is highly
structured. Some tools, concepts, standards, and even instruments and protocols are more deeply sedimented into the main
line of current research trajectories than others, and hence will be subject to revision and renegotiation in different ways, and
on different time scales, than elements of the tradition that are more marginal and in play. Think of Newton’s laws of
motion. Basic to mechanics and celestial mechanics as they have been since the early 18th century, they have been changed
in mathematical expression (Euler) and generalisation of systematic presentation (Lagrange, Hamilton); and they have been
restricted or changed in domain of application (advent of special relativity, and trajectory of subsequent developments).
15
An application Bourdieu himself does not envision, indeed he writes as though Science were one generic field, rather than
as though he were modelling in a generic way any given scientific field.
16
Bourdieu (1975, 1971a, 1971b).
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conflated with the micro-interactions and moment to moment strategies ‘which it in fact determines’. In other
words there is more to the field than the ethnographically recordable discourse and posturing of the players—as
there is more to capitalism than visiting the supermarket or making your fortnightly superannuation subscription.
Bourdieu is inviting us to examine the internal political economy of a discipline, the field of players, mutual
competitors, and the lay of the land of resources and opportunities, the distribution of power, alliance and
opposition at any moment in the history of the field.
Let's recall our conclusion that HPS/SSK theorists had concentrated upon the idea of players' bids to alter
significantly, but not catastrophically, the terms of the objects of inquiry—thus making normal science dynamic
and reducing the plausibility of classical Kuhnian revolutions. In a complementary manner Bourdieu sees the
strategic imperative of players, given their different positions and resources as follows: A player attempts to
produce claims that are both do-able within the limits of his symbolic capital and most likely to prove significant
and attractive to his competitors. It is these peers who accredit his work by taking it up and redeploying it in their
own subsequent construction of bids: Just as the attractiveness and significance of the first player's bid to these
same competitors depended upon his having made use of and redeployed their claims and those of their
common predecessors. What Ravetz, Barnes and others saw in post-Kuhnian terms as a negotiated drift of
concept, standard and aim (accounted as discoveries); Bourdieu focuses on the motivated, tactical play of
differentially resourced and placed players. But what they are playing for—the production of non-trivial, new
claims that will be taken up and used by peer-competitors—maps directly onto the post-Kuhnian conception of
ongoing negotiation into place of ‘discoveries’ which shift the terms of practice in subsequent rounds of research.
But what of the "objective" systematic state of the field at any moment of play? By the system being 'objective' we
take Bourdieu to mean that the field exists as an analyst's model, a historian's model of the internal political
economy of the field at a given moment. As in any model in historiography—for example my model of natural
philosophy presented below, or Maravall’s model (‘structure’) for Baroque culture, or the post-Kuhnian model of
research dynamics in a scientific tradition—it is an intellectual construct, category, constellation of concepts,
constructed using social theory, bits of other historical findings, and appeals to evidence about the field or
discipline in question. It then functions, as Bourdieu (and Maravall) suggests, as the ultimate object of study and
as an explanatory resource for understanding particular plays and processes in the field. Such models of fields
and traditions need to be constructed by historians as objects of inquiry/objects providing explanations . It is not
a 'bad' thing for historians that fields or traditions exist in this manner—that is the condition of, and the nature of,
our knowledge of them as historians. Nor does it mean as tendentious post-modernists proclaim, that no material
reality past or present exists or can be referred to by these models (as first cousins to theories in natural
sciences, they are as good or as bad about ‘reality’ as are the natural sciences) We shall apply these same
methodological reflections to the model of natural philosophy as a tradition of practice/field of discourse below. In
any case Bourdieu has now shown us something about how to deal with the internal political-economy of a field,
the agon that drives on the play of negotiation of the conceptual fabric and tools, glossed and understood as
‘making discoveries’. So a ‘tradition of practice’ gets a social and political 'inside' and a motor, and we may speak
of "agonistic traditions of practice."
In sum, we wind up with a post-Kuhnian/Bourdieuian model of modern sciences as peculiarly agonistic traditions,
compulsively and continuously manufacturing and negotiating novel shifts of tradition practice, and awarding
credit for these shifts using a rhetoric of individual methodologically based heroic discovery. This is a model that
will prove useful in our inquiry into fruitful goals and results for the Baroque Science Project, starting immediately
with the second and third of our foundation laying exercises, regarding the category of natural philosophy
(Section 3) and its main phases of development in the Early Modern period (Section 4).
3.0 Constructing the Category of Natural Philosophy—Natural Philosophising as Culture and Process
It is often said that periodisation is the indispensible armature of historical inquiry, a wise enough statement in
itself, but, on closer inspection, only half the story, because what historical understanding also necessarily
requires is self-conscious, critical and ongoing attention to categories about what kinds of entities and processes
were in play. Only this allows serious narration and explanation to be slung across a periodisation armature.
These categories, constellations of concepts if you will, or ‘structures’ as Maravall says, are heuristic and
revisable, but they are ignored, or frozen, at the peril of one’s life as a serious historian. To approach the period
termed the Scientific Revolution, particularly if we wish further to inquire about the Scientific Revolution and ‘the
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Baroque’, we need to attend to key categories and to a workable periodisation concerning the trajectories traced
by the entities and processes they arguably denote.
In the early modern period the central discipline for the study of nature was natural philosophy. 17 We employ the
category ‘natural philosophy’ in strict preference to Science, Modern Science, new science, etc. ‘Natural
philosophy’ is THE appropriate historical category with which to think through our problems. 18
Natural philosophy is first of all an actor’s term, and in the first instance I use it the way they used it. But, if we
metaphorically treat natural philosophy—and other important categories for the history of science—as an iceberg,
actors’ usages are merely the tip. As critical historians we must also theorise the bottom of the iceberg. I try to
model the structure and dynamics of the game of natural philosophising including, if necessary, points that did not
or could not have been known to the players. So, I model Early modern natural philosophy as a dynamic, elite
sub-culture and field of contestation, theorising about its structure and dynamics, its mode of process over time.
An Appendix to this paper explores more systematically the five dimensions of modelling that have gone into
fashioning this category. 19 For reasons discussed there, and briefly below, I term the entire conception a “cultural
process” model of natural philosophy/natural philosophising. 20
When one ‘Natural philosophised’ one tried systematically to explain the nature of matter, the cosmological
structuring of that matter, the principles of causation and the methodology for acquiring or justifying such natural
knowledge. [Figure 1] The dominant genus of natural philosophy was, of course, Aristotelianism in various neoScholastic species, but the term applied to alternatives of similar scope and aim; that is, to any particular species
of the various competing genera: neo-Platonic, Chemical, Magnetic, mechanistic or, later, Newtonian. Early
modern natural philosophers learnt the rules—or template for—natural philosophising at university whilst studying
hegemonic neo-Scholastic Aristotelianism. Even alternative systems followed the rules of this game. All natural
philosophers and natural philosophies constituted one sub-culture in dynamic process over time.
17
Peter Anstey and John Schuster, “Introduction” to Anstey and Schuster (2005)
18
To place the evolution of natural philosophy, and in particular the shifting patterns of its relations to other enterprises and
disciplines, at the centre of one’s conception of the Scientific Revolution is not novel, and more scholars are realising the
value of such a perspective, but neither is it obvious or agreed upon in the scholarly community. Many older discussions, and
some contemporary ones, are marred by a tendency to lump the culture of natural philosophising under an anachronistic label
of ‘science’, thus obscuring the possibility of speaking convincingly about the internal texture and dynamics of the culture of
natural philosophy and its patterns of change over the period. H. Floris Cohen’s massive survey of Scientific Revolution
historiography [Cohen (1994)] illustrates that the term ‘natural philosophy’ has been endemically present in the literature, but
not systematically theorised, often serving as a synonym for ‘science’ or (some of) the sciences. Recent attempts to delineate
the category of natural philosophy and deploy it in Scientific Revolution historiography include Schuster (1990, 1995);
Schuster and Watchirs (1990); Andrew Cunningham (1988, 1991); Cunningham and Williams (1993); Peter Dear (1991,
2001); Peter Harrison (2000, 2002, 2005); and John Henry (2002).
19
The Appendix on these matters, “An Introduction to the Theoretical Articulation of the Category of Natural
Philosophy/Natural Philosophising for Application and Use in History of Science” is available from the author at
[email protected]. The five theoretical dimensions of the model are: [i] natural philosophy as intellectual tradition in
the manner of post-Kuhnian science dynamics with a dash of Skinner; [ii] as competitive creative field in the manner of
Bourdieu; [iii] as an evolving field of claims governed by rules of utterance, with apologies to the younger Foucault; [iv] as
an historically dynamic sub-culture of the larger culture in the manner of Marshall Sahlins; [v] and as a network of
institutions, in a much revised manner of Mertonian sociology as refracted through the my work with Alan Taylor on the
‘organisation of the experimental life’ at the early Royal Society..
20
The same strategy of category formation/application needs to be applied to other tortured notions about and in the
Scientific Revolution; for example, the rebellious thinkers’ term ‘physico-mathematics’; as well as such terms as natural
theology, mixed mathematics, natural theology (as in the ongoing doctoral work of Ms Larissa Johnson in our School at
UNSW) and ‘method’. This strategy is applied throughout my forthcoming study of the young Descartes: Descartes
Agonistes, Physico-Mathematics, Method and Mechanism 1618-33. Material tending toward the findings of the latter are
contained in Schuster (1992, 2000, 2005); Gaukroger and Schuster (2002).
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The field, sub-culture or tradition of Natural Philosophy
Tell me, 1.matter 2.cosmos 3. causation 4. method
Hegemonic Scholastic Aristotelianism[s]
Challenger Genera:
Neo-Platonic varieties high tide 1580-1620
Mechanistic varieties high tide 1640-80
Newtonianism[s] from 1690s
Support, shape
Order, priority, basic concepts
Narrow, Specialist, Subordinate Disciplines: the ‘Entourage’
Full list and priority depends on your Natural Philosophical Agenda
Mixed mathematical: mechanics, hydrostatics, optics, astronomy, music theory,
geography etc tend to be come ‘Physico-mathematical’
Bio-medical: anatomy, physiological theory, medical theory
Especially Disputed: astrology, alchemy, other branches of natural magick etc.
New in the Period:
Physico-mathematical: celestial mechanics, ‘classical mechanics’
Experimental: electricity and magnetism, heat, pneumatic chemistry
Figure 1: Natural Philosophy—
Generic Structure including Entourage of Sub-ordinate Fields
Clearly, then, we should not equate natural philosophy to Scholastic Aristotelianism; and equally we should reject
the trendy historiographical conceit that natural philosophy died and was replaced by an essentially different
activity, Science. As we shall see, the ‘Scientific Revolution’ was at its climax in the early and mid Seventeenth
century—during the ‘crisis within a crisis’—a set of transformations, a civil war, inside the seething, contested
culture of natural philosophising. The culture of natural philosophy then continued to evolve under internal
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contestation, and external drivers, and variously elided and fragmented into more modern looking, science-like,
disciplines and domains, plural, over a period of 150 years from 1650. 21
That there was a European culture of natural philosophising depended upon a High Medieval development of
world historical import—the establishment of a European system of universities all teaching and arguing about
variants of a Christianised Aristotelian corpus in logic and natural philosophy. 22 This fact continued and evolved
right into the early and mid 17th century. 23 We cannot pretend this was just a throwaway rite of passage for future
stars of the Scientific Revolution; rather it was the intellectual culture for pursuing knowledge of nature in which
they lived and breathed. Picture the tens of thousands of educated men in each generation, who had been
taught Aristotelian logic and related tools of thought as well as large swathes of natural philosophy derived from
Aristotelian doctrine about cause, matter and how—methodologically—you get knowledge about them. That’s
the core of what all the players were on about—even the rebels wanted ‘regime change’ in natural philosophy not
total destruction. This ‘brute historical fact’ of institutionalised acculturation of educated European men into one
genus of natural philosophy is a continuing, necessary bass line, underscoring a process best understood within
a sharpened and refined understanding of what the field or culture of natural philosophising in a larger sense was
all about. Hence, I hold that most of what we conceive of as the process and the products of the ‘Scientific
Revolution’ took place within patterns of change, internal contestation and contextual shaping in this evolving field
or culture of natural philosophising. Although specific concepts constitutive of Scholastic Aristotelianism were
dissolved and displaced during the Seventeenth century, this occurred inside the continuing, if contested, life of
the larger ‘field’ or ‘tradition’ of natural philosophising. We should not throw out the living baby of the’ culture’ or
‘institution’ of natural philosophising’ with the bath water of large chunks of neo-Scholastic Aristotelianism. 24
A Scholastic Aristotelian education taught that nature has a coherent, systematic unity; that nature not only can
be studied by specific means but that correspondingly systematic knowledge of it can be obtained; and that,
when one natural philosophised, one tried systematically to explain the nature of matter, the cosmological
structuring of that matter, the principles of causation and the methodology for acquiring or justifying such natural
knowledge. 25 This template for what natural philosophising consisted in, and what it appropriately could aim to
21
Other contemporary knowledge systems, such as natural history and natural theology also need to be theorised in this
manner and the entire set examined for their dynamics and articulations over time. I’ve written several overviews of the
Scientific Revolution in this style. Schuster (2002), also Schuster and Watchirs (1990); and Schuster (1990). Recently the
latter work was ’borrowed’, translated into Chinese and published for the Chinese HPS market in an anthology of what the
controversial Science and Technology Studies guru, Steve Fuller, calls ‘greatest hits of the scientific revolution’. See Liu Dun
and Wang Yangzong (2002) pp.835-869.
22
The distinguished historian of medieval science, David Lindberg, writes of the Christianised Scholastic Aristotelian
undergraduate curriculum in the high medieval universities, “For the first time in history, there was an educational effort of
international scope, undertaken by scholars conscious of their intellectual and professional unity, offering standardized
higher education to an entire generation of students.” Lindberg (1992) p.212. He’s pointing to the unique fact of the
extensive European institutionalisation of a religiously more or less acceptable version of one genus of ancient natural
philosophy, Aristotelian. And we might add, generation upon generation of student was thus produced.
23
And we now know a lot more about late scholastic education at the turn of the 17th century, thanks to efforts of people like
Ian Maclean and Dennis Des Cheyne: especially about the tools and habituses of thought imbibed by years of study of the
host of dense, printed neo-Scholastic texts of the late 16th and early 17th century.
24
Hence my category modelling can lead to the production of heuristic advice for historiographical practice. For example,
whether one studies Descartes, as I do, or the Royal Society, as I also do, A site where natural philosophers natural
philosophise is a natural philosophical site, not a non-natural philosophical site. Since the field is pan European and
cosmopolitan, a natural philosopher even alone in his study is in a natural philosophical site, and at the very least virtually
in communication with some intended sub-set of the pan European natural philosophical audience. He is not a mind alone,
opposed to some new form of communicatable and networked knowledge making/breaking in the new scientific
organisations, which are also natural philosophical sites. There might have been some new registers of natural
philosophising at the early Royal Society, as we mention below in Section 7 but no break or rupture had occurred in the
ongoing dynamics of the culture.
25
The common method training, allowing of course for the unending technical debates about method, its meaning, contents,
scope etc, is of the upmost importance. This is not because knowledge was actually discovered and demonstrated by method.
As noted earlier, modern sociology and philosophy of science has put paid to that notion, in the writings of Bachelard (1949),
Kuhn (1970), Feyerabend (1975); Schuster and Yeo (1986); Schuster (1986, 1993) and others. Rather method discourse
provided universally understood packaging and rhetorical framing for claims of natural philosophical type, and by means of
the tools of logic provided natural philosophical players, as subjective agents, the technical capability for reflexively
criticising, comparing, overthrowing and radically reworking the claims of others and of themselves.
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achieve, applied to all jostling species of the genus Scholastic Aristotelianism and to all natural philosophical
challengers. Additionally, Scholastic Aristotelianism, dominant institutionally and in the cultural experience of
educated men, entrained an entire geography of knowledge: It framed the way in which other disciplines were
conceived, and related to each other, and to natural philosophising.
This issue of how natural philosophical claims were positioned in relation to other enterprises and concerns is
particularly important, as we shall see, because [1] it set further demands and expectations upon the natural
philosophical game; [2] it related to the issue of constructing and defending systems; and [3] it produced many
spaces in the overall geography of disciplines, “hot spots” we shall term them, where natural philosophical
competition was pursued with extra intensity. Some disciplines were considered superior to natural philosophy
(such as theology); others cognate with it (such as mathematics); or subordinate to it (as in the dominant
Aristotelian evaluation of the mixed mathematical sciences, such as astronomy, optics and mechanics). Other
fields, disciplines or domains of concern were considered (by some players at least) as of some sort of relevance
to natural philosophising, as for example pedagogy or the practical arts, including practical mathematics.
Borrowing some tools from sociologists of science, we see that the positioning of natural philosophical claims in
relation to other enterprises always involved two routine manoeuvres: the drawing or enforcing of boundaries and
the making or defending of linkages (including efforts to undermine others’ attempts at bounding and linking). 26
As we shall see below, this set–up created the objective field of possible moves in which natural philosophers
carried out their own specific systematising and linking strategies—claiming new linkages or defending older
ones—depending upon their respective proclivities, aims and skills.
As far as the subordinate disciplines are concerned, one may think of them as what I have termed an entourage
of more narrow traditions of science-like practice: [Figure 1 above] These included the subordinate mixed
mathematical sciences, as just mentioned, as well as the bio-medical domains, such as anatomy, medical
theorising and proto-physiology in the manner of Galen. The members of this entourage changed and interrelated
over time. In the seventeenth century, some were disputed; some were created; all changed; new or newly
revamped entourage members evolved. 27 Issues relating to the disciplines in the entourage will be touched upon
below when we discuss the heated natural philosophical contestation of the early- and mid- Seventeenth century,
and the resultant crystallisation of some of them as more independent of natural philosophising in the later
Seventeenth century phase of the Scientific Revolution.
Finally, without going into detail about the five elements of theorising in my model of the structure and dynamics of
natural philosophy (Cf. note 19), I need to mention one of the most important dimensions of the model. It deals
with the notion that natural philosophy was an a dynamic and evolving sub-culture.
To explicate this notion, I invoke Marshall Sahlins' way of analysing cultures as dynamic historical entities in terms
of their mechanisms of change and adaptation to exogenous and endogenous challenges over time. Insisting on
the need for an historical category of culture in anthropology, he argues that cultures display specificity of
response to outside impingement, they are not simply imprinted upon or pushed around. The dynamics of
response, over time, characterises the culture:
[Cultural orders] reveal their properties by the way they respond to diverse circumstances,
organising those circumstances in specific forms and in the event changing their forms in specific
ways. Here, then, in a historical ethnography—an ethnography that extends, say, over a couple of
centuries—here is a method for reconciling form and function in a logic of meaning, for discovering
the relatively invariant and mutable dimensions of structures….the currently fashionable idea that
there is nothing usefully called "a culture"—no such reified entity—since the limits of the supposed
"cultures" are indeterminate and permeable...paradoxically...misreads a cultural power of inclusion
as the inability to maintain a boundary. It is based on an underestimate of the scope and
26
Cf. Anstey and Schuster, ‘Introduction’ to Anstey and Schuster (2005). We shall refine the concept of boundary-work,
including how we think about players’ contestation about it, below in Section 5.6.
27 Mechanics meant something different to Galileo and to Descartes, and both had left behind Stevin or Benedetti’s notions
of the domain. A mutant novelty, a discourse of ‘celestial physics’ emerged in Kepler and Descartes. See below Sections 5.3
and 5.4 and Schuster (2005).
