Derek Price on Automata, Simulacra, and the Rise of “Mechanicism” August 28, 2014
Posted by Will Thomas in Schaffer Oeuvre.Tags: Alexandre Koyré, Derek de Solla Price, Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis, Rene Descartes, Richard of Wallingford, Rupert Hall, Silvio Bedini, Thomas Aquinas
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Derek J. de Solla Price (1922-1983). Click for the full-size photo at Yale University Manuscripts and Archives
Before we proceed further with our discussion of Simon Schaffer’s “Enlightened Automata” (1999), I’d like to go back a further 35 years to take a look at Derek J. de Solla Price, “Automata and the Origins of Mechanism and Mechanistic Philosophy,” Technology and Culture 5 (1964): 9-23. This should give us some sense of how much and how little the literature had changed by the time Schaffer wrote.
Price’s article was written in a period when historians were interested in defining and tracing the shifts in thought that they took to be crucial to the development of modern science. The tradition of scholarship is closely associated with figures such as Alexandre Koyré (1892-1964) and Rupert Hall (1920-2009), whose touchstone work, The Scientific Revolution: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude, appeared in 1954.
Probably the most important shift these authors attended to was the rise of “mechanistic” modes of explaining natural phenomena, punctuated by the philosophy of René Descartes (1596-1650) and the achievements of Isaac Newton (1643-1727). Price’s aim was to investigate the intellectual relationship between mechanistic philosophy (“or mechanicism to use the appropriate term coined by Dijksterhuis,” 10*) and the creation of sophisticated mechanisms.
Clericuzio on Alchemy, Chemistry, Medicine, and Natural Philosophy December 26, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Chymistry.Tags: Agricolia, Albertus Magnus, Andreas Libavius, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Antonio Clericuzio, Guy de la Brosse, Nicaise Le Fèvre, Paracelsus, Rene Descartes, Robert Boyle, Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais, Werner Rolfinck
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First off, for readers interested in current efforts to refine historical knowledge about early modern natural philosophical programs: there is a project blog, founded this past August, being run out of the University of Otago in New Zealand, called Early Modern Experimental Philosophy. Do read.
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Andreas Libavius (1555-1616)
This post is a further look at intellectual issues surrounding the relationship between early modern “chymistry” and the pursuit of natural philosophy, as discussed in a much earlier post on the dispute between Bill Newman and Alan Chalmers concerning the nature of Robert Boyle’s chymistry. There I understood Newman to argue that, to Boyle, philosophically important chemical knowledge deriving from experiment would have had to be fit within his mechanical philosophical framework, and that chemical taxonomies would not have fit that bill. Of course, in the seventeenth century, natural philosophy occupied one niche amid a full array of agendas to which chemistry was relevant. Many of these are dealt with in a recent article by the University of Cassino’s Antonio Clericuzio: “‘Sooty Empiricks’ and Natural Philosophers: The Status of Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century,” Science in Context 23 (2010): 329-350.
Ether Wave Propaganda 