1. Harrison, ‘Reassessing the Butterfield Thesis’ (2006), 7, argues that the concept of the Scientific Revolution is incoherent because there is no way of knowing when it began and when it ended. I disagree: the concept would be coherent even if the dates were uncertain (compare the ‘Industrial Revolution’), but actually the dates are fairly easy to specify.
1. Borges, The Total Library (2001), 465. 2. Barker, The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory (2006). 3. Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), 289. 4. Turgot’s A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind was written in 1750 but not published until the nineteenth century (Turgot, Turgot on Progress (1973)); Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795) – original French edition the same year; Bury, The Idea of Progress (1920). 5. II.1.813–15. 6. II.3.1440. 7. MacGregor, Shakespeare’s Restless World (2012), Ch. 18: ‘London becomes Rome.’ 8. Borges, The Total Library (2001), 472 (‘The Enigma of Shakespeare’, 1964). 9. Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan England (2005). 10. Donne, The Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes (1978). 11. Wootton, Galileo (2010), 5–6. 12. Jacquot, ‘Thomas Harriot’s Reputation for Impiety’ (1952). 13. Hill, Philosophia epicuraea (2007). 14. Brown, ‘Hac ex consilio meo via progredieris’ (2008), 836–8. I don’t think it can originally have come from the college library, for library books are not interleaved with blank pages. 15. Trevor-Roper, ‘Nicholas Hill, the English Atomist’ (1987), 11 (quoting Robert Hues), 13 (quoting Thomas Henshaw). 16. Trevor-Roper, ‘Nicholas Hill, the English Atomist’ (1987), 3–4. 17. Trevor-Roper, ‘Nicholas Hill, the English Atomist’ (1987), 28–34. 18. Kepler, Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger (1965), 34–6, 38–9. 19. Trevor-Roper, ‘Nicholas Hill, the English Atomist’ (1987), 11. 20. Lynall, Swift and Science (2012). 21. Letter to Thomas Poole, 23 March 1801. 22. Gingerich, ‘Tycho Brahe and the Nova of 1572’ (2005); McGrew, Alspector-Kelly & others, The Philosophy of Science (2009), 120–2. For the view that Brahe, not Copernicus, marks the beginning of the revolution in astronomy, Donahue, The Dissolution of the Celestial Spheres (1981); Lerner, Le Monde des sphères (1997); Grant, Planets, Stars and Orbs (1994); Randles, The Unmaking of the Medieval Christian Cosmos (1999). 23. Wesley, ‘The Accuracy of Tycho Brahe’s Instruments’ (1978). 24. Thoren, Lord of Uraniborg (2007); Christianson, On Tycho’s Island (2000); Mosley, Bearing the Heavens (2007).
1. Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (2015), xi. 2. Mayer, ‘Setting Up a Discipline (2000); the first appointment of an historian to study and teach history of science came later, in 1948. Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (1950); and Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield (2011), 177–203. 3. Snow, The Two Cultures (1959). See also Leavis, Two Cultures? (2013). 4. Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (1994), 21, 97–121; and, for example, Porter, ‘The Scientific Revolution and Universities’ (1996), 535. 5. In addition to Snow, The Two Cultures (1959); and Ashby, Technology and the Academics (1958). 6. Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (1950), viii. 7. Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism (1936). Ornstein in 1913, Preserved Smith in 1930 and Bernal in 1939 had also used the term ‘the Scientific Revolution’ (Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (1994), 389–96), but that would not justify describing the concept as popular. 8. Greeley, ‘The Age We Live In’ (1848), 51: ‘Lowell, Manchester, Lawrence, are but types of the Industrial Revolution which is rapidly transforming the whole civilized world.’ 9. Koyré, The Astronomical Revolution (1973) (French original, 1961). 10. Cunningham & Williams, ‘De-Centring the “Big Picture” ’ (1993). 11. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (1996), 3. 12. Koyré’s source when he first introduced the notion of the Scientific Revolution in 1935 was Bachelard, Le Nouvel Esprit scientifique (1934), later translated as Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit (1985). In later editions he introduced a reference to the classic work, Bachelard, La Formation de l’esprit scientifique (1938), translated as Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind (2002). 13. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). For its continuing significance, see, for example, Wilson & Ashplant, ‘Whig History’ (1988). 14. Elton, ‘Herbert Butterfield and the Study of History’ (1984), 736. Origins is, says B. J. T. Dobbs, ‘the most Whiggish history of science imaginable’: Dobbs, ‘Newton as Final Cause’ (2000), 30. See Westfall, ‘The Scientific Revolution Reasserted’ (2000), 41–3, for a defence. 15. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (1996). Key authorities on the Scientific Revolution are Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture (1961); Cohen, The Birth of a New Physics (1987); Lindberg & Westman (eds.), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (1990); Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (1994); Applebaum, Encyclopedia of the Scientific Revolution (2000); Osler (ed.), Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (2000); Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences (2001); Rossi, The Birth of Modern Science (2001); Henry, The Scientific Revolution (2002); Wussing, Die grosse Erneuerung (2002); Hellyer (ed.), The Scientific Revolution (2003); Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World (2010); Principe, The Scientific Revolution (2011). For a survey of recent trends in scholarship, Smith, ‘Science on the Move’ (2009). 16. Wilson & Ashplant, ‘Whig History’ (1988), 14. 17. Wagner, The Seven Liberal Arts (1983). 