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systematicity of cultures, which are always universal in compass and thereby able to subsume alien
objects and persons in logically coherent relationships.28
It is in emulation of this, that I have designed my model of natural philosophising as a sub-culture, tradition or
field in dynamic process—defined over time by the resultant of its players’ combats over utterances, where some
of those utterances have to do with attempts to respond culturally to variously perceived, and represented,
contextual structures and forces, threats and opportunities. Moreover, as Sahlins would insist, these moves are
not determined by a universal logic, may express considerable novelty, but remain specific to the (evolving)
culture. This is why I term my model of the field of natural philosophising a cultural process model: no more
history of ideas ‘influences’ or vulgar Marxist social structural ‘imprintings’. This model holds for all types of
contextual drivers or causes asserted by externalists in their explanations of the ‘rise of science’. 29 Quite macro
entities—social structure, economic forces, political structures and processes can be appropriately brought into
play. The arguably objective existence of contextual structures and processes that we as historians need to
model and explain did not cause, imprint or ‘influence’ thoughts about natural philosophy by natural philosophers.
Rather, natural philosophers responded to challenges and forces and decided to bring them into play in the form
of revised claims, skills, material practices and values in the field. To do that, the ‘things’ being brought in had to
be represented to and by them (not us!) in appropriate form. In my model’s terminology, players had to articulate
his natural philosophical claims upon some available representation of the ‘contextual’ or ‘external’ things of
relevance and concern to him, his allies and opponents—just as players variously articulated their own natural
philosophical views onto a selection and weighting of the subordinate disciplines. These points will come into play
later, when we get to grips below in Section 5 with the detailed mechanics and rules of contestation of natural
philosophising during its ‘crisis within a crisis’ phase. For the moment and before proceeding any further in that
direction, we must quickly establish a working periodisation of the Scientific Revolution, corresponding to our
intention to work through the category of natural philosophy and its variously related fields and disciplines.
4.0 Phases and Stages in the ‘Scientific Revolution’ seen as an unfolding process in the field of natural
philosophising, with its attendant articulations to other domains.
I offer here a periodisation, a chronological skeleton, regarding the flow and dynamics of natural philosophising as
the central plot of the period called the scientific revolution, in which the Scientific Revolution takes on an
interesting rhythm as a process of change and transformation of an appropriate 'object'—the field of natural
philosophising with its variously associated superior, cognate and subordinate disciplines and domains of
concern: 30 The period categories are:
[1] The Scientific Renaissance 1500-1600
[2] The Critical Period [or Natural Philosophical Crisis inside a Larger Crisis] 1590-1660
[3] A Period of Relative Consensus, Muting of Systemic Conflict, New Institutionalisation, End of Scientia and
Incipient Fragmentation of the Field 1660-1720 (Which will be abbreviated as CMF Period in some instances
below.)
The Scientific Renaissance owes its names to the fact that it displays in the realms of the subordinate sciences
of the ‘entourage’ as well as that of natural philosophy many of the scholarly aims and practices which already
characterised the treatment of classical literature, history and languages in earlier stages of the Renaissance.
The sixteenth century is pre-eminently a period when the established humanist practices of textual recovery,
editing, translation, commentary and, now, printing came to be increasingly focused on the scientific,
mathematical and natural philosophical heritage of classical antiquity. These developments may have come
slightly late in the Renaissance considered as a larger historical epoch, but they mark the first stage and essential
pre-condition for the further process of the Scientific Revolution.
In the sixteenth century there was a marked increase in the recovery, reconstruction and extension of the existing
28
Sahlins (1993) at pp. 25,15. Shapin (1992) speaks of sciences as cultures in process in analogous ways.
29
On internalism/externalism, Schuster (2000). These ideas are applied to the problems of externalist explanations of the role
of practical mathematics and mathematicians in the Scientific Revolution in Schuster (2008, forthcoming).
30
For more details, and somewhat varying emphases, see Schuster (1990, 2002) and Schuster and Watchirs (1990).
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subordinate entourage sciences, the timing of differed from field to field. In mathematical astronomy the
Renaissance phase is discernible from the late fifteenth century, whilst in mathematics and geometrical optics the
pace of the Renaissance phase only accelerates in the later sixteenth century. 31 Anatomy and medical theory
followed more closely upon astronomy, the programme of editing and publishing the complete body of Galen's
works culminating in the 1520s and 30s. In each case there was an initial stage of recovery, improvement, and, if
necessary, translation of texts. This could lead to positive extension in some cases, even if the advance was
imagined to consist in a purification of sources or a return to lost ancient wisdom. The entire process took place
amid the catalyzing influence of the pedagogical and philosophical assault on Scholastic philosophy; the
reassertion of Platonising modes of thought which helped revalue mathematics as the key to knowledge; and the
more general trend toward recasting the ideal of knowledge in the image of the ideals of practice, use and
progress, rather than contemplation, commentary and conservation.
As concerns natural philosophy, the sixteenth century has been notoriously difficult to deal with, but the notion of
a Scientific Renaissance gives us some orientation. The recovery or improvement, assimilation and publication
of natural philosophical systems made available a wide and confusing array of non- or anti-Aristotelian
approaches. Aristotelianism was under fire from several directions and was sometimes dismissed as irrelevant
by elements of the avant-garde literati, as well as by certain exponents of the cultural priority of the practical and
mathematical arts. Outside of the universities, in princely courts, print house and workshops of master artisans,
anywhere the practice of a science or art fell outside the preview of Aristotelianism, the practitioner could be set
at odds with School philosophy and reach for rhetorical tools against it. Yet, throughout the sixteenth century
'orthodox' Scholastic Aristotelianism was officially entrenched and constituted the central element in the education
of virtually all of the men who had any serious concern with natural philosophy. Indeed, from the late sixteenth
century Scholastic Aristotelianism enjoyed an “Indian Summer” finding renewed vigour as the connective tissue of
the rapidly rigidifying curricula of institutionalised forms of Protestantism and a militant post-Tridentine Catholic
Church. Hence the sixteenth century produced no crisis of natural philosophy.
What I have termed The Critical Period (or Phase of ‘Crisis within a Crisis’) of the Scientific Revolution
(roughly 1590-1650) is characterized by a conjuncture unique in the history of pursuit of natural knowledge,
whether in classical antiquity, medieval Islam or Renaissance Europe: On the one hand there was an
unprecedented burst of conceptual transformation in the subordinate entourage sciences—optics, mechanics,
astronomy, mathematics, well beyond what the ‘Scientific Renaissance’ had witnessed. The achievements of a
Kepler, Galileo, Descartes or Harvey took place within and are symptomatic of a pattern of accelerating
transformation and mutual interaction among the subordinate entourage sciences in the two generations after
about 1590. Between 1590 and 1650 ‘Renaissance lines of development culminated, whilst the major figures of
this generation worked out previously unexplored and unexpected orientations in the entourage sciences and
radically transformed them within the space of a generation. 32
On the other hand, in natural philosophy the tendencies corrosive of Aristotelianism—the challenge of
Paracelsianism, of Hermetically or alchemically tinged neo-Platonism, of calls for the re-evaluation of practical
knowledge, of anti-Aristotelian rhetoric tied to the practice of the mathematical arts or classical mathematical
sciences—all seem to have taken on a greater virulence and urgency. (Nor, as mentioned is this inconsistent
with a notable strengthening of so-called neo-Scholasticism in many quarters, indeed this is part of the reason
for the rising temperature of anti-Aristotelianism). There was a heightened, often desperate competition amongst
systematic natural philosophies (some tied to utopian and irenic programmes of religious, social and intellectual
reform) which issued in the construction and initial successful dissemination of the mechanical philosophy.
31
In astronomy Copernicus could enter into the highly technical tradition of planetary astronomy basing himself on the prior
labours of Regiomontanus and Peurbach, the late fifteenth century renovators of the field, who themselves had tried to
appropriate and perfect the tradition as it had emerged from the later Middle Ages. In geometry the process of assimilation
and purification is even easier to discern, for the century saw not only improved texts and commentaries on Euclid's
Elements, but the recovery, translation and edition of the texts of higher Greek mathematics, of Apollonius, Archimedes and
Pappus, not to mention Diophantus, who was critically important for the typically Renaissance development of the
emergence of the mathematical art of algebra as a subject of theoretical import and structure.
32
The great stature, and frequently Whiggish interpretation of these men, and the Janus-like quality of their work stems from
their engagement with the classical subordinate sciences, and in the cognate mathematics, at just the moment when
characteristic lines of sixteenth century work were pushed to their apparent limits, and intended or unintended steps through
these limits unexpectedly opened radically altered conditions and possibilities of investigation.
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Within and between both developments the Renaissance themes of the re-evaluation of practical knowledge and
the desire for command over Nature continued to be sounded. Now, however, they sounded more urgently and
in a new key, marked by the emergence of the hitherto socially and conceptually disparate debate onto the plane
of 'high' natural philosophical culture, as figures such as Bacon and Descartes projected these values into the
natural philosophical agenda of the educated elite.
Out of this proliferation and climactic struggle amongst competing systems and their advocates there emerged
the mechanical philosophy, which was self-consciously designed and sold by a handful of innovators in an effort
to finesse and resolve (in their own favour) the natural philosophical conflict of the age. By the mid-Seventeenth
century the cultural dominance of Aristotelianism collapsed (although it continued supreme in most universities
for another generation). The mechanical philosophy, in several variants became the dominant form. Hence my
image of a ‘civil war in natural philosophy’, with multiple regime change: from Aristotelian ism to mechanism,
which had averted a threatened neo-Platonic take over. As we shall see in the next Section, these struggles
over natural philosophical systems on the one hand entrained and coloured struggles within the entourage of
subordinate fields, and also on the other hand contained unusually concerted and contested attempts to
articulate favoured versions of natural philosophy to particular images or representations of matters political,
theological, pedagogical or related to the content and promise of the practical arts.
This is precisely where the description of change in natural philosophy and the entourage of subordinate
sciences needs to be linked to the context of heightening political, religious and intellectual turmoil which, as we
have seen, exponents of 'crisis' theses variously denote as the 'general crisis of the seventeenth century', or
more narrowly, in intellectual terms, as the 'sceptical crisis of the seventeenth century'. Following Maravall’s
strategy, we accept this characterisation and place the cultural turbulence and contestation within the field of
natural philosophising within the larger crisis. The religious and political crisis of the period, and its psychological
impact for actors, especially those within the field of natural philosophising was important for the proliferation of
alternative programs to Aristotelianism, and the eventual emergence of mechanism out of the competitive
turbulence thus created. Educated men recognised an imperative to find, and install, the ‘proper’ system of
natural philosophy, because it was widely believed that the ‘correct’ program for natural knowledge would ipso
facto provide much needed support for ‘correct’ religion, as well as a set of directives or for the improvement of
both the moral and practical aspects of life. The stakes—political, moral and religious—inside the natural
philosophical field were high, and recognised to be so. 33 The fact that there was, of course, no consensus on
correct religion casts a poignant light on this struggle and explains its intensity as well as, to some degree, its
ultimate lack of closure: There emerged no agreed mechanistic system within the broad mechanistic consensus,
and of course the adherents of mechanism, Protestant and Catholic, remained unreconciled.
The following period of Relative Consensus, Muting of Systemic Conflict, New Institutionalisation, End of
Scientia and Incipient Fragmentation (1660-1720) is distinctive for this muting of systematic contestation (at
least in public, especially in the new ‘scientific’ institutions) and for the dissemination and widespread acceptance
of mainly loosely held varieties of the mechanical philosophy, and by the endemic melding of these variants to
33
The founders of mechanism hoped to resolve the conflict of natural philosophies in a way which was to them cognitively
progressive, but religiously and politically conservative. They exploited and co-opted recent achievements in the classical
sciences, including the Copernican initiative, and amplified the premium placed upon mathematics and operative knowledge
by sections of Renaissance opinion, whilst they avoided the perceived religious, political and moral pitfalls of the alchemical,
Paracelsian, Hermetic and eclectic atomistic systems. Accordingly, the selection and molding of discursive resources to form
the mechanistic systems was a nice and dangerous task. It involved endorsing some values and aims characteristic of the
magical-alchemical systems, whilst explicitly opposing them as such. Mathematics was construed in terms of the sober
geometry typical of the practical mathematical arts, to avoid any hint of neo-Platonic mathematical fancies; and yet, as in
neo-Platonism—as opposed to Scholastic Aristotelianism—mathematics was to be the very language of nature. Experience
was identified with experiment, itself rhetorically modelled upon the dissection and reassembly of machines, so as to
marginalize alchemical and Paracelsian accounts of experience as an affect-laden, spiritually sanctioned and uplifting
intuition of otherwise hidden relations and correspondences; and yet, as in natural magic and Paracelsianism—as opposed to
Scholastic Aristotelianism—operative command over nature was sought through an active experiential engagement with
nature. The mechanical philosophy was also constructed so as to embody an arguably orthodox 'voluntarist' vision of God's
relation to nature and to mankind, so as to avoid collapsing the divine into nature and/or elevating man to the level of a
'magus', a status unacceptable to mainstream Catholic and Protestant thought alike. Accordingly, mechanism was neither the
finest fruit of detached, rational 'modern' thought finally asserting itself to end 'the confusion', nor was it simply or directly,
the reflection of some long rising merchant, administrative or craftsman-technologist groups, who for some contingent reason
invented mechanism between 1630 and 1650
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Baconian rhetoric of method and experiment. 34 Under this new and looser umbrella of natural philosophical
commitments a ‘research’ primacy was granted to new (rather than co-opted or copied) experimentation,
especially in the new organisations and networks for living and communicating this new phase in the natural
philosophical life. Natural philosophers found themselves doing some of their natural philosophising within the
confines of particular new sites or institutions—such as the Royal Society or the Accademia del Cimento. In such
situations natural philosophers played the institution's organisational patterns in ways advantageous to them in
institutional and natural philosophical terms. These institutions were additional, new nodes in the Europe wide
field of natural philosophising, not the exclusive ones—the field played through these and other sites, and the
dynamics of the sites affected the field—they were not the incubators of an essentially new, unified Science,
replacing a natural philosophising supposedly barred from their precincts.
These transformations from the previously seething, contested culture of natural philosophising and its bubbling
entourage, led to the simultaneous heightening of the cultural autonomy of natural philosophy and, as we discuss
later, the beginnings of its century and half long process of disintegration into a spectrum of successor
sciences. 35 Thus the ironic upshot of the ‘civil war in natural philosophising’ was that, on the one hand, natural
philosophising as a whole—the entire field of all these plays and turbulence—became more autonomous of other
cultural forms such as theology, as well as other branches of philosophy, whilst, on the other hand, it began a
long process of fragmentation into a number of more modern looking, semi-autonomous, diverse and narrow
special domains or disciplines of natural inquiry, which begin to look like sciences in our modern sense. 36 That is,
the formerly more coherent, if internally contested, domain of natural philosophising began to fragment into and
débouche onto a suite of successor, more narrow and modern science-like domains—this included the emergent
master science, classical mechanics, as well as evolved versions of the old mixed mathematical fields, now
crystallised as more experimental and physico-mathematical; and a host of emergent new fields which solidified
further in the 18th century. Over the course of the next century natural philosophy faded and died, and modern
sciences emerged, along with an increasing armoury of philosophical and other meta-scientific rhetoric and
ideology constitutive of the onset of a wider ‘scientific culture’. 37 The way these successor sciences were formed
will interest later, once we have a more developed model of the dynamics of the crisis period.
34
As to Newton, I hold that we misunderstand the rhythm of the development of early modern science by focusing too
intently upon Newtonian celestial mechanics and physics. It is arguable that state of the natural philosophical field, including
the subordinate sciences, might have proceeded qualitatively rather undeterred during the CMF phase for some considerable
time had Newton not contingently intervened. Our periodisation and plot—focussing on the trials of natural philosophy-should take this into account, seeing the process in terms of three phases or moments, punctuated, contingently by Newton,
rather than aiming for him, or finding some clear closure in him. See Schuster and Watchirs (1990), Schuster (1990).
35
To take an overview of the changes in natural philosophy in the early modern, I think we can say that coming out of the
late medieval and into the early 16th century, natural philosophising was largely, indeed almost entirely a university based, inhouse game of competing versions of Aristotelianisms. A subsequent ‘scientific renaissance’ stage followed in the 16th
century, especially heating up in its last two decades, during which the game was opened to a widening range of available
sources, eclectic takes on recovered alternatives, and increasingly bold and religiously implicated moves and claims in the
field. The mechanistic gambits of the critical period of the early to mid 17th century can then be seen as direct responses to
the already disturbed and turbulent state of the field. But, even that turbulence and bold stake-claiming did not and could not
last forever. The conflict of systems in the early to mid 17th century was what first attracted the attention of historians of
science to the problem of natural philosophy as an actor’s and historiographical category—starting with Lenoble’s great work
in the 1940s down through Rattansi (1963, 1964) in the 60s and Ravetz (1975) in the 70s, to people of my own generation.
But it also diverted us from looking at natural philosophy as a field, institution and tradition with a longer and wider life than
indicated by the nodes of vicious confrontation in ‘the age of the Baroque’. (Just as the contemporary phase of vicious
religio-political civil and international warfare was only a phase in the longer process of crystallisation of some states—and
of the state system itself—and failure of others).
36
By the late Eighteenth century, all these tendencies contributed to the dissolution of the five hundred year long European
culture of systematic natural philosophising and the emergence in its wake of that more typically 19th century institutional,
professional and disciplinary ecology of the sciences which we might actually call ‘modern’. Thus giving us the well known
historiographical problem of the so-called ‘Second Scientific Revolution’, which, of course was not a revolution at all, but
that is another story in the macro history of the sciences.
37
On the problematic of the emergence of a scientific culture, see Gaukroger (2006).
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5.0 The Dynamics and Rules of Contestation During the ‘Crisis within a Crisis’ Phase of the Scientific
Revolution
We now look closely, anatomically as it were, at the modes and types of contestation and competition during the
critical or crisis phase of the scientific revolution. Note that our earlier descriptive overview of the three phases
was meant to prepare for and focus this analysis, so that once we better understand the state and dynamics of
natural philosophy in the critical phase, the contrasts to the preceding and succeeding phases will be all the
more clear, and we will be in a position to contemplate the possibility of Baroque norms, modes of behaviour or
identity formation, having been recruited into the natural philosophical struggle, and even living on in natural
philosophy, and its descendant sciences.
Before we begin, we need to note in terms of our model of natural philosophising three background conditions to
any player’s engagement in the field:
[1] Virtually all natural philosophical utterance, by any player, was ultimately referred back to a template initially
learned through neo-Scholastic training in Aristotelian natural philosophy which taught the possibility of
systematic, unified and true knowledge of nature (Scientia), expressed through systematically related doctrines of
matter, cosmology, causation and method.
[2] Each natural philosophy necessarily had a profile of articulation onto a section and weighting of subordinate
fields of inquiry. Natural philosophers had different interests and skills within the entourage of subordinate
disciplines, and even different lists of what was within or without its boundaries. A natural philosopher had to set
priorities amongst entourage members, and link them conceptually to his natural philosophy. This created a
pattern of linkages characteristic of a particular natural philosophy. The practice of a subordinate science under
the aegis of a particular natural philosophy was coloured by the nature of the conceptual linkage. We shall see
that natural philosophers competed with each other in part through attempts to co-opt these narrower traditions of
scientific endeavour.
[3] The first two generations of the 17th century were an especially turbulent time in the history of natural
philosophising: Scholastic Aristotelianism, with its huge, extensive and hegemonic institutional base, provided
the target of strategies of displacement and alternative institutionalisation, whilst competition amongst members
of different broad genera—Aristotelian, neo-Platonic, Magnetic, qualitative atomistic, and finally mechanistic—of
natural philosophising also heated up, as has been long recognised. 38 Hence it has also been easy to suspect
that religious and political issues were ‘getting into’ the natural philosophies, or ‘driving and shaping’ at least
some of them in some manner or other, as are new aims or values: mathematisation, utility, domination of nature.
