HIST 24900/34900, HIPS 435, CHSS 44900

 

 Natural Philosophy, 1200-1800 

 

Adrian Johns

 

Winter 2005 

 

 

Syllabus

 

 

Course Outline

 

This course addresses the history of knowledge concerning the natural world.  It asks how humans came to recognize a “natural order,” how they investigated the environment in which they lived, and in what ways they put their resulting knowledge to use.  

 

In our own age the enterprise which devotes itself to understanding the natural world is called science; its practitioners are professionals, called scientists.  But before about 1830 people recognized no such person as a scientist.  To them, the task of understanding nature was generally undertaken by people called “natural philosophers,” and their enterprise was a distinctly different one.  Natural philosophy was not simply early science - let alone bad or wrong science.  It was a discipline in its own right, with its own aims, principles, approaches and personnel.  This discipline is the principal subject of this course.  The class focuses primarily on its creation, success, consequences and eventual dissolution.  But the focus also extends to the rivals and alternatives to natural philosophy that arose in the course of its history, of which there were many.  Some of them claimed to be different natural philosophies themselves, others alternatives to natural philosophy.  We shall thus address many kinds of approach to nature, including magic, mathematics, and experiment.  Along the way, sessions will raise a number of fundamental questions in cultural, political and intellectual history.  These include: how do we explain the fragmentation of learning in the “Scientific Revolution”?  How did nature inflect politics, and vice-versa?  And what is the relation between natural knowledge, technology and the industrial revolution?  The class will conclude with reflections on the invention and identity of modern science.

 

 

Course Requirements

The class meets on Tuesdays from 3pm to 5:50pm in Cobb 102.  You are expected to attend all scheduled course meetings and complete all readings.  Two pieces of written work are expected: a midterm paper and a final paper.  Details of these will be provided in due course.  

Readings

There are four principal texts for the class, which are obtainable from the Seminary Co-op.  Copies should be on reserve.

 

                     D.C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago, 1992).

                     S. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1996).

                     P. Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions, 1500-1700 (Princeton, 2001).

                     P. Smith, The Body of the Artisan (Chicago, 2004).

 

Note that although not all of the pages of these books are prescribed for specific sessions, you will be expected to have read each from beginning to end by the conclusion of the course.

 

For each week there are also readings from more specialized works, as detailed below.  These should be available on e-reserve.

 

Appointments

My office is a garret in Foster, number 510.  You are welcome to come by at office hours and ask me anything about the course.  Office hours are Fridays 10-12.  With the best will in the world, sometimes university people schedule meetings at that time, so you should try to let me know first if you are coming in case an alternative time needs to be set.  I do my best to be accommodating.  My network phone number is 2-2334.   My email address is johns@uchicago.edu.

Natural Philosophy

Weekly Topics

 

Week 1    Introductory Session: the nature of natural philosophy              1/4/05

This first session will be devoted to sketching out the character, scope and aims of the course.  In particular, it will ask what “natural philosophy” was, and suggest why it mattered.  There is no prescribed reading, but after attending the class students may find it useful to look at the following: 

  •                      Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences, 1-18.

  •                      Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, 1-14.

  •                      A. Cunningham, “How the Principia got its name: or, taking Natural Philosophy seriously,” History of Science 29 (1991), 377-92.

 

 

Week 2    The scholars’ philosophy                                                              1/11/05

This session examines why a distinct enterprise of thinking systematically about the natural world seemed worth undertaking in the thirteenth century.  Its initial focus is on the development of new uses for ancient works - especially those by Aristotle - in a religious struggle against heresy.  By the time the heretics had been defeated, natural philosophy had become a mainstay of education at the new institutions of learning called ‘universities’.  We shall look at what went on in these places.  In particular, we shall ask what a student of the early Renaissance would have been expected to learn, how, and for what purposes.  This ‘scholasticism’ - the philosophy of the schools - would remain the academic norm until well into the seventeenth century.

 

  •                      Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science, 183-261.

  •                      A. Cunningham and R. French, Before Science: the invention of the friars’ natural philosophy (1996), 127-68 (those who are feeling energetic could also look at pp.70-126 and 173-97).

  •                      Aristotle, Physics, Bk II, here from The Works of Aristotle translated into English (W.D. Ross, general ed., 1930), II, 192b-200a.