18. Thus Milliet de Chales, Cursus seu mundus mathematicus (1674), I, †3r: Plebeiae sunt caeterae disciplinae, mathesis Regia; ††1r: Primum inter naturales scientias locum, sibi iure vendicare Mathematicas disciplinas; and in the expanded posthumous edition, Milliet de Challes, Cursus seu mundus mathematicus (1690), Vol. 1, 1–2: Quòd si hoc praesertim saeculo, assurgere non nihil videtur Physica, fructúsque edidisse non poenitendos, si multa scita digna, jucunda, Antiquis etiam incognita decreta sunt; ideò sane quia Mathematici philosophantur, rebúsque physicis Mathematices placita admiscent. Bennett, ‘The Mechanics’ Philosophy and the Mechanical Philosophy’ (1986), is significant in this regard; as is the table in Gascoigne, ‘A Reappraisal of the Role of the Universities’ (1990), 227; and there is an important article on the collaborations between mathematicians and anatomists: Bertoloni Meli, ‘The Collaboration between Anatomists and Mathematicians in the Mid-seventeenth Century’ (2008). Robert Boyle is an interesting (and partial) exception to the rule that the new scientists are nearly always either mathematicians or doctors: Shapin, ‘Boyle and Mathematics’ (1988). Recognizing the clash between mathematicians and philosophers helps clarify the role of universities in the Scientific Revolution: for a positive view of their role, see Gascoigne, ‘A Reappraisal of the Role of the Universities’ (1990) (but note table 5.2, which shows that only one third of scientists born between 1551 and 1650 held university positions); and Porter, ‘The Scientific Revolution and Universities’ (1996). 19. Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting (1956), no. 1. For later puzzlement, see Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della pittura (1817), 2. For an extended argument that mathematics is the foundation of all true knowledge, Aggiunti, Oratio de mathematicae laudibus (1627), esp. 8, 26, 33. There is no reason to think this text is by Galileo (pace Peterson, Galileo’s Muse (2011)), but he certainly approved of it. 20. Biagioli, ‘The Social Status of Italian Mathematicians, 1450–1600’ (1989). 21. ‘Galilaeus, non modo nostri, sed omnium saeculorum philosophus maximus’, Hobbes, De mundo (1973), 178. 22. Hooke, The Posthumous Works (1705), 3–4. 23. Baxter, A Paraphrase on the New Testament (1685), annotations on 1 Corinthians, Ch. 2 (misquoted in OED s.v. physic); and Harris, Lexicon technicum (1704), quoted in OED s.v. physiology (I quote from the second edition, 1708). See also Hooke, The Posthumous Works (1705), 172: ‘the Science of Physicks, or of Natural and Experimental Philosophy’. Wotton thinks that in English ‘physick’ and ‘physical’ are properly restricted to medicine (Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), 289), but in practice he uses ‘physical’ to refer to physics in general. 24. For ‘physiology’ used as synonymous with ‘physical science’, see the full title of Gilbert, De magnete (1600) (physiologia nova); and Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654); also Parker, above, p. 40, and Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), 457. 25. Andrew Cunningham has been particularly insistent that the correct category for the early modern period is ‘natural philosophy’, and that natural philosophy differs from science in that it is God-centred. See his debate with Edward Grant: Cunningham, ‘How the Principia Got Its Name’ (1991); Grant, ‘God, Science and Natural Philosophy’ (1999); Cunningham, ‘The Identity of Natural Philosophy’ (2000); and Grant, ‘God and Natural Philosophy’ (2000). Grant seems to me to be in the right. See also Dear, ‘Religion, Science and Natural Philosophy’ (2001). A much more challenging argument is being developed by John Schuster (see, at the moment, Schuster, Descartes-Agonistes (2013), 31–98), but I don’t agree with his view that natural philosophy is the category for thinking about the Scientific Revolution and that the Scientific Revolution is a civil war within natural philosophy. See also on an alternative category, physico-mathematics, which seems to me much more helpful: Dear, Discipline and Experience (1995), 168–79, Schuster, ‘Cartesian Physics’ (2013), 57–61; and Schuster, Descartes-Agonistes (2013), 10–13, 56–9. The question of whether the new science should be seen as, willy-nilly, a break from natural philosophy, or a struggle within it, depends in part on whether one thinks the mature Descartes is typical or atypical. 26. Kuhn, The Road since Structure (2000), 42–3. Discipline and Experience (1995), 151–2 on Mary Hesse’s ‘network model’. 27. For the French, see Schaffer, ‘Scientific Discoveries’ (1986), 408. 28. Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso (1690), title page = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 11, 281. 29. Quoted from Secord, Visions of Science (2014), 105. 30. 1831 is from Google Books; OED gives 1835–6. 31. Hannam, God’s Philosophers (2009), 338. 32. Hill, ‘The Word “Revolution” in Seventeenth-century England’ (1986), 149, on how ‘things precede words’. 33. Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale II (1974), 247–53; English dates from OED, checked against EEBO and Google Books; I owe the 1895 date to Pierre Fiala, who kindly searched the Frantext database. 34. An exception is Bruno: Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper (1995), 139. 35. An example taken at random: Denton, The ABC of Armageddon (2001), 84–5. 36. Shapiro, John Wilkins (1969), 192. 37. Laslett, ‘Commentary’ (1963). 38. On Digges, Johnson & Larkey, ‘Thomas Digges, the Copernican System’ (1934); Ash, ‘A Perfect and an Absolute Work’ (2000); and Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic’ (1987). On Harriot, Fox (ed.), Thomas Harriot (2000); Schemmel, The English Galileo (2008); and Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets’ (1988). 39. Laslett’s failure to recognize that mathematics was a science-related profession (he mentions only medicine) suggests he had never encountered Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners (1954). Such a mistake would hardly be made now, one would hope, thanks to work such as Dear, Discipline and Experience (1995). 40. A key figure who published on almost all of these is the Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin: Dijksterhuis, Simon Stevin: Science in the Netherlands around 1600 (1970). 41. Snow, ‘The Concept of Revolution’ (1962). Hill, ‘The Word “Revolution” in Seventeenth-century England’ (1986), argues for an earlier date, but most of his examples are, at best, ambiguous. 42. Hull, ‘In Defence of Presentism’ (1979). 43. Hooke, Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies (1665), a4. 44. Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society (1667), 327, 363. 45. Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society (1667), 328–9. 46. Cohen, ‘The Eighteenth-century Origins of the Concept of Scientific Revolution’ (1976); and Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (1990). 