The issue becomes, how do we deal with this in terms of our model of the structure and dynamics of the natural
philosophical field.
To these conditions we add two observations which frame our inquiry and its aims: First of all the competition and
contestation in the critical period was more serious than even the traditional literature suggests, since it is really
quite obvious that the competing families of natural philosophies actually consisted of quite individual systems,
and hence that the situation was actually more like every man for himself: Indeed the existence of clear genera
did not prevent, and indeed they undoubtedly enflamed, a tendency, even for natural philosophers of similar
genealogical stripe—neo-Platonic, proto or emerging mechanist, ‘magnetic’, or chemical—to compete with each
other as well: Kepler vs. Fludd; Descartes vs. Gassendi vs. Hobbes; Libavius and other latter day Paracelsians
vs. the heritage of Paracelsus himself. Secondly, there is no coherent, let alone agreed historiographical model
for how ‘drivers’ work, and what it means for a natural philosophy to be ‘shaped by’ or ‘reflect’ contextual features
and causes.
We therefore need to be more conceptually and historiographically scrupulous and this is where our natural
philosophy modelling comes into play, by articulation and extension of what we have already set out. We must
38
It has been obvious since Lenoble’s (1943) work that families of natural philosophies competed in respect of the values,
aspirations and religious resonances they endorsed and condemned. Also classic work of Rattansi (1963. 1964) and Easlea
(1980).
But we really see the contestation in play when we contemplate the inter and intra family competition arising from the fact
that natural philosophy had that entourage of subordinate, more narrow traditions of science-like practice, including the
mixed mathematical sciences, and the ‘bio-medical’ domains, such as anatomy, medical theorising, and proto physiology in
the manner of Galen.
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model the dynamics of contestation, especially the ways players constructed their competing claims. We need to
consider the modes of competition and the rules (revisable and negotiable of course) of such engagement,
whether deep and implicit, or overtly and explicitly debated by contending players. We will therefore concentrate
here on an examination of the types and dynamics of the rules of production and rules of competition governing,
and expressed in, the natural philosophical contestation of the early to mid 17th century period, hoping to
elucidate them, and to see if in fact their nature, intensity, scope, etc. were qualitatively different from what went
before in the Scientific Renaissance, and what eventuated in the CMF.
5.1 Articulation on Subordinate Disciplines: Grammar and Specific Utterance
Bearing in mind the existence of subordinate disciplines requiring to be articulated to, and practiced under the
aegis of, competing natural philosophies, we have in the critical period increasingly heated and contested
attempts to co-opt entire disciplines into the framework and in the service of, one’s own natural philosophy. This
phenomenon was an index of contestation and was objectively intensified by the fact, noted earlier, that the
subordinate fields had been more intensively cultivated during the later 16th century than previously, displaying
numerous, more dense interrelations amongst themselves, and, in the case of the mixed mathematical sciences,
becoming objects of praise for their actual or potential utility and cognitive value.
As usual with our model, we need to understand the underlying grammatical possibilities before citing particular
moves and gambits. So we must first ask what was involved the articulation of a natural philosophy to a
subordinate field, before citing competitive, contested co-optations of such fields. We can usefully grasp this by
considering the situation of the mixed mathematical fields, under Aristotelianism where they were considered to
be intermediate between natural philosophy and mathematics. For example, for Aristotelians, the investigation of
the physical nature of light and its physical properties would fall straightforwardly under natural philosophising, an
issue of invoking appropriate principles of matter and cause. In contrast, the mixed mathematical science of
geometrical optics ‘investigates mathematical lines, but qua physical, not qua mathematical.’ Geometrical optics
studied ray diagrams, in which geometrical lines represented rays of light, and phenomena such as the reflection
and refraction of light were dealt with in a descriptive, mathematical manner, which was, according to Aristotle,
incapable of providing proper explanations, dealing with the physical nature, properties and causal behaviour of
light.
The question of the relation between the mixed mathematical disciplines, on the one hand, and the ‘superior’
discipline of natural philosophy, which did the real explanatory work on this conception, was thus dominated by
the entrenched, grammatically definitive, Scholastic viewpoint. However, as the competition amongst differing
approaches to natural philosophy heated up in the early Seventeenth century, many natural philosophers hostile
to Aristotelianism proposed a more central explanatory role for mathematics in natural philosophy, and
sophisticated Scholastic Aristotelians also began to loosen the Aristotelian marginalisation of mathematics as
non-explanatory. And it is here that we begin to see a competitive dynamics develop, out of attempts to bend or
elude the template, the declaratory rules of subordination of the mixed mathematical sciences to Aristotelian
natural philosophy.
Consider geometrical astronomy, the exemplary case of a mixed mathematical science. It was routinely held to
lack the explanatory power of natural philosophy because it did not deal with the material and causal principles of
planetary motion, but merely with appearance-saving geometrical models. Thus, the fine details and elaborate
geometrical tools of Ptolemaic astronomy fell outside any plausible realistic interpretation, and hence outside any
natural philosophical gloss. However, the fundamental concepts of Claudius Ptolemy's astronomy were clearly
shaped by Aristotelian natural philosophy: the finite earth-centered cosmos, the distinction between the celestial
and the terrestrial realms, the primacy of uniform circular motion. Therefore, it is quite clear that even in the
relations of Aristotelian natural philosophy to Ptolemaic geometrical astronomy, there were linkages of a causal
and matter theoretical nature that grounded the geometrical astronomy and linked it to its ‘parental’ natural
philosophy. Admittedly this was a thin conceptual linkage, but nevertheless a real one. When Copernican
astronomy came to be hotly debated in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it was not as an
instrumental predictive device, but rather as a system with realistic claims about the cosmos, implying the need
for a non-Aristotelian natural philosophy, able to explain its physical workings.
However, the articulation of a natural philosophy to a mixed mathematical science could be much looser than the
Copernican example implies. As just noted, under Aristotelianism geometrical optics consisted largely in
geometric ray diagrams, their rules of construction and a set of canonical puzzles, such as the behaviour of
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mirrors, the rule governing refraction, the explanation of the rainbow and other curious optical effects. Broadly
speaking, virtually any natural philosophical theory of matter could have been used to provide an explanatory
'voice over' for this science, from Scholastic 'propagation of species', through the transport of atoms or the
propagation of neo-Platonic immaterial substances, to the mechanists' passage of light corpuscles or propagation
of mechanical pressures or tendencies to motion in a medium. Only later, during the critical phase of the
Scientific Revolution, in the optical work of Johannes Kepler and René Descartes, was there sought a closer
interaction between optical theorising and problem solving, on the one hand, and natural philosophical
explanations, on the other. That is, new natural philosophical theories of matter and cause were taken more
intimately to control technical details in geometrical optics, and in turn, technical details in geometrical optics
exerted pressure on the exact nature of those natural philosophical claims about matter and cause.
From this discussion we can begin to grasp the ways in which articulation of a subordinate field to one’s brand of
natural philosophy involved acceptance or non-acceptance (or bending) of the template Aristotelian rules, and
also entailed that the discipline in question should be conceptually flavoured (in terms of matter and cause
discussions) and pursued as part of, and in support of, that favoured natural philosophy. This operated at an
individual basis, but over time, such moves could themselves aggregate and form patterns of largely unintended
change in the subordinate disciplines in question, as we shall see in Section 7.
But there was an even more radical way in which concern with a putatively subordinate field could be played as a
gambit into the contest of systematic utterances, for, in a way, entire natural philosophies could be launched, or
differentiated off from a broader genus, by metaphorically borrowing their core conceptual and normative
resources from a particularly privileged more narrow discipline. For example, what differentiated natural
philosophies of a Chymical type from the wider set sharing neo-Platonic ontologies was the way they linked the
more widely shared neo-Platonic ontology and commitment to the possibility of natural magic to their own
particular concern with the content and value structure of chymical arts and practices, including especially the use
of chymical knowledge in medicine. This in effect was the natural philosophical master stroke of Paracelsus, to
whom the Chymical Philosophers of the critical period looked for inspiration. The varieties of mechanical
philosophy battened upon and projected the supposed meanings and promise of mechanics, their construction
upon metaphorical amplifications of the supposed content and meanings of various strands in the domain of
mechanics being obvious, although space requirements mean we leave them tacit at this point. 39 What were
constructed were still natural philosophies, within the common field of natural philosophising, but the Aristotelian
limitations on the rules or terms of construction were being radically challenged and shifted.
Indeed, and not surprisingly, metaphorically articulating one’s natural philosophy on a favoured take on a
favoured discipline was a two edged sword, because natural philosophical opponents would then be stimulated to
co-opt and ‘sanitise’ (of opposing natural philosophical valencies) the domain in question: Perhaps the most
profound level at which this strategic battle was carried out was where entire disciplines and their value structures
were at stake. So, versions of the Chymical philosophy depended for both technical and value orientation on the
notion of a spiritualised yet practically productive alchemy. In this energised and articulated spiritual form,
alchemy powerfully expressed moral-psychological aspirations, a search for redemption through esoteric
knowledge and successful practice. These powerful sentiments were partially shared, and certainly co-opted in
the programs of Bacon, Descartes and their later seventeenth century followers. For mechanists the nature and
‘control’ of alchemy was therefore a particularly strategic issue. In Bacon, Descartes and their mechanist
followers, the values and aims which Paracelsianism and later the Chymical philosophy invested in alchemy were
co-opted, sanitised of radical political and religious resonances and made acceptable to intellectually progressive
but socially conservative elites, a ready audience for the mechanical philosophy. Alchemy itself was despiritualised and reduced to applied mechanistic matter theory, whilst the search for personal justification and
social benefit would now be achieved through proper method and well grounded results, rather than esoteric
insight and wisdom.
5.2 Find or Steal Discoveries, Novelties or Facts, including Experimental Ones
There was in the critical period a competitive production of novel experiments and facts, accompanied by
39
Beeckman’s corpuscular mechanism keyed to a reading and amplification of dynamical interpretations of mechanics, as in
the pseudo Aristotelian Mechanical Questions. Descartes’ corpuscular-mechanism, surprisingly was keyed in part to the
purely static mechanics and hydrostatics of Stevin (and Archimedes) much overlayed as it developed with material from his
own ‘physical’ optics. (Gaukroger and Schuster, 2002; Schuster 2000a; Schuster 2005)
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scrambles to deflect, co-opt, steal or reinterpret others’ claims, whether this happened amongst nominal
members of the same natural philosophical genus, or across such families. On in the succeeding phase did the
emphasis fall more on production of one’s own novel facts and experimental outcomes. We shall see that this
change correlates to there having been more contestation about systems in the critical period, and more
contestation within and about crystallising more narrow domains of inquiry in the later period.
First of all, as we have recognised ever since the initial insight into a ‘clash of families of natural philosophy’ by
Lenoble and other, each program, indeed any given natural philosophy, was capable of stimulating new
developments—discoveries of fact, production of new instruments or experiments—conditioned and shaped by
the natural philosophy in question. Aristotelianism itself could still provide deep conceptual orientations for narrow
specialist pursuits. Aristotelian concepts continued to nourish physiological and anatomical researches, of which
those of William Harvey, extending the deeply Aristotelian ‘comparative anatomy’ program of Hieronymus
Fabricius at Padua, are only the best known. Aristotelians continued to contend about experimental discoveries
and instruments well into the middle of the Seventeenth century. The novelties in Gilbert’s work heavily
conditioned by, and in turn affecting the shape of, his neo-Platonic natural philosophy are well known. 40 Similarly,
the manner in which Kepler’s, optical, astronomical and celestial mechanical discoveries were shaped by his
version of a neo-Platonic philosophy of nature will be touched on below. Chymical natural philosophies were not
bereft of new claims that were quite plausible to a wide range of contemporaries, as illustrated by Paracelsus’s
iatrochemical treatments and later by van Helmont’s chemical novelties, such as the beginning of the construction
of the concept of ‘gas’.
The increasing imperative and willingness to pursue novelty of act and experience and embed it within one’s own
natural philosophical agenda was a remarkable phenomenon, and one bound seriously to alter the cosy world of
academic commentary and disputation. But it is important to realise that this was not simply equivalent to a lust
to fill cabinets of curiosities. To be important in the history and dynamics of natural philosophising, novelties have
to be pursued and coveted within and for natural philosophical purposes. Nor was competition to produce
novelties and discoveries the whole story, because at this stage natural philosophers were vigorously involved in
attempting to appropriate the discoveries and novelties of others, or to negate them. Only later is some sort of
genuine novelty of claim seemingly required. In the critical phase such attempted appropriation or negation was
tactical; that is, if a discovery or claim was particularly significant in the architecture of a competing system that
claim had to be appropriated, down played, reinterpreted or neutralised in some fashion.
So, in a nice example, Harvey’s ultra significant claims about the motion of the heart and blood of became a
target in an extended game of inter-systemic competitive football: Descartes was happy to appropriate Harvey’s
epochal, yet clearly Aristotelian based discovery of the circulation of the blood and motions of the heart, radically
altering the latter (to the point of arguably contradicting it) to fit his mechanistic program in physiology. Within his
radical Chymical natural philosophy Fludd endorsed the discovery of his friend Harvey, but invested its meaning
with mystical connotations in ways that only committed aficionados of his natural philosophy could appreciate.
Matters became even more entangled in tactical cross fire, however. Gassendi, another early mechanist of quite
different stripe from Descartes and in competition with him, was understandably eager to refute Fludd’s
interpretation of the meaning of the circulation, but went on to reaffirm, against Harvey (and Descartes) the
40
William Gilbert [1544-1603], whose On the Magnet (1600) is arguably the most influential and impressive new natural
philosophical gambit of the period. To call Gilbert ‘the father of electrical or magnetic science’ rather misses the point that
his program involved a new natural philosophical agenda and content, built, it is true, on exploiting and metaphorically
extending important experimental work he had done on the magnet and magnetic compass. Also indebted to a basically neoPlatonic view of ontology, Gilbert based his new system of nature on a new theory of the earth, according to which the
earth’s magnetism, which he established as a fact, is a form of quasi spiritual power. The earth’s magnetic ‘soul’ is
responsible for its spinning on its axis, and since other celestial objects similarly have magnetic ‘souls’, a host of celestial
motions could be explained. Gilbert’s aim here was to support a modified version of Tycho Brahe’s system of cosmology,
and so win the glory for closing the Copernican debate. To establish this, Gilbert worked not on astronomical or
cosmological questions, but on the structure and nature of the earth. He co-opted and reinterpreted the craft knowledge and
lore of miners and metallurgists, to argue that lodestone is the true elemental nature of the earth; that the earth is a gigantic
spherical magnet; and that, since magnetic force, even in a small magnet, is an immaterial, spiritual force, the magnetic
nature of the entire earth amounts to a cosmic soul or intelligence—capable of moving, or at least spinning the earth. This
natural philosophy, he claimed, showed the true nature of the earth, as opposed to the superficial mutterings of Aristotelians
about earth, air, fire and water and their qualities. Similarly, he insisted that his knowledge was built on assiduous attention
to experiments and to facts reported by craftsmen and artisans, and that it was productive of useful results, most notably
improving the understanding and use of the magnetic compass in navigation.
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Galenic pores in the septum of the heart on the basis of first hand witnessing of anatomical facts! For Gassendi it
was this Galenic claim that vindicated a sense of the identity of venous and arterial blood, a claim typical of
Harvey’s position. Hence Gassendi would, like Harvey uphold the priority of the ‘anatomists’ way’ of first hand
experience, yet also preserve a key conceptual claim of Galen, the ‘physiology expert’ that Harvey and Descartes
would have preferred to jettison.
What is at issue here is not the question of merely making the first claim or discovery; the players are happy to
co-opt, and reinterpret each others’ claims; nor is there a simple priority given to new matters of fact, since
Gassendi’s observational claim only confirms Galen, and is subservient to the larger natural philosophical
contestation in which he is involved. Novelty, discovery, dramatic observations of matters of fact—these are all in
play, but can be in play second hand, since borrowing and renegotiation are to the fore, because, and this is
crucial, the entire contest is about systematic natural philosophical advantage, not the toting up of unique and
new discoveries or facts. That latter kind of emphasis will gain more particular privilege later in the century, but
not during the critical period of natural philosophical turbulence. We shall shortly see just how extensive the writ
of ‘contestation over systems’ was in the crisis period.
Descartes’ extended strategic encounter with Gilbert’s work on magnetism, a case of massive co-optation of
previously claimed, often dramatic novelties, illustrates all the above points. What was novel in Gilbert’s
experimentation was co-opted by Descartes without the addition of a single new experiment. For Descartes the
nub of the encounter lay elsewhere. Gilbert's natural philosophical exploitation of the magnet was dictated by his
concern to establish a novel system of Magnetic natural philosophy of distinctly neo-Platonic flavour and
embodying and supporting a modified Tychonic cosmology. This was the ‘significance’ of the magnet work that
had to be appropriated, reframed, and tamed to the imperatives of Descartes’ program. Gilbert's natural
philosophising of the magnet was too important and impressive a gambit in the natural philosophical field to be
ignored by his natural philosophical competitors. So, Descartes efforts were directed at re-glossing Gilbert's
experimental work in mechanistic terms, rather than at extending the number and type of magnetic experiments.
Descartes devoted considerable attention to preserving and capturing the 'cosmic' significance of magnetism, the
keynote of Gilbert's system. He replaced Gilbert's story of the cosmos making and binding role of the spiritual
magnetic force with a mechanist's story of an equally cosmic magnetism which was now the purely mechanical
effect of a species of corpuscle of particular, and peculiar, shape and size, moving in and through suitably
configured aggregations of ordinary 'third matter'.
5.3 Bend or Brake Aristotle’s Rules about Mathematics and Natural Philosophy: The Gambit of ‘Physicomathematics’
A domain of turmoil, contestation and renegotiation of the Aristotelian template rules concerns what we might
vulgarly term the movement to ‘mathematicise’ natural philosophy. These developments are better understood,
however, under the term physico-mathematics, which, like natural philosophy, is both an actors’ term from the
time, and a category that can be fleshed out for historiographical use. Exploring physico-mathematics throws
more light on the rules and dynamics of natural philosophical contestation in the Baroque phase.
Recall our sketch above of the dominant Scholastic view of how the mixed mathematical disciplines related to the
‘superior’ discipline of natural philosophy, which did the real explanatory work in terms of categories of matter and
cause. There we cited some examples of attempts to articulate geometrical astronomy and optics much more
closely to anti-Aristotelian natural philosophies, bringing the matter and cause dimensions of the natural
philosophy into play inside the target discipline. This is what one means by players attempting to render the
mixed mathematical disciplines more physico-mathematical. It is not the mathematisation of natural philosophy,
but the physicalisation (tighter natural 'philosophication' as it were) of disciplines taught by Aristotelianism to be
merely instrumental and non-explanatory.
Although outcroppings of such ‘physico-mathematical’ initiatives began to appear in the 16th century, for example
in scattered discussions of the natural philosophical status and relevance of mechanics, 41 it arguably was the
heightened natural philosophical contestation of the early 17th century that drove and intensified the proliferation,
and competition of physico-mathematical gambits—a phenomenon which, in turn, of course rendered the entire
natural philosophical field more turbulent and contested. A variety of physico-mathematical initiatives can be
identified in the natural philosophical contest and their vigour and self-consciousness as physico-mathematics
41
Hattab (2005), following Liard (1986), Rose and Drake (1971).