  •                      “The book of the two principles,” in  W. Wakefield, A. Evans (eds.), Heresies of the high Middle Ages (1991), 515-44, 551-67.

  •                      E. Grant (ed.), Source book in medieval science (1974), 263-84.

 

 

Week 3    The artisans’ philosophy                                                              1/18/05

For all that scholasticism reigned in official university statutes, alternative cultures of natural knowledge did exist.  Here we’ll look at how artisans in the Renaissance tackled the substances with which they worked: gold, silver, coal, pigments, etc.  Artists and craftsmen had to master the manipulation of natural properties and powers in order to succeed in their enterprises.  Their approach to nature was consequently very different from that prevalent in universities.  It was predominantly non-textual, it was transmitted through practical training regimes (apprenticeships in particular), and it rested in bodily experience more than intellectual contemplation.  When, why, and how this kind of activity came to be seen as a rival to academic natural philosophy are among the topics to be addressed in this session.

  •     P. Smith, The body of the artisan, 95-127.
  •     E. Zilsel, “The Sociological Roots of Science,” American Journal of Sociology 47 (1941-1942), 544-562.
  •     P. Rossi, Philosophy, technology, and the arts in early modern Europe (1970), 63-99.
  •     Agricola, De re metallica, 1-42.

  

 

Week 4    The magicians’ philosophy                                                           1/25/05

This session examines the roots and appeal of one of the most powerful enterprises to challenge natural philosophy - an enterprise that sought to understand powers within nature, not just for contemplation but to harness those powers for human use.  That enterprise was called ‘natural magic’.  It was devoted to using natural forces to effect practical changes ranging from the building of spectacular stage machinery to the transmutation of base metals into gold.  Practitioners of natural magic laid claim to the efficacy of the artisans, and also to the high intellectual status of the scholars and physicians.  Unlike the scholastic philosophers, they could do things.  Unlike the artisans, they could talk to courtiers and professors in terms of highly complex and philosophically ambitious theories.  Of all the rivals to scholasticism, this was perhaps the one that Renaissance academics feared the most.

 

  •                      Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences, 49-64.

  •                      F.A. Yates, “The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science,” in C.S. Singleton (ed.), Art, Science and History in the Renaissance (1967), 255-74.   

  •                      O. Hannaway, The Chemists and the Word (1978), 22-72.

  •                      D. Harkness, “Managing an experimental household: the Dees of Mortlake and the Practice of experimental philosophy,” Isis 88 (1997), 247-62.

  •                      Smith, Body of the artisan, 129-81.

  •                      Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Occult Philosophy (1997), 5-6, 32-3, 35-9, 44-7, 52-3, 58-9, 72-3, 75-6, 105, 110-13 (ignoring the notes).  

 

Week 5    The mathematicians’ philosophy                                                  2/1/05

Another major challenge to scholastic natural philosophy came from mathematicians.  ‘Mathematics’ meant something different in early modern Europe from what the word means today, however.  A mathematical practitioner was like an artisan, skilled in crafts like surveying, cartography, arithmetic, cryptography and astronomy.  Like magicians, mathematicians offered not only knowledge but power.  They could help a prince expand his empire, send ships round the globe, build artillery-proof fortresses, and smash the supposedly artillery-proof bastions of his rivals.  But in what sense, responded the scholastics, did such people address the substance of natural objects?  What was the relation of numbers to things, and how should this distinction be reflected in the disciplines?  Examining such challenges offers an opportunity to appreciate in historical terms what still remain some of the most elemental aspects of modern rationality.  

  •                      Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences, 65-100.

  •                      Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 30-64.

  •                      R.S. Westman, “The Astronomer’s Role in the Sixteenth Century,” History of Science 18 (1980), 105-47.

  •                      M. Biagioli, “The Social Status of Italian Mathematicians, 1450-1600,” History of Science 27 (1989), 41-95

  •                      N. Copernicus, On the Revolutions (Trans. E. Rosen. 1978), XV-XVII, 3-22.

  •                      J. Kepler, New Astronomy (Trans. W.H. Donahue. 1992), 27-35, 45-69. 

