Schaffer on Machine Philosophy, Pt. 5b: Automata and the Enlightenment December 13, 2014
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Bruno Latour, Charles Babbage, Christian Wolff, Dan Christensen, Henri Brunschwig, Immanuel Kant, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Cox, Jean Jacquard, John-Joseph Merlin, Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, Leonhard Euler, Mary Terrall, Pierre Jaquet-Droz, Robert Darnton, Simon Schaffer, William Clark, William Kenrick
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This post concludes my look at Simon Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Schaffer (Chicago University Press, 1999).
As detailed in previous posts, Schaffer’s interest in 18th-century automata in this piece is mainly a means of making larger points about the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment, and its links to an emerging economic order of industrialism and managerialism. In doing so, he contributes an interpretive gloss that joins an existing general historiography of Enlightenment ideology, with a historiography of the automaton creations of such figures as Jacques de Vaucanson (1709–1782), Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1721–1790), and John-Joseph Merlin (1735–1803). This post discusses this second facet of the history.
For Schaffer, the key questions are: 1) what interests did automata engage, allowing them to proliferate as objects of display and fascination? and 2) in what ways did they speak to the concerns of philosophers and other commentators of the period, making them into salient metaphors and objects of intellectual reflection?
Schaffer on Cometography, Pt. 1 July 10, 2009
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Alexis Claude de Clairaut, Comte de Buffon, Edmond Halley, Isaac Newton, Jérôme Lalande, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Johann Lambert, John Flamsteed, Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, Leonhard Euler, Pierre Charles Le Monnier, Simon Schaffer
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Cometary transits have always displayed the troubled relationship between astronomers, theologians, natural philosophers, and their public.
Simon Schaffer, 1987
Drawing by Honoré Daumier, 1857. From the Art Institute of Chicago
Between 1987 and 1993, Simon Schaffer published five papers on the history of cometography, meditating on some of his favorite themes concerning the links between cosmology, scientific methodology, scientific identity, epistemology, theology, politics, authority, social order, and the hermeneutics of history:
(1) “Newton’s Comets and the Transformation of Astrology” in Astrology, Science and Society: Historical Essays (1987), edited by Patrick Curry.
(2) “Authorized Prophets: Comets and Astronomers after 1759,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 17 (1987): 45-74.
(3) “Halley, Delisle, and the Making of the Comet” in Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Longer View of Newton and Halley (1990), edited by N. Thrower.
(4) “Comets and the World’s End” in Predicting the Future (1993), edited by L. Howe and A. Wain.
(5) “Comets & Idols: Newton’s Cosmology and Political Theology” in Action and Reaction (1993), edited by Paul Theerman and Adele Seeff.
From his earliest publications, comets had played a role in Schaffer’s thinking about seventeenth and eighteenth-century cosmology and philosophical inquiry: they were frequently called upon to fill various cosmological roles as agents of destruction, transportation, and restoration. In these five pieces, Schaffer provided further evidence for the centrality of comets in natural philosophical problematics, and clarified the staggering variety of implications cometography could have within and beyond them. In this post, I outline a few of the features of his decidedly complex set of arguments. In its sequel, I will look at Schaffer’s historiographical thinking in (4) and (5).
Although Schaffer’s examination of cometography stretches from Tycho (more…)
Ether Wave Propaganda 