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increases in the opening generations of the 17th century, as the competition amongst natural philosophers heated
up. Those hostile to Aristotelianism claimed that mathematics could play an explanatory role in natural
philosophy. On the one hand, this promoted ‘physicalisation’ of the mixed mathematical sciences; on the other
hand, unprecedented, tight, articulations emerged between some natural philosophies and some innovations in
the mixed mathematical sciences. It was the ‘usual suspects’ amongst alternative natural philosophers who
challenged Aristotelianism on this issue—Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Gilbert, Mersenne, Beeckman. Moving
between mixed mathematics and novel natural philosophising, they produced much more ‘physico-mathematical’
versions of the old fields, supportive of their natural philosophical agendas.
There were competing varieties of physico-mathematics. [1] As Peter Dear has found, some leading Jesuit
mathematicians pursued what I would term a ‘conservative’ sort of physico-mathematical program within the
confines of Scholastic natural philosophy and its institutions. They argued that the mixed mathematical fields
should enjoy a status as ‘separate but more or less equal’ to natural philosophising’ thus in a way liberating the
pursuit of the mixed sciences from Aristotelian constraints (but without fully cashing out their potential to deal with
matter and cause). [2] As noted there were attempts reaching back into the 16th century to bring mechanics,
particularly a dynamical approach to the simple machines into natural philosophy. 42 [3] Kepler’s profound neoPlatonising of mixed mathematics and redirecting the thus physicalised disciplines back into natural philosophy,
while also creating a new physico-mathematical field, celestial physics; [4] Beeckman’s linking of an emergent
corpuscular mechanism to dynamical interpretations of the simple machines; [5] Descartes’ very radical attempts
to ground a corpuscular-mechanism and determine the principles of its doctrine of causation (laws controlling
force and determination of motion) through exploitation of hydrostatical and optical inquires of a physicomathematical character; 43 and finally [6] Galileo’s rather more piecemeal physico-mathematical excursions,
including his construction of a sui generis new kinematical science of motion. 44
The traditional mixed mathematical field of geometrical optics again presents a useful case. Consider how
geometrical optics developed inside the natural philosophical turbulence in the early 17th century: In their optical
work Kepler [1604] and Descartes [1637] each sought closer articulation between optical innovation on the one
hand and natural philosophical explanations on the other. That is, new natural philosophical theories of matter
and cause were taken more intimately to control technical details in geometrical optics, and in turn, technical
details in geometrical optics exerted pressure on the exact nature of those natural philosophical claims about
matter and cause. Kepler practised geometrical optics under, and in the service of, a neo-Platonic natural
philosophy and conception of light. He got brilliant results in the theory of the camera obscura, theory of vision,
and, to some degree, the theory of refraction and the telescope. Descartes, emulating Kepler’s technical optical
achievements but in competition with his neo-Platonic natural philosophical program, practised geometrical optics
under his version of a mechanical conception of light. He achieved a simple and workable version of the law of
42
This was a physico-mathematical program of long duration and complex internal structure, consisting in a series of
attempts, from the early 16th century onward, to move one or another of the constituent texts or sub-disciplines grouped under
the label ‘mechanics’— such as the statics and hydrostatics of Archimedes, the so-called Medieval science of weights, the
more diffuse science of machines, or the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanical Problems—into closer contact with natural
philosophising. We find in this domain, whether the term physico-mathematics is deployed or not, varied, sustained and
serious attempts to do the very opposite of the strategy of Dear’s Jesuits, that is, divorce mechanics from natural
philosophising (it was already sufficiently divorced from natural philosophy in the declaratory Aristotelian view). Rather, the
common denominator—whether expressed through classificatory arguments, rhetoric about values and aims, or downright
technical gambits—was to modify natural philosophising by bringing in mechanics, and to shift the valencies of mechanics
by making it relevant to, even central to, natural philosophising; that is, seeking explanations in terms of matter and cause.
This is radical, rather than ‘inventive yet conservative’ ‘physico-mathematicising’.
43
Gaukroger and Schuster (2002), Schuster (2000a, 2005).
44
In regard to Galileo historiography it is worth adding that he presents a difficult case, in that he was every bit as avid as
other radical players to appropriate and make natural philosophical capital out of mixed mathematics, and quite technically
expert at this tactic as well. But because he did not pursue a systematic natural philosophy throughout his career, as opposed
to trying to establish a realist Copernican cosmology and a strong anti-Aristotelian stance, his strategy and results look more
modern to us than do the strivings of a Kepler or Descartes. But, if we think the issue through in contemporary categories,
we can plausibly conclude that Galileo, like Kepler and Descartes, was specifically and pointedly breaking the declaratory
Scholastic rules about subordination of mixed mathematics, and that his pro-realist Copernican cosmology campaign and
anti-Aristotelian agenda amount to substantial gambits in the field of natural philosophising, short of advocating a ‘new
system’.
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refraction and a general theory of lenses. Conversely, as I have shown, essential details of Descartes’
mechanistic system were shaped by his optical successes. 45
Under such pressures, geometrical optics, the mixed mathematical science of the Scholastics, evolved into a
much more obviously ‘physico-mathematical’ discipline, in which issues of physical causation were definitely not
avoided. Innovating natural philosophers got natural philosophical capital out of such optical work, but also, there
emerged at each turn a more dense, relatively more independent domain of physico-mathematical optics—a
disciplinary area was crystallising as a function of being batted around in the natural philosophical ruck. We shall
return to this emerging physico-mathematical optics when discussing the ways this critical phase of natural
philosophising elided into the succeeding period of muting of systemic conflict, reformed institutionalisation, and
tendency for the field of natural philosophising to begin to fragment and elide into descendant, more modern
looking scientific disciplines
Finally, before we leave the issue of physico-mathematics it will be useful to reflect a bit more on what it means to
talk about players within the field of natural philosophy obeying, or bending ‘rules’. This is motivated by our
important finding that attempts to found a physico-mathematics were parts of the larger picture of contestation
and competition within the natural philosophical field, not steps beyond or away from it. By the same token
attempts to renegotiate, bend or alter the rules governing natural philosophical work and the formulation of natural
philosophical claims also took place inside the field, and did not constitute bids to end or destroy it—at least not
by intention. 46 Members of a culture may in the normal sense of politics try to take it over or marginalise
opponents within it; they are not usually involved in the wholesale destruction of it.
Applying these cautionary observations to the case at hand, we should view the physico-mathematicians, as
indeed rebels, but not rebels against the culture or game of natural philosophising, rather as rebels whose
rebellion in part took the form of attempts to alter the rules under which the game subsequently would be played.
Innovation in natural philosophy, as in any particular more narrow scientific tradition, then or now, is not limited to
significantly new claims about conceptual content, or technique. Innovation can also be pursued in regard to
rules and values. We need to know how to calibrate and describe such radical gambits. Furthermore, we can
observe (in the spirit of interpretive sociology) that Aristotle’s rules about natural philosophy and the mixed
mathematical sciences were actually ‘declaratory’ rules; formally invoked and usually obeyed in practice; but
constantly open to renegotiation in practice and challenge at the level of formal principle. The letter of Aristotle’s
distinction was hard to practice and was violated in many instances such as astronomy, where natural
philosophical and mixed mathematical commitments at least overlapped, and where the entire issue was inflamed
by the Copernican challenge—a mixed mathematical theory that claimed natural philosophical truth and
demanded perforce the overthrow of Aristotelianism to achieve it. Similarly it was open for non-Aristotelian rebels
like Descartes and Beeckman to try to renegotiate the rule. But, and this should be noted, all this jockeying and
negotiating over attempts at the physicalisation of mixed mathematical fields occurred inside the field of natural
philosophising, not outside it.
So, as a result of our discussion so far, what used to be called the ‘mathematisation of science’ really begins to
look like attempts to physicalise the mixed mathematical sciences and perhaps invent some new ones. The old,
rather Whiggish description misses the nuance of our improved categories and understandings. But the old
description was dramatic and was about radical change: The likely death or transcending of the old natural
philosophy and the creation of something incommensurably new. So, it might sound at bit underwhelming and
certainly not very dramatic, to speak as we have about physico-mathematical gambits and attempts to
renegotiate rules. However, if we understand the fields of play in which our actors were engaged, and the
categories through which they thought, and contended, then we can quite reasonably say that it was indeed a
form of intellectual and organisational rebellion, and play for very high stakes, to try to move mathematically
articulated fields into the heart of explanatory, matter and cause, natural philosophising by ignoring or radically
recasting the ‘declaratory rules’.
45
Schuster (2000a); Schuster (2005) and forthcoming “Descartes Agonistes…”, Chapters 4 and 10.
46
Of course, at a macroscopic level, these sorts of individual and local gambits contributed to a pattern of change in the field
of natural philosophy which importantly involved consequences and outcomes unintended by any particular player or group
of players. We shall briefly canvass some of this larger dynamics of natural philosophising in the later seventeenth century in
Section 7 below.
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What we have done, therefore, is further explicate the view of natural philosophy as a contested field in which
players who first learned the basic grammar of claim-making through their neo-Scholastic educations into forms
of Aristotelianism, might later realise that those rules were ‘negotiable’ and that their meanings were in the hands
of successive waves of users. As we have seen, even some Aristotelians claimed to bend the rules about the
subordinate nature of the mixed mathematical disciplines. More radical natural philosophers, such as Kepler and
Descartes, simply ran right over those rules, forging new meanings and practices. (Kepler, however, still paid non
trivial ‘declaratory’ allegiance to them in some contexts. Additionally, the issue of construing the ‘non-Aristotelian’
or ‘Aristotelian’ character of innovative work could become quite complex, and hence negotiable, since what
might be non-Aristotelian under the commonly accepted definition of mixed mathematical sciences, might still be
Aristotelian in terms of the methodological rules of the Posterior Analytics. 47 ) To return to the our main theme, in
my terminology, by the first third of the seventeenth century, the given, declaratory and template-derived rules
about the status of the mixed mathematical sciences were the subject of an unprecedentedly vexed debate and a
turbulent state of play.
5.4 “Hot Spots” of Articulation Contest: Additional Causes and Effects of a Field in Crisis
We have seen a number of modes and sites of endemic contestation inside the natural philosophical field, taking
that field in the large sense indicated in Figure 1 as a domain of competing claims, systems, and associated
articulation patterns to subordinate disciplines. Just as the overall intensity and ‘spatial’ extent of contestation
increased in the ‘crisis within a crisis’ phase of the Scientific Revolution, so also sites of particular, and
particularly new inflammation of contestation appeared, which, unsurprisingly, I term ‘hot spots’ in the field of
natural philosophising. The criteria for thus describing a region as a hot spot might run as follows: [1] the
inflamed site was new, not having appeared in the late Medieval or Sixteenth Century Scientific Renaissance
phases of the life of western natural philosophising 48 ; and [2] a dual process of change was in process at the site.
This regarded on the one hand the target— the subordinate science, theory, instrument, novelty or discovery in
question— and on the other hand the natural philosophies contending to exploit and dictate to the target in
question. The target in a hot spot was often pushed along an unintended trajectory toward becoming a small
domain of inquiry with relative independence from natural philosophy; whilst the future shape and success of
natural philosophies struggling about the target was often at stake at the hot spot of contention. When we look at
hot spots we are often looking at most of the sorts of competitive behaviour and tactics we have surveyed thus
far.
An example of such a hot spot involved the claims of Harvey discussed above. Not only were Harvey’s claims
contested, and revised, by natural philosophical combatants for natural philosophical ends, but, over the next two
generations we see a case of unintended trajectory as a domain of experimental physiological inquiry emerged at
this site, with a dynamic leading on, in the hands of later English experimental natural philosophers so-called, to
raise issues not only about ‘cardiology’, but about the functions of respiration, the blood, the lungs and the
atmosphere. 49 The general tendency for these sorts of dynamics to produce new, relatively autonomous
domains of inquiry is apparent in this case of an obvious, but foreshortened and ultimately relatively abortive
trajectory. All the characteristic features of a hot spot are even more apparent in the most important, exemplary
and historically consequential of these ‘hot spots,’ where some astronomically concerned natural philosophers,
and natural philosophically engaged astronomers wanted to articulate realist Copernicanism (a realist
interpretation of a mixed mathematical science) to natural philosophical claims, which in the nature of the case
had to be non-Aristotelian. 50
47
On this see the enlightening discussion in Rhonda Martens, Kepler’s Philosophy and the New Philosophy,(2000) Chapter 5
“The Aristotelian Kepler”, particularly the concluding remarks pp.110-111.)
48
Hence the salience of significant novelties and discoveries, immediately up for first time contestation in the field. As
interesting novelties emerged across increasingly dynamic and interrelating subordinate fields, the struggles over them
increased. Merely gazing at, or hording or collecting curious new facts may have been a popular pastime, but it was not
central to the natural philosophical agon—contention about curiosities was!
49
Frank (1900), Anstey (2000).
50
(Comment here on Westman issues, Biagioli issues, and the idea that not all natural philosophers are astronomically
concerned; and not all astronomers have any serious natural philosophical concerns or business.)
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Recall that in the traditional alignment of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Ptolemaic astronomy, what I term the
‘declaratory’ position on the merely instrumental and non-explanatory status of astronomy was slightly but
necessarily compromised in practice by small but noticeable articulations of Aristotelian natural philosophy onto
Ptolemy’s astronomy: the Ptolemaic cosmos was finite and spherical with a motionless, spherical earth more or
less centrally located. Combinations of uniform circular motion prevailed and the celestial and the terrestrial
realms were distinct. These high order conditions of Ptolemaic model building were not going to be altered within
Aristotelianism, and they carried some of the tinge of realism conveyed by a the super-ordinate natural
philosophy. No matter how much Aristotelians debated amongst themselves the marginal elements of their
system; and no matter what excruciatingly complex predictive elaborations needed to be added to Ptolemaic
planetary models, no substantive, natural philosophical field-altering controversy or debate would take place
under this dispensation. This was no hot spot, and never likely to become one under the prevailing condition of
the field of natural philosophising.
Copernicus himself, with his realist claims for his astronomical theory, had been de facto attempting what we can
now discern as a physico-mathematical move—this theory of astronomy had natural philosophical implications,
indeed it contradicted the prevailing Aristotelianism and in effect demanded a systematic replacement, although
nothing substantial along these lines was to be found in Copernicus’ own project. It was only when other players,
more radical astronomers and natural philosophers, came to take Copernican realism seriously did a hot spot
develop in the natural philosophical field between systematic natural philosophical theorising and the formerly
relatively tame sub-ordinate mixed mathematical science of geometrical astronomy.
Thus, when, from the late 16th century, the Copernican debate heated up, it was not about a set of new
calculational fictions, but rather about a set claims concerning the actual physical structure and causal regime of
the cosmos. Supporters of realist Copernicanism needed to adduce a framework of non-Aristotelian natural
philosophy, a new theory of matter and cause, adequate to explaining the heliocentric cosmos. This in turn
required of serious natural philosophical Copernicans, as we now understand, a bid to radicalise the grammar of
relation between mixed mathematics and natural philosophical explanation. Conversely, the entire late 16th and
early 17th century debate over realist Copernicanism (culminating in the embryonic emergence in Kepler’s and
Descartes’ respective philosophies of nature of a discourse of ‘celestial physics’) was a phenomenon of
competition at a now inflamed site within the natural philosophical field—the site where anti-Aristotelians
articulated their utterances onto versions of realist Copernican astronomy—no realist Copernicanism, no
inflammation. But why be a realist Copernican unless you intend a quite radical overhaul of Aristotelian natural
philosophy (and its rules) as such?
The rhythm of this process is fascinating, and important. Copernicus, a realist himself, staked his claims about
the natural philosophical truth of his mixed mathematical theory upon the truth value of the ‘cosmic harmonies’ his
astronomical models for the motions of each of the planets displayed when considered together as a
‘cosmological’ package or assemblage. 51 Copernicus himself was either timid, or unprepared, to force the realist
issue more deeply into natural philosophical issues of cosmic matter and cause—What were planets, including
the earth, that they could so move, and what moved them? His own answers were famously lame, even in
contemporary terms, rather poor attempts at twisting Aristotelian matter and cause discourse to finesse the
natural philosophical problems of his system. Instead it was Tycho, who, toward the end of the century kicked off
the eventual crisis of natural philosophy/astronomy articulation by linking his favoured version of quasi
Copernican astronomy to significantly altered (Aristotelian) claims in natural philosophy. Gilbert weighed into the
contest with arguably the most innovative and consequential natural philosophical vision of his generation. Then
in short order Kepler subsumed his brand of Copernicanism within physico-mathematical explanations which in
turn resided at the centre of his neo-Platonic natural philosophy. The situation was similar with Descartes, for in
Le Monde he staked the truth of his natural philosophy on the truth of his version of a physically explained
Copernicanism. 52
In sum, according to the model of the natural philosophical field and agon advanced here, the so-called
Copernican debate was not about astronomy alone; or about astronomy on the one hand, and some vaguely
conceived new 'world views' (or ‘science’) on the other. For knowledgeable natural philosophical contenders it
51
References on cosmic harmonies, Kuhn, Westman. Cf JAS explanations.
52
Schuster (2005), Gaukroger (1995).
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was a battle precisely about articulations of varieties natural philosophy onto varieties of geometrical astronomy.
It was about the direct challenge in the field of natural philosophising posed by realist Copernicanism—because
realist Copernicanism only existed in articulations of non-Aristotelian natural philosophies onto Copernicanism.
This is why the Copernican debate was one of the key hot-spots in the desperate natural philosophical struggle of
the early and mid 17th century, and why in turn it helped fuel that ‘crisis within a crisis’.
Furthermore, it was only in articulations of natural philosophy onto realist Copernicanism that the issue or
possibility of a ‘physico-mathematical’ astronomy arose. The cutting edge of this development was the embryonic
emergence of that field or problematic we in retrospect term celestial mechanics, and which Kepler, its first selfconscious advocate, called celestial physics. Similarly, as I have shown elsewhere, in his Le Monde, Descartes
had a complex articulation strategy spanning astronomy, optics and a new challenging utterance in natural
philosophy. His vortex theory of celestial motion, which formed the core of the natural philosophy, was the engine
room of a now ‘infinite universe’ realist Copernicanism, and also explained the higher registers of the theory of
light, and hence, he hoped, articulated onto his dazzling physico-mathematical achievements in geometrical
optics. 53 The overall tendency in the work of Kepler and Descartes was toward a physicalisation of certain
astronomical questions. 54 The old mixed mathematical science of Ptolemaic astronomy was passing, not simply
as a particular theory, but the very genus ‘astronomy as mixed mathematics’ was giving way to physicomathematical disciplines of astronomy and celestial mechanics, an outcome occluded and hidden in the
turbulence of early and mid 17th century natural philosophy, but quite clear in the wake of the reception of
Newton’s work two generations later.
5.5 Modelling System Construction and Contestation
It is now time to think through what we might mean by systematisation and a systematising élan in natural
philosophy. This model of making systems and competing about them helps explain the rules and dynamics of
conflict, its typical modes, competition over co-optation of fields and novel discoveries and the development of hot
spots. As such it summarises and interpretively solidifies many of our findings so far. Additionally, by offering us
a view of what systematatising was about, particularly in the heated crisis phase of the Scientific Revolution, it
gives us a set of interpretive measures by which to perceive and gauge the processes that set in after the crisis
phase; that is, the subsequent relative muting of contestation over systems, the tendency for quasi-autonomous,
more narrow successor fields of inquiry to emerge from natural philosophy, and for natural philosophy itself to
undergo a slow process of final dissolution.
To address this modelling problem I have begun to develop the idea of systematicity of a natural philosophy as
another ‘iceberg’ category: like natural philosophy itself, systematicity is an actor’s category, in their hands to
negotiate from instance to instance, but it has certain contours we can model, beyond what they might have
enunciated, and which we can use as a regulative tool for describing and assessing player vs. player moves, and
long run dynamics and trends.