                                             

Week 6    The courtiers’ philosophy                                                             2/8/05

Natural philosophy was predominantly a practice of universities.  But beyond their walls it was possible to legitimate other kinds of natural knowledge, including magic and mathematics.  Here we look at how this was done at the new center of political and cultural power in the late Renaissance: the court of an absolute monarch.  In particular, we examine how the issues raised by courtly practices were personified in the notorious figure of Galileo Galilei.  Galileo built his fame around a sequence of encounters with court life, first in Florence and then in Rome.  It was when he overstretched as a courtly philosopher that he ran into trouble.  When he happened to do so at a critical moment for the politics of the Reformation, the result was the most famous “trial” in the history of science.

 

  •                      Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences, 101-30.

  •                      M. Biagioli, “Galileo’s System of Patronage,” History of Science 28 (1990), 1-62.

  •                      M. Biagioli, “Scientific Revolution, social bricolage, and etiquette,” in R. Porter and M. Teich (eds.), The Scientific Revolution in National Context (1992), 11-54.

  •                      G. Galilei, “The Assayer,” extracts in S. Drake (ed.), Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957), 231-80.

 

 

Week 7    The gentlemen’s philosophy                                                         2/15/05

This session examines the development of experimental natural philosophy.  The idea of experimenting originated in the debates between scholastics, magicians and mathematicians.  After 1660, in the wake of several generations of warfare fomented by religious and philosophical differences, experiment became the lynchpin in a new attempt to forge consensus.  Here we examine the issues raised by making experimental practice so central.  Among those issues is the status of a newly-invented item of learned currency: the matter of fact.

  •                      Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 65-117.

  •                      S. Shapin, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England,” Isis 79 (1988), 373-404.  

  •                      R. Hooke, Micrographia (1961 [orig.1665]), Preface (unpaginated).

  •                      T. Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667), 61-119.

 

 

Week 8    The public’s philosophy                                                                2/22/05

In the eighteenth century natural philosophy left the universities and the royal courts, and fought for attention as a public entertainment.  This was the age when the consumer society came into being, especially in cities like London, Paris, and Amsterdam.  There, lecturers made their livings displaying the forces of Newtonianism to paying audiences.  Experiments became coffee-house spectacles, marketed to paying punters alongside newspapers, concerts, and art.  This session examines the implications of this shift in audience.  What did it mean to make “the public” into the arbiter of learned disputes about technical issues?  This was certainly an Enlightenment ideal, but it was one that the contemporaries of Franklin saw as fraught with problems and dangers.

  •                      L. Stewart, “The Selling of Newton: Science and Technology in early Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986), 178-92. 

  •                      S.J. Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science 21 (1983), 1-43.

  •                      I. Newton, Opticks (1952; orig. 1704), 339-406.

  •                      S. Schaffer, “Priestley and the Politics of Spirit,” in R.G.W. Anderson, C. Lawrence (eds.), Science, Medicine and Dissent: Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) (1987), 39-54.

 

 

Week 9    The experts’ philosophy: or, the invention of the scientist         3/1/05

In this final session we examine how natural philosophy gave way to science - or, more precisely, how the figure of the natural philosopher yielded to the figure of the scientist.  “Scientist” was a term invented in the 1830s, originally in jest, to describe a new type of practitioner - one who based his credibility not on status, lineage or rank, but on professional expertise.  It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge who sparked the coining of the term when he objected that such a specialist could no longer properly be called a philosopher.  Here we examine how the Romantic ideal of genius and struggles over the authority of experimental practice gave rise to this new creature.  The invention of the scientist marks a major transition in modern history.

 

  •                      J. Morrell and A. Thackray, Gentlemen of Science (1981), 1-34, 47-52.

  •                      S. Ross, “‘Scientist’: The Story of a Word,” Annals of Science 18 (1962), 65-86.

  •                      S.J. Schaffer, “Scientific Discoveries and the End of Natural Philosophy,” Social Studies of Science 16 (1986), 387-420.

  •           C. Smith, “‘Mechanical Philosophy’ and the Emergence of Physics in Britain, 1800-1850,” Ann. Sci. 33 (1976), 3-29.

  •                     C. Babbage, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1969 [orig. 1830]), 1-49.

  •                      W. Whewell, review of Somerville, Quarterly Review, March 1834: extract.

 

 

Week 10         No meeting                                                                             3/8/05