47. Hunter & Wood, ‘Towards Solomon’s House’ (1986), 81. Compare Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society (1667), 29: ‘one great Fabrick is to be pull’d down, and another to be erected in its stead.’ 48. On the word ‘modern’ in English, Withington, Society in Early Modern England (2010), 73–101. 49. Galilei, Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music (2003). 50. Kuhn, Structure (1970), 161; Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason (1987), 143–61. There was soon (1587–95) an attempt by Bernardino Baldi to write a history of modern mathematics modelled on Vasari’s Lives: Swerdlow, ‘Montucla’s Legacy’ (1993), 301; and Rose, ‘Copernicus and Urbino’ (1974). 51. For some two hundred examples, see Thorndike, ‘Newness and Craving for Novelty’ (1951). 52. For example, Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923), II, 451–527; and Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking (1994), 345 53. Gilbert, De magnete (1600), Ch. 1. Gilbert also identifies ‘more modern’ authors, i.e. Renaissance authors. 54. Filarete, Trattato di architettura (1972), Bk 13; Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences (1970), 28, quoted from Greenblatt & Koerner, ‘The Glories of Classicism’ (2013). See http://fonti-sa.sns.it/TOCFilareteTrattatoDiArchitettura.php, 380. 55. Swift, A Tale of a Tub (2010), 153. 56. Rapin, Reflexions upon Ancient and Modern Philosophy (1678), 189 (first French edition, 1676). 57. Boyle, Hydrostatical Paradoxes (1666), A7r = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 5, 195; and Glanvill, Plus ultra (1668), 1. For Glanvill, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes and Boyle are the moderns. 58. Harvey, The Vanities of Philosophy and Physick (1699), 10. 59. Glanvill, Plus ultra (1668); Le Clerc, The History of Physick (1699) (first published in French, 1696). 60. ‘Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur, omnino tamen propius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam pervenivemus.’ (The root meaning of investigare is ‘to follow in the tracks of’.) Boyle, The Origine of Formes and Qualities (1666) = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 5, 281; Boyle, A Free Enquiry (1686) = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 10, 437. See Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature (1994), 269–300. 61. Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), unpaginated preface, 91, 105, 146, 169, 341. For early examples of the phrase ‘progress of science’ (and variations), see: Jarrige, A Further Discovery of the Mystery of Jesuitisme (1658); Borel, A New Treatise (1658), 2 – Borel is under the misapprehension that Bacon had written a book de progressu Scientiarum (92); Naudé, Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library (1661); Bacon, The Novum organum … Epitomiz’d (1676), 11; and Le Clerc, The History of Physick (1699), ‘To the Reader’ (unpaginated). 62. Quoted in Gingerich & Westman, ‘The Wittich Connection’ (1988), 19. 63. Wootton, Galileo (2010), 96, 123, 286 n. 53. 64. Hunter & Wood, ‘Towards Solomon’s House’ (1986), 87. 65. Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), 178, 181–3. 66. Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy (1656), B1r (first Latin edition, 1655). 67. Power, Experimental Philosophy (1664), 192. 68. Wallis, ‘An Essay of Dr John Wallis’ (1666), 264. 69. Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure (1666), 45. 70. Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesie (1668), 9. 71. Kuhn, Structure (1970), 162–3. 72. Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (1958); Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (1958); Kuhn, Structure (1962). Wittgenstein was a key influence on David Bloor and the ‘Edinburgh school’: Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (1991); and Bloor, Wittgenstein (1983). For a devastating assessment of the project of using Wittgenstein to ground a relativist sociology, Williams, ‘Wittgenstein and Idealism’ (1973). 73. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), §43. 74. E.g. Phillips, Wittgenstein and Scientific Knowledge (1977), 200–1. I have started with Wittgenstein, but William James thought the concept of truth as something other than a human device died in 1850: James, ‘Humanism and Truth (1904)’ (1978), 40–1. 75. Biagioli (ed.), The Science Studies Reader (1999), provides an introduction to what used to be called Science Studies and is now called Science and Technology Studies. 76. Russell, ‘Obituary: Ludwig Wittgenstein’ (1951). 77. Wittgenstein, On Certainty (1969), §612. 78. Feyerabend, Against Method (1975); Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason (1987). 79. Wilson (ed.), Rationality (1970); and Hollis & Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism (1982). 80. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 5, 309–10. 81. Shapin & Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), 67. 82. Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds (2001); and Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960), 150–2. 83. Hooke, The Posthumous Works (1705), 3. 84. Gilbert, On the Magnet (1900), iii. 85. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (1979), 1–2. 86. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1924). 87. Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (1950), 5; Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1924) (on which, see Daston, ‘History of Science in an Elegiac Mode’ (1991)); and Koyré, ‘Galileo and the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century’ (1943), 346. 88. Diderot, The Indiscreet Jewels (1993), 136.
1. Copernicus, On the Revolutions (1978), 7.