I articulate systematicity using the concepts of the explanatory ‘core’ of any natural philosophy; its ‘horizontal’ and
‘vertical’ articulations toward particular domains of explanation; and the idea of ‘system-binding moves’. First, by
the core we mean its central, enunciated doctrines of matter and cause and any specially significant explanatory
53
Schuster (2005)
54
The natural philosophical strivings of Descartes and Kepler, which were pursued with special attention to the subsumption
of astronomy, i.e., Copernican astronomy, variously interpreted, and to its problem of celestial causation, raised a number of
crucial topics and opportunities for natural philosophical inquiry and construction, quite apart from what arose later and was
taken on board as a result of the use of the telescope: What was the nature of the earth as a planet, what could be gathered
about the earth, for example, about its structure, its magnetism (Gilbert), its tides (Galileo and Descartes), the nature of local
fall, that would support its construal as a planet amongst planets and allow for the motions Copernicanism required of it;
what caused the celestial motions; what physical role did the sun (and all stars in multiple planet system versions of
Copernicanism) play in those motions; did the nature and behaviour of comets throw any light on these problems, and so on.
In an interesting and important inquiry along these lines Jacqueline Biro has recently shown how early to mid 16th century
technical developments in mathematical geography were only grudgingly granted by the Scholastic Aristotelians, but eagerly
seized as a resource by natural philosophers advocating Copernican cosmology, with Galileo and Descartes offering late
examples of such tactics in a sequence of varied yet uniformly anti-Aristotelian natural philosophical gambits stretching from
Copernicus himself, through Bruno, Gilbert and others. [Jacqueline Biro (2006)].
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cases within it. 55 By the horizontal articulation of the system [Fig. 2] we denote the explication/modification of the
core in order to launch explanations of results, ‘matters of fact’, ‘solid findings’ in various domains of inquiry, and
in turn how well those explananda support those explanations. Across the horizontal level one asks how well the
articulations of the core cohere over the spectrum of applications to differing domains.
Figure 2 Horizontal dimension of articulation of system
Explicate, develop Core at these points to set up
possible explanations of the targets
core
Targets :Various domains of
phenomena
Targets: Various mixed
math fields
Horizontal Systematicity: How well does the core cohere over the
horizontal extent of explications, developments and modifications?
By the vertical articulation of the system [Figure 3], we mean how fully and coherently various sub-disciplines
(such as fields of mixed mathematics) or domains of inquiry (such as local motion and fall, or magnetism) are
grasped and explained by the (articulated) core of the system, and what sort of program of further inquiry, if any,
is possible. In this way, we explore the arguable coherence of extension of the core to cover various subdomains, and the arguable depth and strength of the core’s explanatory grasp of those domains. System binding
moves occur across the horizontal dimension and will tend to be missing where systematicity is not an important
actor’s aim or intention. 56
55
For example in the case of Descartes’ system of mathematical corpuscular mechanism in Le Monde, we mean the
matter/element theory, the dynamical principles and laws of motion and, as an exemplary explanatory case, his vortex
celestial mechanics itself.
56
For example, I have argued that even in his vernacular and pre-Principia ‘system’ in Le Monde, Descartes makes a number
of elegant and clever moves that arguably bind the system together and lend extra theoretical credibility to some of his
claims. Things that look rather ad hoc from one angle, look highly systematic, almost inevitable, if we tease out the system
binding logic with a perspective informed by a category of systematicity. Schuster, Descartes agonistes…(forthcoming);
Chapter 10; cf Schuster (2005).
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Figure 3 Vertical Dimension of Articulation of System
core
Various mixed math fields
Various domains of
phenomena
Vertical
Systematicity: How
fully and
coherently is any
given sub-field or
domain of inquiry
grasped and
explained by the
[albeit articulated]
core of the natural
philosophy?
Discipline formation tending to dissolution of natural philosophy:
Horizontal systematicity is sacrificed to increasingly sui generis
detail involved in exploration/explanation within a given field or
domain.
Now, of course, at the actor’s level the criteria for assessing the goodness of a natural philosophy and the modes
of applying such criteria to cases, were themselves objects of negotiation, part of the weave of the contestation in
natural philosophy itself. What is proposed by my articulation of the idea of systematicity is not meant as the
only, best or truest way of sizing up any system, and certainly not a set of criteria any actor embraced fully
explicitly and exclusively. Rather it is a self-consciously designed analytical tool for dissecting systems of the
time, in the interest of building better accounts of the process of natural philosophising, a tool reflecting to some
degree some of the goals and standards the actors arguably used. Two immediate heuristic benefits of this
model for macro history of early modern natural philosophy may be mentioned, as they pertain to the themes of
this paper:
First, to analyse a natural philosophy in the vertical dimension—where subordinate fields or novel results or nonnatural philosophical claims might be attempted to be co-opted—amounts to a very searching examination, one
that any system would have found difficult to pass with flying colours. But that is the point. Such analysis shows
us clearly what was and was not happening in the dynamic heart of a system, where reduction and cooptation of
subordinate domains was expected, and often rhetorically claimed, but where, in the nature of the beasts under
examination, smooth success is hard to find, never consensually granted by everyone, and very much dependent
upon the eye of the beholder. On the player’s level this was part of the field of possible contestations that made
the game so inviting and difficult. We learn to watch for it, and characterise its rules and dynamics.
Secondly, the model of systematicity also allows gleaning of heuristic insight concerning one of the key processes
we are discussing in this paper: modelling of systematicity gives historians some purchase on the long run
tendency, from the mid seventeenth century, for natural philosophising to be pursued less in terms of explicit
systems, and more as fragments of ‘experimental natural philosophy’, eliding slowly toward the crystallisation of
more specialised domains of inquiry, which began to look more like separate disciplines. Analysis of natural
philosophical work by vertical and horizontal articulation suggests a rule of thumb: In a given natural philosophy,
to the extent that vertical articulations within subordinate domains are dictated by and co-opted toward the
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strengthening of horizontal systemic considerations, that natural philosophy is, and indeed is intended to be, a
system. To the extent that investigations within subordinate domains take on a life of their own—meaning
amongst other things that horizontal systematic articulation is neglected, rather ad hoc, or merely rhetorically
asserted—that natural philosophy is tending toward the genus ‘experimental natural philosophy’. Moreover, to
the extent that various natural philosophies tended to treat specific sub domains in the latter way, relatively
autonomous of horizontal articulation concerns, those sub domains took on sui generis, quasi disciplinary
characters, and over time floated more free of any particular natural philosopher’s systematising ambitions.
5.6 The Mechanics of Responding to ‘Outside’ Challenges and Opportunities
One of the main aims in talking about a crisis phase in natural philosophising is to try to relate it to the undeniable
larger crisis of the age, hence our conceit of a ‘crisis within a crisis’ It is here especially that we are navigating
close to and in the wake of Maravall’s pathway, in that he tries to construct a model of the nature and structure of
Baroque culture, as a concerted elite response to the relevantly perceived aspects of the ‘general crisis of the
seventeenth century’. We, in turn, want to see how the natural philosophical turmoil of the early and mid 17th
century was shaped by players responses to that same crisis, and whether, in the process elements of the then
crystallising Baroque culture also were recruited into play in natural philosophy.
We have offered informal (non-theorised in relation to a model) descriptions of the situation above in our
discussion of the three main phases of the Scientific Revolution. Now we need to get serious in terms of our
modelling of natural philosophy. It is easy to cite testimony about the sheer cultural, political, religious, and indeed
identity desperation of the day. 57 That is exactly why various versions of the ‘general crisis’ were detected by
57
We may have been missing the emotional and identity forest for all the detailed trees that have been studied in the past four
generations of early modern scholarship. Writing long ago, and dealing with opposite chronological ends of the period,
Henri Pirenne (1936—actually written whilst detained by the Germans 1916-17, Eng trans 1939) and Paul Hazard (1935,
English trans. 1963) each captured the religiously centered critical desperation and life or death imperative to choice. It is
true that after the mid 16th century one would be, from infancy, acculturated into one or another of the efficiently self-girding
denominations. But literate and/or widely experienced early modern people would sooner or later confront the choices,
threats, doubts and claimed certainties of their age, in their studies, in the streets, and most importantly, in their imaginations
and consciences. Pirenne (p.583) writes of those living through the period after the initial German Peasant War and
Anabaptist risings that had accompanied the early spread of Lutheranism, and into the stage of the rise of Calvinism and
stirrings of the Counter Reformation—in other words in the later 16th century as the general crisis began to form: “…although
the Catholic defence was in a very much better position about the middle of the 16th century than it had been in 1517, the
Protestant offensive was also more powerful. The religious problem now appeared everywhere with formidable clarity….it
was no longer possible to hope for a reconciliation with the Church. It was therefore necessary to make the choice between
the old faith and the new. Both were laying claim to men’s souls, both were appealing to the conscience, and by that very
fact were compelling men to undertake an examination of the conscience which in many persons led to what some called an
apostasy and others a conversion…Now it was necessary to take sides a debate in which the question of eternal salvation was
at stake, and every man, according to his decision, had to enter one of the two opposing camps and prepare for battle.”
Hazard (p.221) commenting on exactly that late 17th century shift from hot religious war to more cultural if still vigourous
and divisive debate that characterised Rabb’s move from crisis to resolution (wars continue and multiply, but not religious
wars in the strict sense of the term, mainly Protestant coalitions against Louis XIV notwithstanding), writes: “No sooner do
we come to contemplate Europe as a whole than it is its divided state that forces itself upon our attention. Ever since the
Reformation, its moral unity has been shattered. Its peoples are divided into two hostile camps, each bidding defiance to the
other. Wars, persecution, bitter feuds, cruel words, such are the things that fill the daily lives of these contentious brethren.
Whoever longs for harmony [in the later 17th century, e.g. Leibniz] must first of all essay to cure an evil that every day grows
more acute. Since 1660, in fact, the quarrel between Catholics and Protestants had been raging with renewed and ever
increasing intensity, and there was no telling to what extremes of violence it might not ultimately lead.” Rabb’s ‘resolution’
has as one hallmark the fact that the kind of final physical showdown about religion that Hazard says contemporaries feared
as a result of re-ignited cultural and political conflict (think Glorious Revolution in England and surrounding political
phenomena, or even more seriously, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and its consequences) did not in fact occur.
Hazard’s conception of a late 17th century ‘crisis of the European mind’ ushering in the Enlightenment may seem contrary to
later crisis theories, such as those of Rabb and Popkin (1964), and similarly averse to the position put in this paper. The
resolution, in so far as the present argument goes is this: there was an historical hysteresis (in the Sartreian sense, Sartre
[1963] 64, 75 and part III passim) between natural philosophical crisis (which paralleled the hot state structural and religiouspolitical-military turbulence of the early and mid 17th century) and the later, wider ‘Hazard cultural intellectual crisis’, a
situation marked by the prior changes in natural philosophy, and played out largely in the new pan-European literary and
cultural media as a density of quarrels and controversies, not as a set of life and death social, civil and inter-state
confrontations and conflicts. The Hazard crisis, marked by the rise of deism, ‘criticism’ and sceptical rationalism; the protoEnlightenment ‘war on tradition, superstition and unreasonable authority; and the quarrel of ancients and moderns, would not
have occurred had not, amongst other things, the trajectory of natural philosophy already unfolded as it had earlier in the
century; or if state structures and the inter state-system had not crystallised into their post ‘general crisis’ forms. Perhaps it
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earlier historians. Still without a clear sense of how our presumably properly conceived object of study, natural
philosophy, was affected, shaped or had something about it caused by these larger circumstances, we have not
really advanced our post-Maravall argument a natural philosophical crisis within a crisis, nor a fortiori the issue of
the possible collateral shaping of natural philosophy in crisis by aspects of the rising, supervening Baroque
culture. Now, in modelling terms, in terms that is of constructing historical categories and structures of
interpretation, the generic version of this problem runs as follows: How should we think through the causal role[s]
of larger features of a larger socio-political-religious crisis of the sort posited by the likes of Rabb and Maravall?
As usual in intellectual history, history of science and history of philosophy, our explanatory armoury is somewhat
decrepit, filled with well worn but actually obsolete tools and. In the wake of two generations of development of
methodological criticism from both the school of Quentin Skinner and the school of post-Kuhnian SSK, we do not
want to return to either naïve ‘influence’ of ideas (or even worse, events and structures) upon other ideas; nor do
we want to recur to vulgar Marxist (or if you prefer, Mary Douglasian, or to be really trendy, superficial postmodern complaint theory) mystifications, in which social and economic structures imprint corresponding
constellations of ideas upon great leading thinkers, who just happen for these purposes to be cultural dopes. 58
Nor do we want to follow normal intellectual history practice, as evidenced in this particular area by, for example,
Popkin with his hypostatised, growing then resolved ‘sceptical crisis’, and simply give thick enough, untheorised
descriptions so that a de facto and largely tacit explanation emerges something along the psychologistic lines of
‘great thinkers somehow get it into their heads to address the great challenges hanging about in the cultural
atmosphere, and hence their intellectual output somehow reflects or is shaped by them’.
The way through on this issue arises directly from within the model of natural philosophising we have been
developing: the way to deal with ‘contextual drivers, shapers or causes of ‘thought’ is built into our model of a
dynamic agonistic field or tradition, in which competing players deploy differential resources, and follow or attempt
to revise rules of engagement and utterance, in order to construct and advance claims whose value, longevity or
otherwise, is entirely in the hands of their peers and successors in the evolving field. The modelling here is only a
slight modification of that involved in conceptualising natural philosophical players competing over articulations of
their preferred natural philosophy onto subordinate fields, resulting in a characteristic and articulation. It follows
directly from Sahlins' conception of the historicity of cultural dynamics discussed above in Section 4.
So, we conceive that the players in the natural philosophical tradition responded to ‘outside’ or ‘contextual’
challenges and forces by deciding to bring them into play in the form of claims, skills, material practices, values
new to the field. To do that, the ‘things’ being brought in had to be represented in appropriate form—the objective
existence of contextual structures and processes did not cause or inform thoughts about natural philosophy by
natural philosophers; rather, appropriately thinkable/writable representations of things about contextual structures
and features were mobilised, used, reshaped and deployed in natural philosophical claims and discourse by
players of the natural philosophical game. In partial emulation of the young Foucault, I term these actions ‘the
articulation of natural philosophical claims upon things at the boundary of the field’ and I envision the process as
described by Sahlins.
What all this means is that we are now talking about the boundaries of the field of natural philosophising, or more
properly, the shifting ways in which players in the field accounted, acted upon, and competed over, what they
took to be the bounds or limits of the field at any given moment. 59 In my model, then, there were no fixed,
essential boundaries of the field of natural philosophising; no permanent, explicit and always honoured account of
what was inside natural philosophy and what was outside; or better put, what was relevant to natural
philosophical claim and utterance and what was not (so that shifting views in this regard can be seen as involving
was not a crisis at all, just the opening phases and rapidly ramifying crystallisation of new, wider cultural forms, the
emergence of the ‘Republic of Letters’ as it were, with a widened reading public and enlarged (open or clandestine)
publishing domains. The new, third phase ‘CMF’, natural philosophy, attendant sciences and new organisations were part of
the furniture in the salons in which Hazard’s crisis was argued out, for these developments had been forged by prior ‘crisis
inside a crisis’ if you will.
58
Schuster (2008, forthcoming).
59
To this end, I have also benefited from SSK scholars’ concept of ‘boundary work’ in disciplines or professions (Gieryn,
1983), but, as some readers will sense, my conceptions of boundary maintenance and work upon field or disciplinary
boundaries are wider, more historical and very much tempered by a much modified ‘Foucault’ passed through the filter of
Bourdieuian sociology of agonistic fields.
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tacit or explicit ‘rules’ for natural philosophising). Rather, [1] the utterances of figures and groups dominant in the
field tended to create, and recreate, a ‘leading or hegemonic picture’ of those boundaries and how to articulate
the natural philosophical onto them, whilst [2] articulation upon boundaries was a competitive enterprise, an
essential part of the agonistic dynamics of the field. The university neo-Scholastic Aristotelians’ possession of
dominant organisations and institutions was crucial; but, competitors tried to challenge the way dominant players
articulated utterances to boundaries in order to define the field. Institutional and organisational moves expressed
and facilitated this. So, in general the dominant utterances in the field carried a particular selection, weighting
and thematisation of articulations on boundaries. 60 Challengers could reorder these selections, weightings and
contents, and they could also challenge or modify existing articulations in new ways, or bring in new ones.
For example, one might say that in the university teaching of Aristotelianism, a virtual articulation was present to
whatever version of orthodox religion dominated that particular polity and university. However the nature of
university curricula which traditionally excluded discussion of theology in the undergraduate logic and natural
philosophy course, most often meant that this articulation was tacit, or not thematised in the body of
undergraduate natural philosophical teaching. Or, one could say that a rule existed in these precincts about not
explicitly articulating natural philosophy to theology from the natural philosophers’ side of the fence. But, on the
other hand competing utterances from non- and anti-Aristotelian challengers could mobilise much more explicit
and deeply developed articulations onto religion. To bring in religion explicitly involved devising new utterances,
new articulations in depth and degree of thematisation in accord with favoured religious and theological
commitments, claims and agendas. This is what we mean by challenging the choice, depth and weighting of an
articulation. This gives a much more precise meaning (and tool kit for study) to a Maravall-type formula that ‘some
natural philosophers responded to a perceived crisis with cultural moves inside natural philosophy’.
Similar points attach to politics, or more particularly to issues about the nature and role of ‘the state’, and the
contemporary tortured issues of sovereignty, Church governance vis à vis the state, and issues of civil order and
legitimate rebellion (all of which could count as elements in a larger ‘crisis’ perceived and responded to by some
natural philosophical players). Most Aristotelian teachers of natural philosophy in the university environment
would have left largely unsaid within natural philosophy its linkages to the local political status quo, and to the
institutional arrangements that supported the very existence of that particular university and its natural
philosophical functions. A Bacon or Hobbes, however, articulated natural philosophical utterance in part upon
such particular evaluations and agendas of these political issues. But this is not to say that politics or political
doctrines or agendas 'influenced' the natural philosophical utterances of Bacon or Hobbes. Rather, it is to say in
the first instance that within the field of natural philosophy they saw fit to mobilise and deploy such articulations in
an effort to win the natural philosophical agon, and through it, partially to support their properly political aims, now
recursively expressed, amongst other ways, through natural philosophy. So we do not deny their aims and
aspirations in the actual domain of politics—but, we must demarcate and understand before we associate and
explain. Hobbes would have liked to have won in politics as well as natural philosophy, and his possession of a
natural philosophy well articulated to a particular view of the state, and the causes and cures of civil wars, was in
his view a weapon in the real political field, as his novel articulation upon politics was a weapon and argument in
his favour in the natural philosophical field. To conflate the two fields of play or link them by 'influence', contextual
imprinting' or an intimate psychology of motive may paint a pretty picture of Hobbes, but it will probably ruin our
ability to do the history of either natural philosophy or politics (or their precise modes of interrelation in the actions
and discourse of such interestingly innovative figures). 61
60
My emphasis on selection, weighting and content of boundary articulations seems to me an important conceptual point,
requiring more ‘articulation’ on my part. I can say, however, that I believe it pushes beyond the customary ‘boundaries’ in
how SSK work on boundary management has been conceived and applied in case studies.
