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)

theoretical physics is pure, abstract; Baconian science invites amateur observation (19); until Darwin (who gave biology the pure abstractness of philosophy), biology and chemistry were unimaginative and uninnovative (19) <-- typical claim of historians of science

mechanism and corpuscularianism, seen as philosophical foundations that made science possible, had elements of telepathic communication and 'sympathetical limbs' -- which "are as much the phenomena of empirical science as magnetism is" (22)

Wilson connects these methodologies to educational methodologies, e.g. in Comenius (23-7)

"The programmatic statements of the 17c atomists and corpuscularians are, then, not the meaningful figure against the background of a proliferating but inchoate empiricism; they are philosophy, which is to say that they are not only, and perhaps not primarily, a support for science, but also a reaction to it and a substitute for it." (27)

"The rhetoric of new beginnings and new methodological foundations can obscure the ways in which 17c science was a restoration and a continuation of the reasoned natural history of the ancients, which had been lost in, and to a certain extent repressed by, Christian culture and scholastic philosophy." (28)

• Aristotle wrote about much the same things, 17c proto-scientists performed much the same experiments as him -- "the thing simply had to be done better, more precisely" (28)
• new technologies of reading, writing and looking enabled this
• "Success in drawing in and equipping new observers and theoreticians of nature, in creating a scientific community, depended on the introduction of print and was assisted by the development of techniques for reproducing visual images in printed form. Anatomical works, letters and reports to scientific societies, specially commissioned studies, compendia, and review journals, not philosophical treatises, were what created a scientific community." (28)
• Wilson suggests that works that became influential (e.g. Aristotle) in early modern period were largely accidents of history and technology (28-9)

can't focus purely on the literary -- must also look at the "loci and their props" (29)

• "the laboratory, an alternative site of intellectual labor to the solitary study of the humanist scholar, appeared both in the utopian imagination and in fact in the first half of the century." (29)
• scientific societies: Lyncean Academy, Academy of Cimento, Royal Society, French Academie des Sciences, Collegium curiosae
• laboratory as a modification of the scientist's study and "the extension of other palceS: the workroom and the nursery with their tools and playthings, the anatomical theater of the medical school, the autopsy room where the causes of death were investigated, the astronomical observatory where data were recorded, and the collector's cabinet, which was itself a miniaturized world of samples." (30)

curiosity cabinets: (re)creating the world in minisature; concupiscence, a desire for possision; "the desire to have one of everything, to possess the whole world in microcosm" (30)

can't distinguish between scientists and amateurs in 17c; anachronistic (33-4) -- distinction is the result of institutions/professionalization processes not yet in existence