1. Hanson, ‘An Anatomy of Discovery’ (1967), 352. 2. Columbus, The Journal (2010), 35–6. 3. Lester, The Fourth Part of the World (2009). 4. Grafton, Shelford & others, New Worlds, Ancient Texts (1992), 80; Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 3, 57; above, p. 56. 5. Galilei, The Essential Galileo (2008), 47; Giordano da Pisa: ‘Non é ancora venti anni che si trovó l’arte di fare gli occhiali, che fanno vedere bene, ch’é una de le migliori arti e de le piú necessaire che ’l mondo abbia, e é così poco che ssi trovò: arte novella che mmai non fu. E disse il lettore: io vidi colui che prima la trovó e fece, e favvellaigli’ (quoted from Ilardi, Renaissance Vision (2007), 5); and Filarete: ‘Pippo di ser Brunelleschi inventò la prospettiva, la quale precedentemente non si era mai usata … Benché gli antichi fossero acuti e sottili, essi non conobbero la prospettiva’ (quoted from Camerota, La prospettiva del Rinascimento (2006), 61). 6. On the meaning of descobrir, Morison, Portuguese Voyages to America (1940), 5–10, 43 (the 1484 usage, translated by Morison as ‘explore’), 45–6 (1486, translated by Morison as ‘discover’). See also Randles, ‘Le Nouveau Monde’ (2000), 10, for the word descubre occurring in Spanish to mean ‘discover’ in 1499. 7. Caraci Luzzana, Amerigo Vespucci (1999), 321–83; searchable text at http://eprints.unifi.it/archive/00000533/02/Lettera_al_Soderini.pdf. The earlier Mundus novus does not contain discooperio, but the original Italian text is lost. Waldseemüller is far too good a Latinist to copy Vespucci’s usage in the Cosmographiae introductio. O’Gorman argues that Waldseemüller’s invenio should be translated as ‘conceive’, not ‘discover’, which is to ignore the fact that Waldseemüller is working from a Latin text of Vespucci in which invenio is already a translation of discooperio (O’Gorman, The Invention of America (1961), 123 and n. 117). 8. See, for example, Wolper, ‘The Rhetoric of Gunpowder’ (1970). 9. Watson, The Double Helix (1968), 197. 10. On the discovery of discovery: Fleming (ed.), The Invention of Discovery (2011); and Margolis, It Started with Copernicus (2002), Ch. 3 – neither explores the new terminology. On curiosity: Huff, Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution (2011); Harrison, ‘Curiosity, Forbidden Knowledge’ (2001); Ball, Curiosity (2012); Daston, ‘Curiosity in Early Modern Science’ (1995); and Daston & Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (1998), 303–28. An interesting account of the cultural foundations of modern science is to be found in Muraro, Giambattista della Porta, mago e scienziato (1978), 171–9. 11. Bury, The Idea of Progress (1920), 44–9. 12. Leroy, Variety of Things (1594), fol. 127rv. On Le Roy’s secular historical philosophy, see Huppert, ‘The Life and Works of Louis Le Roy, by Werner L. Gundersheimer’ (1968). 13. For a firm statement of the principle of progress in knowledge based on the new geographical discoveries, see Piccolomini, De la sfera del mondo (1540), 39v. 14. I owe this point to Stuart Carroll. 15. 1829 comes from a search on Google Books; OED gives 1853. 16. On ‘nostalgia’, see OED. For the first English use: Harle, An Historical Essay on the State of Physick in the Old and New Testament (1729) (OED gives 1756); for an early French usage of maladie du pays, Constantini, La Vie de Scaramouche (1695). 17. I take the term from Dunn, Modern Revolutions (1972), 226; for the underlying issues, Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol. 1 (2002), 128–44; and Shapin & Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), 14. 18. Leroy, Variety of Things (1594), sig. A4v. 19. Leroy, De la vicissitude (1575), ‘Sommaire de l’oeuvre’. 20. Vergil, On Discovery (2002); Copenhaver, ‘The Historiography of Discovery in the Renaissance’ (1978); and Atkinson, Inventing Inventors in Renaissance Europe: Polydore Vergil’s ‘De inventoribus rerum’ (2007). 21. Hay, Polydore Vergil (1952), 74. 22. Zhmud, The Origin of the History of Science (2006), 299–301. 23. Vergil, A Pleasant and Compendious History (1686), 149. See also Vergil, An Abridgement (1546); and Vergil, The Works (1663). 24. For an introduction, Bodnár, ‘Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy’ (2012); also Kuhn, The Road since Structure (2000), 15–20. 25. See below, 315–17, 530–1. 26. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923), Vol. 5, 37–49. 27. Westman, The Copernican Question (2011), 99. 28. Thorndike, Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century (1929), 209 (translation modified). Thorndike had not seen the first edition: Achillini, De elementis (1505), 84v–85r. 29. Thorndike, Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century (1929), 209. 30. See the extended argument that experience must take precedence over authority, especially in questions of geography, in Piccolomini, Della grandezza della terra et dell’acqua (1558), 7v–10r. 31. Thorndike, Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century (1929), 210. 32. See, for example, the preface to Book 1 of Machiavelli’s Discourses (Machiavelli, Selected Political Writings (1994), 82–4); Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1991), 605–6; and Schmitt, ‘Experience and Experiment’ (1969) on Zabarella. 33. Quoted in Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature (1994), 272. 34. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923), Vol. 5, 581–2; and Taisnier, Opusculum (1562), 16–17. It is sometimes said that Ramus defended the thesis that everything that Aristotle said is false, but this is a mistranslation: Ong, Ramus (1958), 36–46. 35. Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1967), 107–8; for a discussion of this and similar examples, and of the adage that it was better to err with Plato/Aristotle/Galen than be right, Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature (2002), 191–3. 36. Muir, The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance (2007), 15–18; compare Pascal, Oeuvres (1923), 9 – Pierre Guiffart on Pascal’s experiments. 37. Glanvill, Plus ultra (1668), 65–6. 38. Harvey, Anatomical Exercitations (1653), preface, fol. 4r; and Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654), 183. 39. Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections (Ricordi) (1972), 76. 40. Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1991), 648. 41. Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1991), 644 (the 1588 text); Borges, The Total Library (2001), ‘The Doctrine of Cycles’ (115–22), ‘Circular Time’ (225–8), with Vanini ‘quoted’ on 225 (this is, in fact, a Borgesian improvement on what Vanini actually says: see Vanini, De admirandis (1616), 388); and Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence (1979). 42. Zhmud, The Origin of the History of Science (2006), 299. 43. Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (1962), 15, 23. 44. Bacon, Instauratio magna (1620), Vol. 1 §84, 99 = Bacon, Works (1857), Vol. 1, 191; and Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646), 20; see also Pascal, ‘Préface sur le traité du vide’ (Pascal, Oeuvres complètes (1964), 772–85); and Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), 140–1. 45. Johnson, ‘Renaissance German Cosmographers’ (2006), 34–5. 46. Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture (1972), 33 (dedication to Brunelleschi; translation modified). 47. Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture (1972), 57–8; above, p. 58 and n; and Serlio, Libro primo [-quinto] d’architettura (1559), Book 2, 1r (1537 is the date of the first edition). 48. Discourses on Livy, introduction to Book 1 (a paragraph missing from the Neville translation of 1675); Book 2, Ch. 17; and Machiavelli, Art of War, preface. 49. Copernicus, On the Revolutions (1978), 5; and Gingerich, ‘Did Copernicus Owe a Debt to Aristarchus?’ (1985). 50. Rheticus, Narratio prima (1540); and Rosen (ed.), Three Copernican Treatises (1959), 135. 51. Digges & Digges, A Prognostication Everlasting (1576), fol. 43. 52. Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1967), 274, 276, 318, 328. 53. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature (1994); and Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship (2001). 54. Quoted from Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (1988), 9. 55. See Guillaume de Testu’s defence of the concept of chozes nouvelles in 1556: Lestringant, L’Atelier du cosmographe (1991), 187. 56. Rosenthal, ‘Plus ultra, non plus ultra’ (1971); and Rosenthal, ‘The Invention of the Columnar Device’ (1973). 57. Randles, ‘The Atlantic in European Cartography’ (2000), 15. 58. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 3, 253. 59. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 15, 155. 60. Norman, The New Attractive (1581), Aiirv. 61. Lodovico delle Colombe, quoted Wootton, Galileo (2010), 7; compare the same author in 1612: Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 4, 317. 62. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 13, 345. 63. Quoted from Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature (1994), 272. 64. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923), Vol. 7, 430; or, for example, Thevet, Cosmographie universelle, 1575: ‘en ces matieres cy, les plus sçavans n’y voient pas si clairement, que font les Matelots et ceux qui ont par cy devant long temps voiagé en ces terres, d’autant que l’experience est maistresse de toutes choses’: quoted in Lestringant, L’Atelier du cosmographe (1991), 25; see also 27–35, 45–6, 50. 65. Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), 140. 66. On experientia magistra rerum, n. 64 above; Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini (1965), 39; Tedeschi, ‘The Roman Inquisition and Witchcraft’ (1983); Gerson, Opera omnia (1706), Vol. 1, 76; and Himmelstein, Synodicon herbipolense (1855), 207. Erasmus, however, thought that only fools need to learn from experience: Vaughan, ‘An Unnoted Translation of Erasmus in Ascham’s “Schoolmaster” ’ (1977). 67. Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous (2007). 68. Ashworth Jr, ‘Natural History and the Emblematic World View’ (1990). 69. ‘Discovery’: OED; ‘discover’: Münster, A Treatyse of the Newe India (1553), sig. H7r; ‘voyage of discovery’: Bourne, A Regiment for the Sea (1574), 35v. 70. Phillips, ‘The English Patent’ (1982), 71. 71. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605), 48v = Bacon, Works (1857), Vol. 3, 384. For a general discussion of this theme, see Gascoigne, ‘Crossing the Pillars of Hercules’ (2012). Later, Hooke, in his ‘The Present State of Natural Philosophy’, sought to give rules for how to make discoveries, and thus ensure that hard work, rather than genius, would be all that was required to advance knowledge: Hooke, The Posthumous Works (1705), 1–70. 72. Serjeantson, ‘Francis Bacon and the “Interpretation of Nature” in the Late Renaissance’ (2014). 73. Weeks, ‘Francis Bacon and the Art–Nature Distinction’ (2007), 105, quoting Novum organum CIX (translation modified). 74. Weeks, ‘The Role of Mechanics in Francis Bacon’s “Great Instauration” ’ (2008). Compare della Porta, Natural Magick (1658) [1589], 2. 75. Compare Pascal, Oeuvres (1923), 136–41; and above,p. 36. 76. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 3, 59. 77. De Bruyn, ‘The Classical Silva’ (2001). 78. Fattori, ‘La diffusione di Francis Bacon nel libertinismo francese’ (2002). For a discussion of his ideas by Mersenne, see Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923), Vol. 7, 430. 79. Bartholin, Anatomicae institutiones (1611), 449. 80. Wotton & Bentley, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning. The Second Part (1698), 45–6; Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923), Vol. 5, 44–5; and Park, ‘The Rediscovery of the Clitoris’ (1997). 81. Laqueur, Making Sex (1990). 82. Bartholin, Anatomicae institutiones (1611), 174. 83. Gingerich & van Helden, ‘From Occhiale to Printed Page’ (2003), 251–4. 84. Galilei & Scheiner, On Sunspots (2008). 85. Kuhn, ‘Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery’ (1962). 86. Schaffer, ’Scientific Discoveries’ (1986); and Schaffer, ‘Making Up Discovery’ (1994). 87. This is the argument of O’Gorman, The Invention of America (1961). O’Gorman complicates matters by distinguishing ‘discovery’ from ‘invention’ in a peculiar way (9), but his basic claim is that Waldseemüller discovered America (123). 88. Schaffer, ‘Making Up Discovery’ (1994), 13. 89. Broughton, ‘The First Predicted Return of Comet Halley’ (1985); and Yeomans, Rahe & Freitag, ‘The History of Comet Halley’ (1986). 90. There is a difference of opinion as to when Bessel may be said to have made this prediction. Compare Bamford, ‘Popper and His Commentators on the Discovery of Neptune’ (1996), 216, who says 1823, and Smith, ‘The Cambridge Network’ (1989), 398–9, who says 1840. Morando, ‘The Golden Age of Celestial Mechanics’ (1995), 216, has ‘after 1835’. 91. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), §§66–8. 92. Merton, ‘Priorities in Scientific Discovery’ (1957); Merton, ‘Singletons and Multiples’ (1961); Merton, ‘Resistance’ (1963); and Merton, The Sociology of Science (1973) (which collects the earlier articles); see also Lamb & Easton, Multiple Discovery (1984); and Stigler, ‘Stigler’s Law of Eponymy’ (1980). 93. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants (1965); Merton & Barber, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (2006); and Sills & Merton, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences: Social Science Quotations (1991). 94. Koyré, Études Galiléennes (1966), 80–158; and Schemmel, The English Galileo (2008). 95. Schaffer, ‘Scientific Discoveries’ (1986), 400–6. 96. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (1958), 4–30 (which goes a long way towards stating Kuhn’s ‘different worlds’ thesis); Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences (1978), 22–5; and Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know? (2012), 226–9. 97. Burkert, Lore and Science (1972), 307. 98. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 10, 296; see also, for example, 372. 99. Wilding, Galileo’s Idol (2014), 108–11. 100. For concurrence, see Leroy, De la vicissitude (1575); the Vocabolario delli Accademici della Crusca does not give the modern sense of concorrente when defining the word but uses it in the modern sense when defining rivale. For English usages, see OED (also ‘emulation’, 1552), but for the first use of ‘competition’, see Stubbes, The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf (1579), E5r. 101. Quoted from Hobbes, Examinatio et emendatio (1660), in Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and Roberval’ (2002), 164–5 (Malcolm’s translation). 102. Hall, Philosophers at War (1980); Bertoloni Meli, Equivalence and Priority (1993). On priority disputes: Iliffe, ‘In the Warehouse’ (1992). 103. Westfall, Never at Rest (1980), 446–53, 471–2, 511–12. 104. For some reason, Merton, although he started out as an historian of science, never developed the line of argument I am about to present. But see Merton, Science, Technology and Society (1970) [1938], 169, n. 30. 105. Jardine, The Birth of History and Philosophy of Science (1984). 106. Clark & Montelle, ‘Priority, Parallel Discovery and Pre-Eminence’ (2012). 107. For a possible earlier example, Van Brummelen, The Mathematics of the Heavens (2009), 182. 108. Hellman, Great Feuds in Mathematics (2006); Toscano, La formula segreta (2009). 109. Biagioli, ‘From Ciphers to Confidentiality’ (2012). 110. Mattern, Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (2008); Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know? (2012), 6–8, 10–11, 132. 111. Merton, The Sociology of Science (1973), 273–5. 112. Park, ‘The Rediscovery of the Clitoris’ (1997). 113. Ambrose, ‘Immunology’s First Priority Dispute’ (2006). 114. Serrano, ‘Trying Ursus’ (2013). 115. Ruestow, The Microscope in the Dutch Republic (1996), 47–8; Cobb, Generation (2006), 155–87. 116. Röslin, De opere Dei creationis (1597). (I owe this reference to Adam Mosley.) Compare the three medical systems in Severinus, Idea medicinae philosophicae (1571). As far as I can tell, Brotton is wrong to claim that Brahe immodestly named his system after himself: Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps (2012), 266. 117. http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Curves/Limacon.html. 118. On Waldseemüller’s map ‘America’ does not appear to refer to the continent as a whole, but his collaborator Matthias Ringmann, in a book accompanying the map, clearly intended the new name to refer to the continent as a whole, and by 1520 it appears on maps with this meaning: Meurer, ‘Cartography in the German Lands, 1450–1650’ (2007), 1205. On other maps ‘Asia’ continued to be used until at least 1537: Rosen, ‘The First Map to Show the Earth in Rotation’ (1976), 174, reprinted in Rosen, Copernicus and His Successors (1995). On the naming of America, Johnson, ‘Renaissance German Cosmographers’ (2006) – although, unfortunately, she takes eponymy for granted. 119. The earliest usage of the adjective ‘Alphonsine’ (in Latin) that I have found is 1483, but there may well be earlier occurrences. 120. Randles, ‘Bartolomeu Dias’ (2000), 26. 121. McIntosh, The Johannes Ruysch and Martin Waldseemüller World Maps (2012), 17. 122. Galilei, The Essential Galileo (2008), 46. 123. On Galileo’s success in elevating the Medici among the pagan gods, Aggiunti, Oratio de mathematicae laudibus (1627), 20. 124. Ramazzini & St Clair, The Abyssinian Philosophy Confuted (1697). 125. Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721). 126. Ippocratista: Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti (1981), 40; Scotista: Gerson, Opera (1489), index, s.v. Distinctionis; the rest from OED. 127. Little has been written about eponymy, but there is an interesting dictionary of medical eponyms at http://www.whonamedit.com, and Stigler’s Law states that the wrong person always get the credit: Stigler, ‘Stigler’s Law of Eponymy’ (1980). When Pascal writes (Pascal, Oeuvres complètes (1964), 523), ‘[Q]uand nous citons les auteurs, nous citons leurs démonstrations, et non pas leurs noms; nous n’y avons nul égard que dans les matières historiques,’ he is distinguishing between two ways of using an author’s name. If one refers to Copernicus (using the name to refer to a book), this is a shorthand way of referring to heliocentrism; but if one refers to the nova of 1604 (a matter of historical fact), then the credibility of its existence depends on the authority of Kepler and other observers of astronomical phenomena. 128. See OED, ‘algorism’. 129. Proclus & Euclid, In primum Euclidis (1560), 207; and van Brummelen, The Mathematics of the Heavens (2009), 56. 130. Proclus & Euclid, In primum Euclidis (1560), 198, 200. 131. Proclus & Euclid, In primum Euclidis (1560), index (under admirabile) – compare 134, 270; Drayton, Poly-Olbion (1612), A3rv, offers various accounts of the origin of the name. It is true that there was some uncertainty as to whether Pythagoras was indeed the originator of the theorem: Proclus had been cautious in reporting the attribution (and had gone on to present the theorem as being of limited significance). Vitruvius, Zehen Bücher (1548). 132. Ruby, ‘The Origins of Scientific “Law” ’ (1986), 357. 133. Devlin, The Man of Numbers (2011), 145. 134. Pascal, Oeuvres (1923), 478–95; Dear, Discipline and Experience (1995), 186–9. (Koyré found these protestations disingenuous: Koyré, Études d’histoire de la pensée scientifique (1973), 378.) Similarly, Pascal claimed that since he had invented the void-in-the-void experiment, he deserved the credit for the discoveries made by others with modified versions of it; for a similar claim made by Leibniz, see Bertoloni Meli, Equivalence and Priority (1993), 6. 135. ‘Plagiary’: there is a 1585 occurrence in EEBO, unrecorded in OED, but this is in the etymologically correct sense of ‘kidnapper’. 136. Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646), 22. 137. OED, s.v. ‘Ptolemean’. 138. Starkey, Nature’s Explication and Helmont’s Vindication (1657). 