61
To recur to the parallel ruminations of Marshall Sahlins on the need for an historical category of culture: This is analogous
his critique of post-modernist views of indigenous cultures as simply the decrepit or sad results of a steamrollering impact or
imprinting by Western imperialism. He argues that such pessimistic sentimentality systematically neglects the specificity of
response to Western impingement from an indigenous culture, and the fact that even the history of imperialism must take
note of the dispersion and effects of such culture specific responses over time. Similarly 'politics' or 'social factors' impinging
upon natural philosophy and philosophers did not denature, or collapse the latter. Rather, politics were played by some
natural philosophers, as part of doing natural philosophy and often as part of their engagement with politics. Correlatively,
natural philosophy as a (sub-)culture needs to be studied historically, with close attention to contestations within it, including
responses to, articulations upon, 'contextual factors'—large and small, structural or ephemeral.
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The practical arts, another domain often taken as having ‘influenced’ natural philosophy, provides, again, another
useful example: In the sixteenth century many books were written extolling the value of practical knowledge and
the status of their practitioners. These books issued from pedagogues, master artisans, practical
mathematicians, courtiers, physicians, surgeons and others. Later these same revaluations become central in
the natural philosophical utterances Bacon, Descartes and Hobbes. So much is standard fact, as documented for
example in Paolo Rossi's work. 62 Most readers take this as a vast improvement on the vulgar Marxist notion,
popular in old fashioned externalism, of imprinting upon actors by emerging commercial capitalist structures. 63
But how exactly should we understand this ?
Nobody seems to agree: Do the new values float into Bacon's and Descartes minds, do they 'influence' these
thinkers in some way: Is this a parallelism of ideas, or some contextual imprinting of them? Is this in the end a
history of ideas or some sort of mitigated Marxist account, or what? It is hard to answer, since neither Rossi nor
most of his readers possess the following tools: a model of what a field of discourse is; a map of the
fields/traditions in play at the time; an explicit model of how contexts play upon, or, to be exact, are played upon,
by actors in a field.
I suggest that we can interpret Rossi using our field in process model, and feed what we find into that model. I
read Rossi as having described a diffuse 16th century field of (non-natural philosophical) discourse on the
practical arts. That discourse was itself articulated upon structural changes in sixteenth century Europe: changes
in state and economy to be modelled by us in state of the art social and economic history. Utterances in that
discourse—that is, representations of the practical arts—were later co-opted and redeployed by Bacon and
Descartes into debates inside the natural philosophical field, as part of their respective strategies for advancing
their natural philosophical claims. They were now articulating upon 'the practical arts' in this mediated sense.
We need no implausible direct constitution of Science or natural philosophy by technical demands of a changing
economy and state structure, à la Hessen or Zilsel. Nor were Bacon and Descartes 'reflecting' the interests of
some class magically imprinted upon them. Similarly we do not need a history of ideas notion of the 'influence' of
these ideas upon Descartes and Bacon. They were simply re-working and projecting into the natural
philosophical field already available discursively embodied representations and revaluations of the practical arts.
A Sahlins type gloss on this would be, as we have already mooted: These natural philosophical 'natives' were
adapting to big, hard contextual forces by culturally specific yet innovative moves, moves that arguably
possessed novelty, but which were specific to the thereby evolving culture of natural philosophising. Moreover,
the explanation of their behaviour depends on their positions, resources and goals in the field: that would be
Bourdieu’s contribution. And, to challenge hegemonic Aristotelianism they needed, according to my model, to
make new articulations, involving new resources, tactics and stratagems. 64 So we have here strong analogies to
Maravall’s thesis about the creation of Baroque culture. Radical innovators like Bacon and Descartes are bidding
to remake virtually the entire field of natural philosophising in response to their perceptions/interpretations of the
impact of the practical arts, the aim of utility and the values and norms attributed to men of practice.
In short, the field of natural philosophising was a tradition in process over time. We can theorise its ongoing state
of contextual relations: contextual forces were always ‘at work’, but only as the model envisions, not as imprinting
of context upon practice as vulgar Marxist, or cultural history of science would have it. That is, the contending
players, active at the moving coalface of the sub-culture or discursive field, were always in the process of making
out the boundaries and relations of the field (from their perspectives and agendas) by articulating utterances in
the field upon (their selection and weighting of) boundary structures and discourses. If outside entities and forces
seemed to some to be particularly threatening and challenging (if, hence, a crisis was in progress), the variety,
intensity and scope of competing articulations would rise, and it did!
Finally, therefore, recurring to our Maravall inspired notion of a crisis within a crisis in early and mid 17th century
natural philosophy we can say that because of the existence of a genuine sub-culture of natural philosophy, in
which systems of nature had significant and contested articulations to religious, political and social discourses,
the really existing contextual problems and tensions (labelled by us the larger ‘general crisis’) were arguably read
62
Rossi (1970)
63
Schuster (2000b)
64
I apply similar arguments to the more specific issue of the ‘relation between practical mathematics and mathematicians and
the “Scientific Revolution” in J.A.Schuster (2008, forthcoming).
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and interpreted by players through the filter of natural philosophising, which also tended to suggest the problems
of the age had some of their basis in natural philosophical contention and dissensus. All this further raised the
stakes in finding and enforcing the 'true' philosophy of nature, since for actors the enterprise of natural philosophy
was arguably part of these problems and part of their solutions. Hence the proliferation of desperate and daring
initiatives in neo-Platonic, alchemical, magical and Hermetically tinged natural philosophy, which in turn, set
against a backdrop of dipping into the resources of cultural pessimism and scepticism, elicited from some few
individuals the equally sweeping, desperate as well as sudden invention of mechanism. Hence, also, a sense of
a crisis of natural philosophising, within a larger general crisis. 65 We can therefore now ask, following Maravall
and the problematic of the Baroque Science Project, what role was played in this crisis within a crisis phase by
the recruitment of elements of the rising Baroque culture.
6.0 Recruitment of Baroque Behaviours, Norms and Identities?
To be precise, we may now ask, ‘Were elements of Baroque culture, identity and behaviour templates recruited
into the field of natural philosophy; were there phenomena inside natural philosophising in its critical phase that
make sense as normal cultural mores of otherwise ‘Baroque-ified’ intellectuals’? It is entirely plausible that the
desperate larger crisis—especially the awareness for almost every reflective individual of a crisis of religious
conscience, and the virtually unavoidable awareness of the reigning politico-religious anarchy—was carried by
intellectuals right into their experience and engagement in natural philosophising. Friedrich and others who have
studied the Baroque as a culture stress that the Baroque was about rule bending and rule breaking, as well as
about especially self-regarding and anguished matters of identity and honour. We shall consider the possibilities
under the categories of challenges to Scholasticism; bending and breaking of rules; the politics of heroic identity
and honour, and shifting images and self-understandings of reason. That is, we look for Baroqueness, not in end
results (although we shall see some of that as well later), but in the very weave of the processes of the game of
natural philosophising, and a fortiori in the comportment and identity struggles of players: have they recruited
Baroque cultural elements into the game or alternatively were some natural philosophers quite ‘Baroque chaps’
even before entering the game, and hence comported themselves as such within it. Similarly, we are not
interested in this or that isolated borrowing of a Baroque gesture, or action or meaning—these are only to be
expected and while they provide wide thin background evidence for a Maravall-like approach, they do not help
substantially with the problematic of the Baroque Science Project.
Trying to run rings around Scholastic institutions and thinkers is a Baroque proclivity, although, to be sure, not a
new pastime. 66 But what marks early and mid 17th century natural philosophising apart from earlier Renaissance
humanism are specific forms of anti-Aristotelianism focussed on strategies of displacement or deformation of
hegemonic Aristotelianism within a continuing and contested game of natural philosophy. Many of the
contenders desired system change within the culture of natural philosophising, not the destruction of the game as
such. The attitude seems to have been that crisis also prevailed in natural philosophy and what was required
was a bold, determined change of regime. These are the players Stephen Toulmin picked out in Cosmopolis–
65
All of the major innovators in natural philosophy, whether or not part of the eventually triumphant mechanist party, should
be viewed as actors responding to the context of religio-political-cultural ‘crisis’ of their generation. The careers of all the
major figures in natural philosophy display certain similar strategies and aims, shaped by the needs of innovating in natural
philosophy because natural philosophy itself was thus placed in the turbulent culture of the age. They all aimed to fill a
perceived void of natural philosophical authority; they all overtly rejected Scholastic Aristotelianism whilst remaining to
varying degrees dependent upon its vocabulary and conceptual resources (hence giving endless work to historians of the
continuity of ideas); they all resonated on the plane of natural philosophical discourse some positive interpretation of the
sixteenth century revaluation of the practical arts; and they all drew models and exemplars from the accrued catalogue of
achievements in the practical arts and subordinate sciences of that century, although the choice and weighting of privileged
items did vary greatly. In addition, most of the innovators stressed proper method and pedagogy as a salient feature of a new
natural philosophy, as being necessary for establishing its truth and facilitating its dissemination and triumph. Their strivings
grew in all cases from a sensitivity to the apparently irreconcilable divisions within politics, religion (and natural philosophy)
of the age, and they also shared the perception that Aristotelianism could neither deal with those divisions nor grasp or
stimulate the proliferation of novelties in the arts and subordinate sciences. Beyond all this there was the suspicion,
characteristic of the self-understanding of natural philosophers, that natural philosophical dissension was itself a conditioning
cause of the larger political and religious conflicts, which, accordingly, could be wholly or partially cured by the installation
of a true philosophy.
66
Clark (1992)
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The Hidden Agenda of Modernity as bold anti-Renaissance self-proclaimed heroes of intellectual and cultural
salvation. 67 The rules they were challenging were the established rules of Renaissance humanist engagement,
as well as the taken for granted institutional hegemony of neo-Scholastic Aristotelianism. Both would go in a
natural philosophical cum political cum social reform.
But one did not have to be the mature Descartes, Hobbes or Bacon to be involved in Baroque-looking rule
breaking and bending. The vogue of seeking out novelty and discovery (even if only by co-opting others as we
have seen) was not in the first instance a feature of the Scholastic culture of commentary and disputation (which
of course is not to say that none went on in Scholastic circles, teaching and textbooks, only that it was not the
leading edge of these phenomena, rather the reluctant follower.) Natural philosophies and philosophising were
going to change, and be sites of heightened contention because of this. Similarly, a host of de facto or actually
declared neo-Scholastic rules of the game can be cited as under threat from aggressive and individualistic (hence
Baroque looking) players.
For example: Neo-Scholasticism teaches ‘don’t change the mixed mathematical sciences and their relation to
natural philosophy’. But some bold innovators try to do so, and in doing so they create, foment and explore the
new domain of physico-mathematics, as we have seen. Neo-Scholasticism in its customs of pedagogy and
content says ‘don’t explicitly articulate natural philosophical claims on religious/political challenges, agendas and
debates”. But some bold innovators try to do so, as we have seen. Neo-Scholasticism also holds de facto, but
strongly, by means of its customs of pedagogy and content, ‘don’t bring in ‘inappropriate’ values, aims or players,
particularly anything related to practical arts, material practice, instruments, and images and rhetoric concerning
the status and value of same’. But many bold innovators do.
Rules and norms, explicit or implicit, and practices, well entrenched and firmly reproduced from academic
generation to generation, were all under threat of reformation, deformation or outright rejection. The self image,
self-understanding, and correlated public posturing of the rebels and challengers is one of isolated, heroic,
honour seeking, black and white decisive decision-making and action-taking. We easily grant the epithet of
‘Baroque personalities’ to the political and military figures of the age—our Richelieus, Wallensteins, Gustavus
Adophuses, Maurices of Nassau, and Olivareses—who, engaging their particular businesses in the general crisis,
display, often very self-consciously, these cultural identity garments and proclivities at the same time that they
forge new or revised forms and concretions of power (and of legitimations of power). The natural philosophical
players for the biggest stakes seem similarly to display these traits, with the exception of the gentle, genial (and
resigned to unending crisis?) Gassendi, a man for that reason well recognised by historians as interestingly
generationally displaced (too late for the scientific renaissance, too early for the age of consensus, muting and
fragmentation). To contest for systemic hegemony meant that one was a lone combatant against the rest,
including the massed ranks, and deeply entrenched network of bastions of neo-Scholasticism. It would be an
heroic effort, and one perhaps poignantly (Baroquely?) overlaid with intimations of tragic failure. We cannot
know, nor need we, in the case of each natural philosopher the nice biographical cum psychological channels
through which the favoured identity garments and protocols came to be lived and expressed, nor the degree to
which they were fully imbibed, as opposed to somewhat detachedly and tactically put on. It is, however, clear
that the situation in natural philosophising seemed to many to demand such self-understandings, and public
imagings, and that it was further enflamed by the presence of such personalities. Importantly, one did not
particularly have to write or express oneself in a way later scholars would class as Baroque in order to be acting
in a Baroque way inside the natural philosophical agon. Acting Baroquely inside the natural philosophical crisis,
did not mean one’s writings have to be notably Baroque by the standards of later literary classification.
Descartes, particularly the young Descartes whom I have been studying, is a fine example of all this, as I
suggested in my contribution to the first Baroque Science Project Workshop in September 2006. From 1618 and
age twenty-two Descartes, operating at first under his similarly inclined mentor, Beeckman, was a thrusting rebel
against the official university rules about the scope and application of mathematics, without an as yet well
defined, maturely expressed, cause in the game of natural philosophy. Early on Beeckman and Descartes were
thumbing their noses at scholastic natural philosophical rules about the status and role of mixed mathematics,
and even the ideal of systematisation. Correlatively, they were willing to take on board a vague, but trendy
concept such as physico–mathematics, and in Descartes’ case, his home cooked version of the already
circulating idea of a ‘universal mathematics’, as well, inflating them with aspiration and bravado. Descartes soon
67
Toulmin (1990)
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went even further, to a putatively world–beating new analytical method. At each stage of these early adventures
Descartes was well pleased. To fancy himself a ‘physico-mathematician’, then a ‘universal mathematician’, gave
him firm placement in a cultural debate, and provided a sense of who he was intellectually (and particularly as
some special specimen of a mathematicising natural philosopher). After ten years of these endeavours, and selfinflations; that is, after several notable little technical successes and a sequence of ever more grandiose fantasy
agendas: ‘physico-mathematics’, ‘universal mathematics’, and, ‘the method’, it all blew up with the unfinished
later portions of the Regulae in 1628-9, at which point he realised he was actually meant to be a radical version of
his own Jesuit scholastic mentors in systemic natural philosophy, leading to an equally rebellious agenda along
these more customary lines of systemic natural philosophising. That makes a rather Baroque looking story line
through the natural philosophical currents of the day, without anything Descartes produced in those years, or in
the Discourse which retails an ideal version of his life story to that point, being particularly Baroque in the literary
sense.
In sum we may perhaps say in very simple terms that to behave and comport oneself in a Baroque manner,
involved a striving to test and remould styles and norms always and essentially entangled with a search for
identity and agenda in line with images of heroic struggle and individual honour and fame. Of course, individuals
could imbibe and internalise these traits, which would become part of their own understandings, and public
projections, of their identities. The more radical the breaking with available styles and norms, and the more daring
and honour/fame seeking the intended identity, the more Baroque the performance. If you were a natural
philosopher in the ‘crisis within a crisis’ phase, numerous avenues were open to you to pursue and express such
traits, whilst natural philosophising:
To be the best natural philosopher can become a be a matter of honour and fame: Is natural philosophy to
become mathematical? In what sense, who gets the credit? What is the role and identity of the natural
philosopher in that sense. Is good and true natural philosophy to be decided more in terms of co-opting and
explaining novel discoveries? In which realms, by what techniques? What is the role and identity of the natural
philosopher in this sense? Can natural philosophy articulate to political theory, medicine, theology or not, on
whose terms? What then is the role and identity of the natural philosopher? Is natural philosophy meant to
produce or rationalise useful results?. Which ones? How? What then is the role and identity of the natural
philosopher? Since all these channels were potentially open, and various gambits available within them, the
overall goal of replacing Aristotelianism by producing the really best and truest natural philosophy got
supercharged with Baroque culture elements widely donned by the contenders, hence easily, indeed ‘naturally’ in
play as the very cultural atmosphere in which at the very least, bold rebels lived, even if most Scholastics did not.
The ‘crisis within a crisis’ phase was not caused by Baroque culture, but it may well have been lived and played
out by men who most often acted, expressed and self-understood in its terms. And, as we shall see below, when
that phase ended, and a cooler more muted form of contestation emerged, a lot of the Baroqueness also
dissolved, as it did in the wider society as the wider crisis ebbed, although, not surprisingly, some of the arguably
Baroque genes lived on, well acculturated to the next phase of natural philosophy and even on into its successor
narrow domains of science-like inquiry. There we have in the identity, self-understanding, and public accounting
and accrediting resources and comportment of players a Baroque-looking complex involving individual, daring,
heroic, method-wielding discoverers, and at the more concrete level of tradition dynamics, the restless, ceaseless
contest to change the terms of the tradition for the next round of plays.
We can help bridge the gap between the two phases by considering, finally in this Section, that part of the selfunderstanding and public imaging of competitive players in the ‘crisis within a crisis’ phase surely had to do with
notions of reason. We gain bearings here by looking back to their anti-Scholasticism, as just noted, and forward
to how later 17th century figures (in the Hazard ‘crisis’ Cf note 57 above) characterised them. Consider Bernier
and Boileau in 1671, cited in Hazard p.119.
Whereas for some years past an obscure person, who goes by the name of Reason, has been
attempting to make forcible entry into the schools of our University; and whereas said person, aided
and abetted by certain comical quidnuncs calling themselves Gassendists, Cartesians,
Malebranchists, vagabonds all of them, designs to arraign, and then expel Aristotle…
What is being noted here has nothing to do with later 19th century characterisations of rationalists
(Descartes/Malebranche) and empiricists (Hobbes, Gassendi) in the history of philosophy. It is a different
symptomology that is being displayed, and it accordingly needs a different diagnosis. Reason, here, as used by
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Bernier and Boileau (and Hazard) and pinned on the earlier figures (leaving Malebranche aside), means an
active, competitive, anti-Scholastic and (in the later 17th century sense) ‘critical’ reason—all anti-authority, anticredulity, anti-self illusion, and we might add anti-competitors in the ‘anti-business’: All terms we probably should
impute to the self-understandings of our crisis players.
Here, outside the confines of 19th century German categories of history of philosophy, we can begin to consider
that this kind of ‘reason’, as a self-understanding and public stance, was not totally opposed to everything
Baroque, but was the obverse side of that concerted, self-aggrandising, often desperate competing in natural
philosophising, which, we are presently speculating, was, in part at least, Baroque in temper and cultural garb. If
you like, we, as well as Hazard and his later 17th century commentators, are [re–]inscribing reasoning as an
agonal function inside the game of natural philosophising. The identity struggles and comportment of our natural
philosophical players (with the exception of the calm and detached Gassendi), their competitive plays and their
self-understandings of reason are hence arguably all of a cloth, and that cloth, we are further speculating in this
Section, had Baroque culture threads running through it. 68 An extreme version of this would be to say that
Baroque culture was not all about emotion and emoting, about manipulation of the senses: When it was recruited
into core of natural philosophical conflict (either intentionally, or by means of the formed personalities of the
players), it, ‘the Baroque’, was also about ‘reason’ in new senses of critical/rationalistic/competitive. And,
moreover, this notion of reason also comports directly, in the context of competition as we have described it, with
the image (and methodological accounting rhetoric) of the lone, heroic, correct application of reason to winning
the natural philosophical game, and sealing up the gaping abyss of crisis within a crisis. That is, reason stops
being a set scholastic contents and becomes more a sense of critical, and competitive, agency or function,
aimed at resolving the mess through as yet not fully achieved results, but certain to eventuate, guided by proper
technique or method.
