Wilson 1995

Wilson, Catherine. The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

1. Science and Protoscience

"Those who agree that there was an acceleration in the growth of knowledge after the turn of the century are divided on whether it is appropriate to speak of it as a scientific revolution or only as an increase in momentum and coordination. Was there a clean break with the past, o rather a return to the mathematizing of the medieval calculators and the direct observation of the ancients? Was the cultivation of personalities alienated from the literary-humanistic culture of the Renaissance a precondition of these changes or a consequence of them?" (3)

re: scientific revolution: "it is not so easy to say exactly what was revolutionary in this alleged revolution, what marked such a radical departure from the interest in nature, its patterns and its deviations, that had always been present" (4)

"was the protoscience of the 17c an immature form of modern science, or was it the form of something else altogether?" (5)

• earlier historians of science extracted superstitions, etc., and focused on the positive data produced by 17c "scientists," emphasizing similarity to our own time
• but one could also see the "otherness" of 17c science -- radically different from today

"From the point of view of positivist historiography, the result of documenting these relationships [of otherness, difference] is a loss of signal in noise. From another point of view, the noise is part of what history is trying to say." (6)