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)

drama of tensions, "obstacles" impeding the way to development of science is largely a historian's projections (8) -- actual actors in the period didn't feel these tensions

easy to reconcile tensions by identifying underlying philosophies, then seeing proto-scientists as "natural philosophers" working within these conceptual models; however, philosophy and world of experiments/math/machines were often opposed, the latter having practical value (11)

• examination of 1717 Oxford curriculum shows that "if protoscience did have metaphysical foundations, they were not taught and learned as such" (11)

term "philosophy" had dual role -- useless speculations, or doctrinal/foundational (12); 17-18c saw it in many different ways

biology and chemistry thought to lag behind in 17c; Baconian science produced "haphazard collecting and showy but vaguely conceived 'experimentation", but no real methodologies (though rigorous in itself, in practice "baconian method became Baconian empiricism, the paradigm of unsystematic, ungrounded science," 15); theory also thought beneath science -- i.e., philosophy showed an interest in science (e.g. Descartes), but science did not always show an interest in philosophy (e.g. Malpighi rejecting "book learning" for experimentation) (14-5)