7.0 The Phase of Consolidation, Agonal Muting, Re-Organisation and Discipline Formation
Many periodisation schemas for the Scientific Revolution see in the later 17th century a phase of consolidation,
cooling out of systemic conflict and rising consensus toward a corpuscular-mechanical and experimental
emphasis in ‘Science’ so called. Our sketch descriptive periodisation presented earlier in Section 4, and derived
in part from earlier writings of mine, did that as well, although couched in terms of outcomes in natural
philosophy and the subordinate sciences.
None of the theories of a primarily socio-political (rather than artistic/literary)‘Baroque’ nor those of an intellectual
crisis of the 17th Century (with the exception of Hazard 69 ) see the later 17th century as a period of unique crisis
or turbulence. Hence we may ask, How does our model of natural philosophical dynamics fit this later period,
and does anything importantly ‘Baroque’ remain in play in natural philosophising during it?
7.1 Broad Post ‘Crisis within a Crisis’ Developments
Broadly speaking, whilst contestation in systematic natural philosophy, the ‘civil war in natural philosophising’, as
I term it, peaked during our earlier crisis within a crisis or phase, a number of consequences followed in the next
phase, which would have seemed quite ironic and unexpected to early 17th century players but which are quite
understandable given our model of the dynamics of the field of natural philosophy. On the one hand, natural
philosophising as a whole—the entire field of all these plays and turbulence—became more autonomous of other
cultural forms such as theology, as well as other branches of philosophy, whilst, on the other hand, it began a
long process, lasting into the second half of the following century, of fragmentation into a number of more
68
In other words, ironically and against the conventional run of historiographical play, it is later history’s ‘rationalists’ who
were exactly the Baroque-looking desperate strivers in intense natural philosophical conflict: And the meanings of reason
that seem to attach to them, including as attached by themselves, looks forward, sanitised and de-natured, to history of
philosophy text books, but also looks sideways, to their actual Baroque cultural environment and its ‘natural’ frames of
identity and action.
69
We have commented above on this, Note 57.
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modern looking, diverse and narrow special domains or disciplines of natural inquiry, which begin to look like
sciences in our modern sense. 70
One way to characterise the changed natural philosophical field is to see it as having lost the ideal of ‘Scientia’ ,
which may be glossed in the following way: The particular genus of natural philosophising displaced in the
Scientific Revolution, institutionalised neo-Scholastic Aristotelianism, had promoted and promised a unity of
natural knowledge and the possibility of certainty therein, or in short it promised Scientia. As we have seen, at
the height of the process of the Scientific Revolution in the early and mid 17th century, other types of
systematised natural philosophies challenged neo-Scholastic Aristotelianism, and some of these, notably
Cartesianism, also seemed to promise Scientia on their own terms. Nevertheless, the aforementioned incipient
fragmentation of natural philosophy, and the cultural posturing against overt systematisation, meant that the
ideals of both the unity and overall certainty of natural knowing had been lost, and for many thinkers well lost.71
However, we must be careful in describing, and explaining these processes: We are not dealing with the ‘death’
of natural philosophising tout court and the birth of ‘modern Science’. The field of natural philosophising still
existed, and continued to undergo slow yet definite and examinable dynamics of change and mutation. There
was a decided muting of overt controversy, especially at the level of competing systems. It became unpopular
publically to advocate a system or argue about them. But coherent schemas or systems, call them what you will,
continued to be entertained more behind the public scenes, and underneath the display tables, whilst, as always
and everywhere human perception, observation, experimentation and reporting about the same, including such
acts carried out by natural philosophers, continued to be shaped by pre-existent categorical schemes, and
theories. No new Scientific regime of collection of atheoretical matters of fact emerged (or could have emerged).
72
Yet the relative move away from building and contesting systems is a very important development, along with a
similar avoidance of the previously popular strategy of co-opting and reconceptualising the novel claims of
others. The emphasis, perhaps best emphasised in the organisational dynamics of the new academies and
societies, particularly the Royal Society and Accademia del Cimento, was on specific problems or projects in
which adducing new and dramatic findings and claims was to the fore.
7.2 New Institutional Sites for Natural Philosophising Accelerate and Accentuate the Newer Tendencies
These new organisations served to mute, in various ways, natural philosophical contention, especially at the
systematising level, which, to be sure, was already being muted by the dual processes of [1] consensus
formation about experimental corpuscular-mechanism in the field of natural philosophy overall, 73 and [2] the
70
It seems that a plausible argument can be mounted for this constellation of changes in the field of natural philosophising
having been on the whole more endogenously than exogenously conditioned, allowing of course for the broad ‘resolution’ of
crisis outcomes that crisis theorists postulate. Consider, for example that there would be less turbulence in the field than
previously if some technical proto-traditions were starting to float freer of any systematic contention, and hence develop a
density of concern and an attraction on their own, without necessarily inviting systemic conflict, overt or covert, as
thematised in our Figures 2 and 3. The way the new organisations functioned, discussed below, also conditioned the broad
field outcomes, again allowing for the clear external shaping of the institutions in the first place. Finally, we cannot say that
end of religious war and emergence of more tolerance in the wider society caused this toning down of religion driven
turbulence evident before inside the field, because it is not religious controversy in the republic of letters that dies away,
rather, as noted above at Note 57, that is vibrant and itself stoked by further political-military ‘problems’ of critical import
helped along by the agendas of unflinching players like Louis XIV and William of Orange, not to mention the alternatively
rigid and vacillating James II. So, the toning down inside natural philosophy may, again, have had more to do with the state
of the field—cause and effect of system conflict being muted, of institutions refusing to be dedicated to it; of a sense of
separation of natural philosophy from theological controversy; and the emergence in Protestant contexts of natural theology
as a mediating discourse.
71
And, as Stephen Gaukroger (2006) has penetratingly examined at great scholarly length, the central puzzle of emergent
modernity was thus created: Traditional Scientia was lost, and yet the emergent modern sciences (whose own epistemological
statuses have been debated ceaselessly since their origin) formed the most central strand in the DNA of modernity. We shall
suggest below what we mooted earlier, that what modern sciences, and culture, owe to the early 17th Century is not the
Aristotelian or Cartesian lust for frozen certainty, but perhaps that ‘Baroque DNA’ of traditions-consisting- in-ceaselesscontestation-over-tradition-change’ which marks the historically unique, and hence deeply strange, dynamics of the modern
sciences as traditions.
72
Schuster and Taylor (1997)
73
Schuster (1990) pp. 238-40; (2002) pp.348-9.
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simultaneous acceleration of the processes of fragmentation into physico-mathematical and experimental
domains, which we are about to examine. The new organisations were not places to recite systems, so for
example, even systematisers with strong compensating experimental natural philosophy personas, such as
Rohault, still could not gain admittance. The procedural and organisational focus of the new institutions was on
problems and projects. These did entrain natural philosophical commitments, as recent research has shown. 74
But, any given player might not have been an intentional systematiser any more (on the criteria we shall put
forward below for measuring this above in Section 5.5. And, in any case there was no scope in the course of
meetings, to display either systems or the intention to foment them.
Nor did the realm of official (organisationally) published work offer much encouragement to contention, whether
embodied in systems or in more fragmentary claim-vehicles. Publication processes and products of both
institutions tended to wash out overt, strong yet fragmentary theory-claims, and especially any hint of systems
that might encapsulate them, hence a fortiori any contention about the latter or even the former. 75 To the extent
74
In recent years, it has been widely claimed , following Shapin (1995), that Boyle's gentlemanly matter of 'factism' ruled
unchallenged at the Royal Society from the 1660s, until Newton’s new mathematical experimental science triumphed. Case
studies carried out by Alan Taylor and myself have produced no evidence to support the idea that the Royal Society became
functionally identified with a Boylean regime of gentlemanly exchange of atheoretical matters of fact. It is true that in house
the Society repeated and witnessed experiments; but, there was clear loading of natural philosophical theory and agendas.
Mathematics was also sometimes overtly or tacitly involved in experimental actions. It is also quite true that things that
superficially look like the ‘matters of fact’ of Shapin envisions were published, but the claims and reports always involved
theory-loading, evidential contexts and sometimes mathematical articulation. [On the important concept of evidential
contexts, as used in post-Kuhnian analyses of experimentation in science, the locus classicus is Trevor Pinch (1985).]
Nobody should attempt the history of any experimental practice in the history of the sciences before having mastered this
text. Indeed, the ‘unit of communication’ that the Society aimed at was not the impossible ideal of the atheoretical matter of
fact. Rather, in each case some neat communication package was devised. Theory-loading; contexts of theoretical relevance;
and mathematical articulation were tacitly or overtly recognised in the package. But the package was shaped to be the
neatest, "matter of fact" looking message possible, given the in house activities and debates, and the wider knowledge politics
of the case.
This prompts a most important result for the theme of the present paper: It is clear that natural philosophy as a field and agon
did not die, replaced by the goings on at places like the Royal Society; rather, natural philosophising continued in and
through the site, and was indeed affected and partially reshaped by the organisational patterns and processes of the site:
natural philosophical endeavour and conflict continued, but in ways both muted and managed, at least where the writ of the
organisation ran. In particular competition continued and was invested in natural philosophical agendas if not outright
publically proclaimed systems.
75
Precisely these same sorts of conclusions have recently been reached about another major natural philosophical
organisation, the Academia del Cimento. Dr. Luciano Boschiero has carried out research on natural philosophy and the
experimental life at the Accademia del Cimento, which supports and significantly extends our Royal Society findings. His
work started in his doctoral dissertation in our School at UNSW, extended through several papers (Boschiero 2002, 2003,
2005) including an award winning one, and now involves a major book (Boschiero 2007). Carefully distinguishing between
the in house natural philosophical contestation and practices, and the cultural and political constraints exercised on the
production and communication of the Cimento’s only publication, the Saggi, he fully documents the endemic, deep and
shaping conflict of natural philosophical values, theories and agendas amongst the members, and the ways this constituted the
courses, and outcomes, of their experimental natural philosophical work on [1] void and air pressure; [2] the nature of hot
and cold; [3] comets; [4] the rings of Saturn and other matters. Boschiero attended closely to the mathematical and natural
philosophical training, skills, enterprises and products of the academicians, before, during and after their period of
engagement in the Cimento, including Viviani and Borelli, the leading mixed mathematical/mechanistic members, the two
stalwart Aristotelians, and Prince (later Cardinal) Leopoldo di’Medici, one of the two patrons, and, as revealed in these
studies, a fully committed corpuscular-mechanist. Then, having fully exposed the natural philosophical texture of the in
house work, he is in a position to exploit the literature on courtly etiquette, politics and ‘science’, to show exactly where and
to what degree these matters of court behaviour and politics played a role, thus modulating the historiographies of such
notable commentators as Tribbey (1991), Findlen (1993), Biagioli (1992). Boschiero does not conflate public rhetoric of
experimental method with in house practices in experimental natural philosophy. He shows how and why a presentational
rhetoric of experimental method dealing with atheoretical facts was implemented in the Saggi; the ways in which this hid
deep strata of natural philosophically driven, and contested, courses of experiment, and the ways in which that natural
philosophical contestation did occasionally poke its head out of even the published Saggi (how could it not have done so).
Boschiero demonstrates that certain icons of the ‘experimental method in courtly culture’ thesis, such as Redi, actually
played no role whatsoever in the experimental life of the Cimento (and that Redi’s work was redolent of natural philosophical
contestation in any case!) He also shows that Leopoldo did very skilfully and delicately manage the censorship of public
dissemination of the Cimento’s work (in the Cimento’s name) on cosmology and astronomy, along with the clear fact that
knowledge of such work and its outcomes was not thereby banished from the larger pan-European culture of natural
philosophising.
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that more narrow successor fields to natural philosophy were forming, this promoted and accelerated their
genesis.
A ‘method’ rhetoric of experimental vs. speculative (natural) philosophy grew up, as we shall shortly note,
articulated to the glossing of putative matters of fact (which of course were always entangled in at least tacit
theoretical commitments) putatively gathered by objective and trustworthy observation and experiment. Here the
institutions again promoted and enlarged an already emergent phenomenon, the rhetorical carapace actors
needed to legitimate, and self-understand, the new dynamics of the natural philosophical field (on behalf, of
course, of players who embraced and wished further to develop these tendencies inside the field).
Thus, on the one hand, the organisations expressed the effects of the larger tectonic movement away from
systems and toward fragmentation and domain formation; and, on the other hand they also caused and
promoted more of the same, magnifying and channelling these underlying trends of long duration. And, as new,
public nodes in the field of natural philosophising, they were especially well placed to promote the covering
rhetorics that were emerging to legitimate and represent these processes and their advocates. 76 Or, to put it
another way, competition for credit and hegemony in the field of natural philosophy was still in play, but a new,
important, and different arena for such play now existed in the form of the new organisations. Competition here
was quite different from contention for university curricula and places; or within the textbook market; or in the
large diffuse publishing universe for first order natural philosophical claims, including of course large
systematising claims which were still pursued. Natural philosophers still competed about natural philosophy in
the new organisations.
So the Royal Society and Academia del Cimento had a lot to do with the larger processes of fragmentation and
discipline formation. They did not originate these tectonic processes, nor did their strong public rhetoric about
them accurately reflect the state of play in the natural philosophical field. The new institutions were new kinds of
nodes in the already shifting and processing field of natural philosophy. Micro studies of the new organisations
are thus essential, but one must always attend to the fields and traditions, such as natural philosophy and its
entourage of subordinate sciences, which were played through, and upon, in such sites.
7.3 The Dynamics of Formation of Successor Domains and Disciplines
The trend toward dissipation of natural philosophy as a field and tradition into more narrow, ‘modern science-like’
successor disciplines and traditions can be traced in outline under two categories: the emergence of physicomathematical sciences out of transformation, and addition to, the classical mixed mathematical sciences; and the
emergence of new ‘experimental’ domains or sciences. In both cases we are interested to see what social and
cognitive genes, possibly of Baroque cultural lineage, were inherited from the crisis phase of natural
philosophising. We turn first to the former, using the example of optics.
7.3.1 Crystallisation of Physico-mathematical Sciences: The Case of Optics
Recall that we saw in the critical or ‘Baroque’ phase the first moves, by Kepler and Descartes, to shift
geometrical optics from an Aristotelian mixed mathematical science into a physico-mathematical discipline
articulated respectively to Kepler’s neo-Platonic or Descartes corpuscular-mechanical natural philosophy. This
process deepened in the latter half of the Seventeenth century, in the physico-mathematical optical work of
Hobbes, Huygens, Robert Hooke, Newton and a host of others. Geometrical optics, the mixed mathematical
science of the Scholastics, was evolving into a much more obviously physico-mathematical discipline, in which
issues of physical causation were definitely not avoided. Innovating natural philosophers got natural
philosophical capital out of such optical work, but also, there emerged at each turn a more dense, more
independent domain of physico-mathematical optics—a disciplinary area was crystallising as a function of being
batted around in the natural philosophical ruck. Indeed this had an unintended consequence within and for the
field of natural philosophy, for by the end of the 17th century there was a great density of new optical phenomena,
76
We know from studies of the politics and rhetoric of method in the more mature professional and disciplinary organisations
of the 19th century, that this indeed would become the typical pattern: Inside the institution contestations over theory, agenda
and resources could be couched and expressed in equally opposed and competing versions of ‘method-talk’, whilst the
institution as a whole would manage to promote a unified method story to the wider scientific community and educated
public—a consensual public story that did not necessarily even have to map accurately onto any of the method rhetorics
deployed by actors jockeying within the institution. See the classic studies by Yeo (1986) and Miller (1986) in Schuster and
Yeo (1986).
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instrumental/practical applications and new problems. A domain of physical cum mathematical expertise
crystallized, where optical work floated more freely than ever before from the demands of any given natural
philosophical system. 77 A more modern looking discipline of physical optics was tending to detach itself from
the field of natural philosophising, and as this process was occurring across many domains, the traditional field
of natural philosophy was entering a process of disintegration, its long term dissolution products being a suite of
more narrow, technical and autonomous scientific disciplines. 78 So, over the course of the 17th century,
beginning with our period of heightened contest and turmoil in the era civil war in natural philosophy, optics
presents an example of how, as an unintended consequence of the natural philosophical agon, the mixed
mathematical sciences emerged from their Aristotelian cocoons, where they were held to be non-explanatory,
and became physico-mathematical disciplines, increasingly independent of any particular natural philosophical
system and indeed relatively independent of the domain of natural philosophising as a whole.
More generally, this growth and transformation of the mixed mathematical sciences into physico-mathematical
ones helped alter the complexion and centre of gravity of natural philosophy. By the late Seventeenth century
natural philosophy was in one sense more centrally about such physico-mathematical matters; but,
simultaneously there was also a marked tendency for natural philosophy itself to dissipate into what were just
beginning to manifest the character of successor fields. The emergent physico-mathematical fields more and
more absorbed questions previously treated in natural philosophy. It is only retrospectively and whiggishly that
these developments look like de novo births of discrete, non-natural philosophical mathematical disciplines.
Viewed prospectively, developing over time as a function of the dynamics of the natural philosophical field, these
emergent physico-mathematical disciplines represent at the macro level, a complex, and unintended wash up of
varied and competing attempts to rethink the articulations between the mixed mathematical and natural
philosophical domains, particularly by challengers to entrenched Aristotelianism, that is by combatants in a
common natural philosophical field. What they carried was an anti-system bias, but not an anti-theory one, and
ongoing competition over novelties of concept, instrument or discovered (theory-loaded) fact, with accountings of
actions and achievements carried in the method rhetoric of experimental ‘philosophy’ or science.
7.3.2 Emergence of new experimental domains
Similar dynamics in the field of natural philosophising conduced after the mid 17th century to the parallel
crystallisation of more narrow experimental domains of inquiry, also increasingly autonomous of natural
philosophising. Because discussion of these matters is often confused by assertion that some sort of modern
77
Newton’s optics is often misread in this connection. It is either taken as the point of origin of physical optics or even more
implausibly as the working exemplar for the development of other mathematical-experimental sciences, much as Galileo’s
mechanics often is. But, Newton’s optics fits into a larger process of formation of a relatively autonomous physicomathematical domain of optics. Additionally, just like Galileo’s mechanics, it carried no algorithmic instructions for its
replication in other domains of phenomena. Following a neo-Bachelardian line of interpretation, enriched by Kuhn’s [Kuhn
1958] and Feyerabend’s [Feyerabend 1970] later interventions, we may say that Newton’s success rested upon his unique
phénoméno-technical achievement: the 'elongated' prismatic spectrum, instantly idealised in theory-bound reportage.
Constructed through material deployment of the geometrical optical theories of Descartes (on refraction) and Kepler (on pinhole images), this phénoméno-technical 'object' in turn materialised and testified to the precise degrees to which it violated
the rules of its own generation, a Bachelardian turn of events of the first order! This object and its very theory-loaded
'descriptions' could be rhetorically sold under various types of ‘method-talk’ as an 'event-experiment' [Dear (1995)], didactic
illustration, or as a device for replicating and multiplying 'the experience' [Feyerabend (1970)]. Regardless of the contingent
choice of mode of method rhetoric, we have a phénoméno-technique capable of sustaining a cascade of further manipulations
and findings—it initiates a major node in the longer story of physico-mathematical optics.
Both of the usual misreadings—Newton’s optics as origin of the science and/or tranferable model for all mathematical
sciences—are aided by the misunderstanding of an otherwise quite relevant and true fact: Newton’s optics were very
strongly shaped by his own particular brand of post-mechanist natural philosophy of forces and aethers, and it grew up, as we
would expect, in dynamic relation to shifting nuances in that natural philosophy. Properly appreciated, this fact therefore
supports our general thesis, and, of course, reminds us of the heroic optical/natural philosophical wranglings of Descartes and
Kepler. The key difference is that Newton’s properly physico-mathematical optical results and claims were fed into an even
more dense and crystallised domain of physico-mathematical optical science than those of Kepler and Descartes had been,
and that is an equally important aspect of his optical work. In short, if we believe in de novo origins of sciences, inventions
of transferable methods, or the triumph of ‘mathematics’ over ‘natural philosophy’ we miss that dynamics of natural
philosophy and emergent physico-mathematical domains in which an historiographically and epistemologically sustainable
account subsists.
78
Compare the ideal typical discussion of these processes within the model of system content and dynamics above in figures
2 and 3.
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‘experimental Science (capital S) emerged in the late 17th century and that this somehow emerged from a
broadly construed ‘new experimental philosophy’, we need to tread carefully and in the conceptual pathways
suggested by our model of natural philosophy and its dynamics.
Now in order to think clearly in historical terms about experiment whether in natural philosophising or in ‘science’,
one needs a dose of fundamental epistemological therapy. First, abandon all hope that the invention of some
unique transferable method of experiment explains everything (or indeed anything!). Kuhn, Bachelard and postKuhnian ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’ [SSK] disposed of that. 79 Nor will Shapin’s sociological equivalent of
method—a unique transferable etiquette for doing experiment—offer a solution. 80 Secondly, the way to proceed
is to do what Graeme Watchirs and I in 1990 termed, ‘taking Bachelard and “sociologicising” him’ 81 —marrying
his model of experimental science to modern sociology of scientific knowledge perspectives from Harry Collins,
Trevor Pinch, Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin.
Figure 4 teaches the several ways in which a scientific instrument, experimental hardware, is theory-loaded. 82
An instrument is, as Bachelard famously said, a ‘materialised’ theory. Experimental hardwares also give
perceptual outputs, but these have to be interpreted and selected—so you need more theories. The interpreted
and selected perceptual outputs are ‘results’ which you deploy in your scientific argument to advance claims
about the objects of inquiry in your field of research. There’s also a prior question: how does nature input your
instrument, and that too depends on theory. In an optical instrument, the telescope, light is the input. But, what
is light? How does it bend? Does celestial light differ from terrestrial light? So you need theory of the input.
79
Schuster (1979, 1984, 1986, 1993) Richards and Schuster (1989) and the Ur-sources in Bachelard, Kuhn and Feyerabend
[particularly Feyerabend (1970) rather than his otherwise canonical Against Method and Bachelard (1949)].
80
Why this is the case is discussed at length in Schuster and Taylor (1997) commenting on Shapin (1994).
81
Schuster and Watchirs (1990)
82
Figure from chap 14 of my web-based textbook, Schuster (1995b)
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Figure 4 Sophisticated View of Instruments
Nature
Theory of input
(eg: of light)
INSTRUMENT
is material
embodiment of
theories
Output
Theoretically
selected,
weighted,
interpreted
Results for use
in making
arguments
about objects
of inquiry in
this field of
research
Now, when you talk about a hardware, its make-up, its inputs and its outputs, you either talk ordinary language,
or theory language. In the former case you’re not doing science—your discoursing about an everyday artefact.
Hence, and this is the crux of the matter for this paper—when experimental hardwares first entered science—I
mean natural philosophy and its entourage of subordinate sciences—guess where the theory came from that
was invested in hardwares, their inputs and outputs—that’s right—the theories and discourse embodied in early
hardwares had to come from within the field of natural philosophy, otherwise, you were outside the sphere of
natural philosophising—or the sphere of science, as the vulgar would say—and in the sphere of crafts and
practical arts. 83
So, what was the fundamental touchstone of an experimental leaning natural philosophy—whether Aristotelian,
mechanistic, chemical, neo-Platonic, or Newtonian: Was it experimental method—surely not; was it gentlemanly
etiquette for reporting trivial facts—surely not; 84 was it random Baconian fact gathering in ordinary language—
surely not! Generically speaking, ‘experimental natural philosophy’ occurred where natural philosophical theory
was invested in artefacts and instruments (and accompanying practices and "outputs") in order that the reports
of outputs could serve to support other natural philosophical claims. 85
83
I discuss this in relation to the problem of natural philosophers being ‘influenced’ by practical mathematicians in
J.A.Schuster (2008, forthcoming)
84
The contention of Shapin (1994). For deconstruction of this quite untenable posture see Schuster and Taylor (1997) .
85
If, following Bachelard, Kuhn and Feyerabend, there is no unique, transferable and genuinely efficacious experimental
method, and if experimental science was actually natural philosophers doing experimental natural philosophy the way I have
modelled—much of the traditional understanding of the role of the practical arts has to be rethought: Everyone from Zilsel
(1942) and Needham (1969), pp.49-50 and passim. right down to H.Floris Cohen (1994) has seen the key to the Scientific
Revolution as the ‘experimental method’ emerging from the crossing of the practical arts (and practical artisans) with action
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Now we can ask, “What Was It to Experiment and Handle Hardware within the Natural Philosophical Contest?
and Where did new Experimental Domains and eventually Sciences Finally Come From?”
Recall that during the hotly contested civil war in natural philosophising of the critical’ phase, a contestation over
the production, or co-option of novel discoveries was to the fore, and that natural philosophers competed by
creating, or co-opting hardwares, and making claims, in natural philosophy, on the basis of outputs from such
hardwares. The hardwares were competitively invested with natural philosophical theory—Ideal typically: my
theory of a hardware was an articulation of my natural philosophical commitments; and the outputs delivered by
that hardware and glossed by me were of natural philosophical relevance, to support my natural philosophical
agendas and to deny your competing ones. For Gilbert, his terrella and other hardwares bespoke, and produced
evidence for his cosmology and natural philosophy. When Descartes co-opted the manipulations and
observation reports, they completely subserved his own system.
Now, this same competitive pattern of production of novel experiments and facts, to support one’s own natural
philosophy or deflect an opponent’s, runs right through the mid Seventeenth century. The international
sensations produced by Torricelli’s ‘barometer’ and later by Boyle’s air pump weren’t simply events about making
(and transferring) an instrument, and finding (and replicating) one given agreed set of facts. Mechanists,
Aristotelians and surviving Chemical philosophers contended over what the facts were, what they meant, how
the instruments behaved, and hence what the instruments actually were. Furthermore, as we learned above,
despite recent trendy interpretations, it is not the case that, after 1660, the advent of new scientific societies and
academies ushered in a new world of ‘experimental science’ producing atheoretical facts. In other words, that a
rupture occurred, natural philosophy died and modern experimental science was born.
So, the ‘rise of experimentation’ occurred in and of the natural philosophical field. The increasing tendency to
deploy instruments and experimental hardwares was both an effect and cause of competition within and across
genera of natural philosophy. The ‘rise of experimental science’ is in the first instance the ‘rise of experimentally
articulated, and contested, natural philosophy’. New experimental domains did later tend to emerge, but they
occurred within the field of natural philosophising, with the formation of successor disciplines, experimental
disciplines, more narrow and specialised than natural philosophising, and increasingly independent from it.
These new fields included the study of heat, electricity, magnetism and pneumatics, or the physical side of
chemistry concerned with the manipulation and properties of gases.
How that occurred may be conceptualised as a long term unintended windfall of these processes: These new
‘experimental sciences’ formed out of the evolving matrix of late Seventeenth and Eighteenth century natural
philosophising and not against it by rupture. The new sciences arose out of understandable—but largely
unintended—processes within the domain of natural philosophising. 86 We have seen that by the mid 17th
century competition within and across natural philosophical programs lent extra imperative to doing of
experiments and exploring instruments and experimental hardwares. Different programs favoured different areas
of experimental exploration but all had to take some account of what competitors were doing. This dynamic
encouraged proliferation of experimental domains and depth of engagement with them—meaning the
multiplication of claims, hardwares and practices in regions of experimental contestation, a process we can
heuristically imagine using Figures 2 and 3 above. Competition also promoted the idea that the criteria of natural
scholars (not fuddy duddy Aristotelians). But the problem is clear—either you assert the culture of natural philosophy was
defunct, and a unique transferable method was discovered, or you face up to serious ‘field and process’ history—you cannot
affect dynamics and utterances in the culture of natural philosophy unless and until some practitioners within that culture
respond to, weave into the culture, some aspects of the world of practical arts—rhetoric, artefacts, information, values. The
extreme cases prove the rule—if early modern Europe had not possessed a dynamic and contested culture of natural
philosophising, its ferocious state and military competition, awakening agricultural and commercial capitalist economy, and
bubbling practical arts would have gone their way without that missing natural philosophical carrier beam—as they had in
Islam and Rome [see my essay review of Cohen (1994), Schuster (1997)] A perfect example of this dynamic is the master
engineer and maestro of the mathematical arts, Simon Stevin. He eschewed the culture of natural philosophy and looked to a
kind of program in ‘super-arts’, to be lead by men like himself. His values, and his results, needed to be taken into the
culture of natural philosophising, for example by Beeckman and Descartes, for it to matter in the natural philosophical
contest. [Gaukroger and Schuster (2002), Gaukroger (2000) These points by the way, illustrate the general pattern of
historiographical criticism and alternative explanation made possible by rigorous exploring a macro history focussed on the
culture of natural philosophising.
86
Schuster and Watchirs (1990)
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philosophical success were novelty and fruitfulness. Each domain of experimental inquiry acquired more
hardware, findings and protocols whilst its language of explanation, originally derived from the field of natural
philosophising, became a more regional explanatory dialect, less related to upper level disputes (and residual
systematising aims) in natural philosophy. 87 By the mid-Eighteenth century there were obvious disciplinary
bodies of theory, experiment and practitioners in the study of heat or electricity and magnetism relatively more
detailed than their original sources in competing natural philosophies. 88 A century earlier only a random flotsam
of fact, hardware, claim and counter-claim ‘belonging’ to these areas had floated atop the natural philosophical
cauldron subordinated to the competitive systematising ruck. In between lay the process of domain/dialect
formation. Again, although the heroic combatants of the ‘crisis within a crisis’ stage might well have been very
surprised by these outcomes, they are completely understandable, and explicable, in terms of the contestation
and tradition dynamics of natural philosophy.
7.4 Methodological Accounting Rhetoric Evolves in Step with These Processes
The slow but powerful processes toward fragmentation of natural philosophy into successor domains and
disciplines, unleashed originally during the crisis within a crisis, and clearly in play in the following phase, carried
the élan of continuous competition and contestation from the earlier period right into the structure and dynamics
of the successor fields. Lusting after and competing over systems disappeared and had to disappear, as did
mere co-opting and copy catting of others’ discoveries. But what was transcribed into the successor fields was
the peculiar tradition dynamic according to which the tradition or community existed through and for the purpose
of producing accredited novelty, a trait first expressed, in confused and desperate form, during the heated
contestation of the critical phase. An important dimension of this result, and a very telling symptom of the entire
development, was the fact that as this process continued, actors’ legitimatory and packaging rhetorics (typically
rhetorics of method, as I have argued in previous publications on this issue) evolved to meet the needs of
players with these new sorts of aims and agendas.
For example, as Peter Anstey has well shown, even before being further popularised by Newton, a method–
discourse concerning ‘speculative’ vs. ‘experimental’ (natural) philosophy flourished in late 17th century England
and was deployed, mainly by self-styled advocates of the latter, against real or imagined adversaries of the
former stripe. 89 But, with our model of the natural philosophical field, our concept of systematicity, and analysis
of the processes of change, we can now avoid a number of pitfalls when considering the advent of the rhetoric of
experimental vs. speculative philosophy. For example: [a] This does not mean that some experimental,
inductivist method had actually been found and was being applied by miraculously appearing modern scientists.
[b] Nor does it mean that the term ‘speculative’ should be extended to any and all instances of discourse that
look natural philosophical, whilst the term ‘experimental’ should similarly signal the absolute absence of the ‘taint’
of natural philosophical language and aim. [c] Hence even less so does it mean natural philosophical aims and
discoursing suddenly stopped, thus opening a new domain of experimental modern science. [d] It simply means
that processes of fragmentation of the previously more coherent, if hotly contested, natural philosophical field
were occurring, consisting in domain and discipline formation in old (and changed) or new areas of natural
inquiry; and that, as usual in the history of Western seeking of knowledge of nature, discourses of method were
being spun and re–spun to cover, legitimate, and even explain to actors themselves, what they thought they and
their opponents were doing. All mid to late 17th century users of this rhetoric were inside the field of natural
philosophising—they had not really escaped to some other space. And, although those favouring the
87
Again, as in the case of formation of physico-mathematical domains, compare the ideal typical discussion of these
processes within the model of system content and dynamics above in figures 2 and 3. Cf. Schuster (2002), elaborating
Schuster and Watchirs (1990) by attending to the parallel processes in the emerging physico-mathematical disciplines.
88
Gaston Bachelard and Thomas Kuhn first studied these developments, pointing out that these sciences did not arise from
the application of a mythical scientific method. About this they were correct. What they were incorrect about, according to
me, was their claim that the new experimental disciplines arose from local ruptures with ‘pre-scientific-’, ‘pre-paradigm-’,
that is, natural philosophical discourse. I claim these new ‘experimental sciences’ formed out of the evolving matrix of late
Seventeenth and Eighteenth century natural philosophy and not against it by rupture. The new sciences arose out of
understandable—but largely unintended—processes within the domain of natural philosophising. I say, “What else could
experimental sciences be, if not descendants of competitive attempts to invest experimental hardwares with natural
philosophical meanings?” (Schuster and Watchirs, 1990)
89
Anstey (2005)
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‘experimentalist’ side of the rhetoric might have proclaimed the death and overcoming of natural philosophy (and
fooled some subsequent historians), it was in fact a way of positioning themselves and their work in a field still
inhabited not only by themselves, but by others, including a few players and texts of overtly theoretical,
systematic and contentious natures. Once we understand that, we see that the ongoing secular process toward
fragmentation of natural philosophy, and crystallisation of more narrow and more modern looking successor
fields, makes no difference to the argument, as some domains became more autonomous, sui generis and
discipline like, they still enjoyed the genetic endowment of this rhetoric of experimental method.
As a result, an interesting macro picture of the evolution of methodological accounting rhetoric emerges, which
can now embrace the picture of the Scientific Revolution explored here. 90 The matter might be envisioned as
follows: Anstey’s work shows some new threads of method–discourse being forged and deployed as the mid and
later 17th century history of natural philosophising unfolded. Later, with deepening fragmentation of the field and
emergence of descendant fields, virtually the only dimension of natural philosophising (of the original four—
matter, cause, cosmology and method, Cf figure 1) that survived into the nineteenth century with its rationale and
practise little changed was just the dimension of ‘method’. It became the last vanishing ghost of the living field of
natural philosophising. The story of how method-talk was re–invigorated in the 19th century as a political and
rhetorical tool in the new geography of the sciences, with their proliferating institutions, new audiences in the
learned public and new uses in pedagogy, thus becoming a major preoccupation, has become much more clear
over the past generation. We can now run that story back into the heart of the Scientific Revolution, by attending
to how the history of method discourse tracked and reflected the shifting dynamics and contents of natural
philosophising, and its fate. What Anstey has uncovered is an important mid 17th to early 18th century phase in
the long process running from the 16th century dominance of neo-Scholastic discussions of method, through the
methodological prophets of ‘the Baroque’ such as Bacon and Descartes, and leading on toward the 19th century
golden age of debate about scientific method per se, no longer tied to the (vanished) rest of the body of natural
philosophising.
8.0 Conclusion
By the later 17th century the field of natural philosophy was sleeker than its critical phase antecedent, in that
systemic construction and conflict had largely, and necessarily, been left behind; and, to the extent that a field of
natural philosophising still existed, it was less entangled by competing articulations to contextual features than it
had been. But in recompense, contestation still reigned, subjected, certainly, to constraints of expression and
comportment in some, but not all, natural philosophical sites, and more focussed on issues of discovery and
experimental performance (although no natural philosophical concerns in this regard could be atheoretical).
These same points held in the emerging domains/disciplines, indeed even more so, since their very mode of
functioning would revolve, oddly, around constant change, accredited by competitors to each other. To this end,
the entire complex of natural philosophy and associated subordinate domains was imbued with an
accounting/accrediting rhetoric that focussed upon experimental and methodological endeavours and one’s own
individual, heroic discoveries.
The field or sub-culture of natural philosophy had thus evolved under endogenous and exogenous stimuli and
become something very different from its late medieval, strictly university based self, or its sunny, complexly
expansive Renaissance phase. It was in the ‘crisis within a crisis’ phase that the lineaments of this much
inflected, and certainly unintended, set of outcomes had been forged. And given that, we can, finally, take an
audit of what these developments in natural philosophy, and developments of sciences may have owed to those
two creatures, Baroque culture and the general crisis of the seventeenth century, whose interrelations according
to Maravall (the latter elicited the former), should frame most of our understanding of the ‘Iron Century’. 91 The
purpose of our final reckoning being, of course, to return to the Baroque Science Project with some advice,
heuristically positive and negative, about what, in our humble opinion, it can be, and what it should do:
This inquiry has taken two paths, one not at all in accord with the stated aims and conclusions of the Baroque
Science Project, the other perhaps somewhat in accord with them. On the one hand, in taking the Baroque as
an epoch/culture in European history we have followed the path of wide ranging social, political and cultural
90
The links here suggested as worthy of exploration fit into an expanded notion of the political history of methodology, as
first envisioned in Schuster and Yeo (1986) and later studies by those originally involved in that project.
91
As Henry Kamen famously dubbed it in his text of the same name.
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historians like Friedrich and Maravall. With them, we have rejected a trajectory of inquiry into the Baroque as a
style or set of stylistic expressions, pursued by analogy and juxtaposition down various avenues of the fine arts,
literature, and style. Additionally, with them, we have eschewed the idea that the Baroque was just the culture of
the late Renaissance court or of the Counter Reformation Church—that is not what an epoch or culture simply
boils down to. This path bears little relation to that enunciated by the Baroque Science Project, but it arguably
has made some headway in understanding early modern natural philosophy, its dynamics and phases, and its
relation to the more or less convincing picture of Baroque culture and the general crisis painted by Maravall.
On the other hand, however, we have also found some interesting hints that the Baroque Science Project
problematic can be quite fruitful. For we have found that the beginnings of an argument can be mounted to the
following effect: Modern sciences are by historical standards very odd beasts. They are continuously
reproduced expert traditions whose very dynamics, and raison d’être in rhetoric and in practical activity, consists
in the unremitting, competitive and concerted struggle to construct, and have implanted into the tradition,
significantly tradition-altering achievements, which are proffered on a contested basis, and only have effect after
being revised and negotiated into place by peer competitors of the initial proponents. The players engaged in
these tradition dynamics understand, account for and accredit such achievements by means of a type of
discourse which envisions highly individual, specific, indeed heroic acts of discovery achieved by strict
adherence to a code or method. Both the actual, messy, competitive and political ‘mangle of practice’ inside
scientific traditions, and the channels of crisp rhetoric through which they are understood and accounted for,
seem to bear just legible hallmarks that say—“forged by somewhat rebellious master practitioners in the white
heat of the early to mid 17th century natural philosophical crisis, with some ingredients in part borrowed or
burnished at that time from the supervening Baroque culture”.
© J. A. Schuster 2008
References
Anstey, Peter. (2000) ‘Descartes’ Cardiology and its Reception in English Physiology’ in Gaukroger, Schuster and
Sutton (eds.) (2000), pp.420-444.
Anstey, Peter (2005) “Experimental versus Speculative Natural Philosophy” in Anstey and Schuster (2005) pp.
215-42
Anstey, P. and J.Schuster (eds.) (2005) The Science of Nature: Patterns of Change in the Culture of Natural
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