139. Bartholin, Walaeus and others, Bartholinus Anatomy (1662). 140. Stubbe, An Epistolary Discourse Concerning Phlebotomy (1671). 141. Dates from OED unless otherwise noted; in Latin, boyliano originates with Line, Tractatus de corporum inseparabilitate (1661). 142. Harris, Lexicon technicum (1704). 143. Reynolds, Death’s Vision (1713). 144. Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733). 145. Zhmud, The Origin of the History of Science (2006). 146. Galilei, The Essential Galileo (2008), 45. 147. Bacon, Sylva sylvarum (1627), 45–6 = Bacon, Works (1857), Vol. 3, 165–6. 148. Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654), 3. 149. Huff, Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution (2011). 150. Harris, Lexicon technicum (1704). 151. Phillips, ‘The English Patent’ (1982); Long, ‘Invention, Authorship, “Intellectual Property” ’ (1991). 152. May, ‘The Venetian Moment’ (2002). 153. Wootton, ‘Galileo: Reflections on Failure’ (2011); on Baliani, Wallis, ‘An Essay of Dr John Wallis’ (1666), 270. Wallis thinks that Galileo’s theory produces two high tides a day, but see Palmieri, ‘Re-examining Galileo’s Theory of Tides’ (1998), 242. 154. McGuire & Rattansi, ‘Newton and the “Pipes of Pan” ’ (1966), 109. For a discussion which would have delighted Newton, see Russo, The Forgotten Revolution (2004), 365–79.
1. Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide (1986), 15, 274, 463. 2. Kuhn, ‘Dubbing and Redubbing: The Vulnerability of Rigid Designation’ (1990), 299. 3. Kuhn, Structure (1970), 171. 4. Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth (1991). 5. Columbus, The Four Voyages (1969), 217–19. 6. O’Gorman, The Invention of America (1961), 98–101. 7. Biro, On Earth as in Heaven (2009); Schuster & Brody, ‘Descartes and Sunspots’ (2013); also Johnson, The German Discovery of the World (2008), 51–7; the first book with ‘cosmology’ in the title is, I think, Mizauld, Cosmologia: Historiam coeli et mundi (1570). (Worldcat shows a couple of earlier entries, but both are likely to be ghosts.) 8. Aristotle, On the Heavens (1939). 9. To be exact, the problem seems to have originated with the last of the pagan philosophers, Olympiodorus of Alexandria: Duhem, Le Système du monde, Vol. 9 (1958), 97–8. 10. Pliny the Elder, Natural History (1938), Book 2, cap. 65; the translator has been unable to make sense of the passage: compare Pliny the Elder, L’Histoire du monde (1562). Pliny’s claim would seem to be that the distance from the centre of the Earth to the ocean shore is less than the distance from the deepest point of the ocean to the high seas. 11. The key text, on which the following paragraphs are largely based, is Duhem, Le Système du monde, Vol. 9 (1958), 79–235 (available online at www.gallica.fr). Since discussions of this subject are usually based on an incomplete acquaintance with the literature, I offer here an attempt at a more complete bibliography, in chronological order, although Rosen, ‘Copernicus and the Discovery of America’ (1943), is a necessary preliminary; Boffito, Intorno alla ‘Quaestio’ (1902) (which amounts to an anthology of sources) – available online at www.archive.org; Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923), Vol. 4, 161, 166, 176, 233; Vol. 5, 9, 24–5, 156, 321, 389, 427–8, 552–3, 569, 591, 614; Vol. 6, 10, 12, 27, 34, 50, 60, 83, 380; Vol. 7, 50, 54–5, 339, 385, 395–6, 404, 481, 601, 644, 692; Wright, The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades (1925), 186–7, 258; Thorndike, Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century (1929), 200–16; Duhem, Le Système du monde, Vol. 9 (1958), 79–235 (available online at www.gallica.fr); O’Gorman, The Invention of America (1961), especially 56–8; Goldstein, ‘The Renaissance Concept of the Earth’ (1972); Randles, De la terre plate au globe terrestre (1980); Grant, ‘In Defense of the Earth’s Centrality and Immobility’ (1984), 20–32 (the best starting point); Hooykaas, G. J. Rheticus’s Treatise on Holy Scripture and the Motion of the Earth (1984), 127–32; Margolis, Patterns, Thinking and Cognition (1987), 235–43; Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth (1991) (although he rather misses the point of Randles’ work); Wallis, ‘What Columbus Knew’ (1992); Vogel, ‘Das Problem der relativen Lage von Erd- und Wassersphäre im Mittelalter’ (1993); Randles, ‘Classical Models of World Geography’ (1994) (reprinted in Randles, Geography, Cartography and Nautical Science in the Renaissance (2000)); Grant, Planets, Stars and Orbs (1994), 622–37; Vogel, Sphaera terrae (1995); Headley, ‘The Sixteenth-century Venetian Celebration of the Earth’s Total Habitability’ (1997); Margolis, It Started with Copernicus (2002), 96–102; Besse, Les Grandeurs de la terre (2003), 65–110; Vogel, ‘Cosmography’ (2006); Lester, The Fourth Part of the World (2009); Biro, On Earth as in Heaven (2009) (the thesis on which Biro’s book is based is available online at unsworks.unsw.edu.au/fapi/datastream/unsworks:993/SOURCE02); and Schuster & Brody, ‘Descartes and Sunspots’ (2013). A convenient point of entry to the medieval debates is provided by Alighieri, La Quaestio de aqua et terra (1905) (facsimile and translations), available at www.archive.org (there is also a translation by Philip Wicksteed at http://alighieri.scarian.net/translate_english/alighieri_dante_a_question_of_the_water_and_of_the_land.html). It is remarkable that the relevant issues are not even mentioned in Westman, The Copernican Question (2011), although Westman is familiar with the two works by Grant, and with Goldstein (Margolis, Patterns, Thinking and Cognition (1987), 314), and historians of cartography are generally unacquainted with the issues: e.g. Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps (2012); Simek, Heaven and Earth in the Middle Ages (1996); and Woodward, ‘The Image of the Spherical Earth’ (1989). The vast bulk of Woodward (ed.), Cartography in the European Renaissance (2007) contains three sentences on the subject (59, and 327 – where Randles’ argument is misrepresented), but a key contribution, on globes, shows no knowledge of it (136–7). 12. Oresme, Le Livre du ciel et du monde (1968), 397, 562–73. 13. Duhem, Le Système du monde, Vol. 9 (1958), 91–6. In 1505 Alessandro Achillini expressed doubt as to the validity of the traditional ratios, but (if I understand him correctly) he did not go so far as to question the two-spheres theory: Achillini, De elementis (1505), 84v–85r. 14. Hiatt, Terra incognita (2008), 100–4. 15. Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators (1949), provides text and translation. 16. There are two listings, which differ significantly: Roberto de Andrade Martins at http://www.ghtc.usp.br/server/Sacrobosco/Sacrobosco-ed.htm; and Hamel, Studien zur ‘Sphaera’ (2014), 68–133. 17. For example, Taylor, The Haven-finding Art: A History of Navigation from Odysseus to Captain Cook (1971), 154; Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth (1991), 19; Lester, The Fourth Part of the World (2009), 28–9. 18. Hiatt, Terra incognita (2008), 142 (quoting British Library MS Cotton Julius D.VII, 46r (for a photograph of the passage see 123). 19. Hiatt, Terra incognita (2008), 133, quoting Petrarch, Le familiari (Familiarum rerum libri), ed. V. Rossi (4 vols., Florence: Sansoni, 1933–42) Vol. 2, 248. 20. Wright, The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades (1925), 86–7, 259–61; Arim: Oresme, Le Livre du ciel et du monde (1968), 24, 330–5; and Sen, ‘Al-Biruni on the Determination of Latitudes and Longitudes in India’ (1975). 21. Duhem, ‘Un précurseur français de Copernic’ (1909); Duhem, Le Système du monde, Vol. 9 (1958), 202–4, 329–44; Sarnowsky, ‘The Defence of the Ptolemaic System’ (2007), 35–41; Grant, Planets, Stars and Orbs (1994), 642–7; and Oresme, Le Livre du ciel et du monde (1968). 22. For the conventional view, see Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators (1949), 274–5, 296 (the commentary is attributed to Michael Scot). 23. Johnson, The German Discovery of the World (2008), 57–71 (though the thrust of her argument is at odds with mine). 24. On the first representations of the terraqueous globe, see Helas, ‘ “Mundus in rotundo et pulcherrime depictus” ’ (1998); and Helas, ‘Die Erfindung des Globus durch die Malerei – Zum Wandel des Weltbildes im 15. Jahrhundert’ (2010). Medieval representations of a globe, such as the globus cruciger, should be understood as representations of either the sphere of earth or the sphere of the heavens – in other words, the universe as a whole (Vogel, Sphaera terrae (1995), 360). 25. Colón, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus (1992), 15–40 (the globe is on 19); Dalché, ‘The Reception of Ptolemy’s Geography’ (2007), 329; and Randles, ‘The Evaluation of Columbus’ “India” Project’ (1990). 26. Besse, Les Grandeurs de la terre (2003), 62–3. 27. Vogel, ‘America’ (1995), 14. 28. For example, Guillaume Fillastre, writing 1414–18: ‘I say that supposing the shape of the earth [terra: the land mass] to be spherical they who live in the furthest parts of the east are antipodeans to those who live in the furthest parts of the west.’ Hiatt, Terra incognita (2008), 158. 29. Ezekiel 7:2; Isaiah 11:12. On the habitable earth’s four corners, Oresme, Traitié de l’espère (1943), Ch. 31. 30. Donne, Holy Sonnets VII. 31. Leurechon, Selectae propositiones (1629), 19. An advance on the earliest date (1646) known to Randles: Randles, Geography, Cartography and Nautical Science in the Renaissance (2000), article 1, 74. The first known English usage (predating the OED date of 1658) is Charleton, The Darkness of Atheism Dispelled (1652), 8. 32. Trutfetter, Summa in tota[m] physicen (1514), Book 2, Ch. 2 (sig. liii–miiv). In Trutfetter, Summa philosophiae naturalis (1517), an abbreviated version of the previous edition, the issue is not addressed. 33. Habes lector was reprinted in 1518, 1522 and 1557, but it also appears in the apparatus to Pomponius Mela, De orbis situ (1518, 1522, 1530, 1540, 1557), sometimes bound separately and catalogued as a separate publication. See Randles, ‘Classical Models of World Geography’ (1994) (reprinted in Randles, Geography, Cartography and Nautical Science in the Renaissance (2000)), 66–7 (note that the key passage from Vadianus quoted on 67 varies in different editions – compare Agricola & Vadianus, Habes lector (1515), sig. B iii(r) with Mela, De orbis situ libri tres. Adiecta sunt praeterea loca aliquot ex Vadiani commentariis (1530), sig. X5v). 34. Mela, De orbis situ libri tres. Adiecta sunt praeterea loca aliquot ex Vadiani commentariis (1530), V2v, V3r, V4r, X2r, X6r, Y3v. On Tannstetter’s role as editor of the 1518 Sacrobosco, see Hayton, ‘Instruments and Demonstrations’ (2010), 129. For an illustration from 1524, see Margolis, Patterns, Thinking and Cognition (1987), 236. Oronce Fine’s 1528 La Theorique des cielz, which is not a commentary on Sacrobosco, also adopts the new image of the globe: Cosgrove, ‘Images of Renaissance Cosmography’ (2007), 62–3. 35. Similar views had already been expressed by Fernández de Enciso (1519), Margalho (1520) and Fernel (1528): Randles, ‘Classical Models of World Geography’ (1994), 65–9. 36. Gingerich, ‘Sacrobosco as a Textbook’ (1988). 37. Hamel, Studien zur ‘Sphaera’ (2014), 42–50. 38. Gingerich, ‘Sacrobosco Illustrated’ (1999), 213–14. 39. I have seen the later reprint: Sacrobosco, Sphaera … in usum scholarum (1647). 40. See, for example, Beyer, Quaestiones novae (1551) and Sacrobosco, Sphaera (1552) (I have used the edition of 1601). Piccolomini, La Prima parte delle theoriche (1558) claims to be new and shocking, but he is evidently writing for an inexpert audience, and he treats the one contemporary he has found upholding the old views with contempt. 41. Schott, Anatomia physico-hydrostatica (1663). Similar issues are discussed in Carpenter, Geographie Delineated (1635). 42. Berga & Piccolomini, Discorso (1579); and Benedetti, Consideratione (1579); the two texts were then published together in Latin (Berga’s text being translated by another because Berga was already dead or dying): Berga & Benedetti, Disputatio (1580). (The texts have separate title pages but continuous pagination.) 43. Madeleine Alcover claims (Cyrano de Bergerac, Les États et empires de la lune et du soleil (2004), 27), on the basis of an article by Maurice Laugaa, that Vincent Leblanc denied the existence of a second hemisphere in 1634. I have not seen Laugaa’s article; but Leblanc’s text, at least in translation, does not support the claim: Leblanc, The World Surveyed (1660), 171–3. 44. Bataillon, ‘L’Idée de la découverte de l’Amérique’ (1953), 31. The phrase originates with Peter Martyr in 1493: O’Gorman, The Invention of America (1961), 84–5. Columbus himself held that his third voyage had discovered a new world, even though his first two voyages had discovered part of Asia: O’Gorman, The Invention of America (1961), 94–104. Equally, the new lands were sometimes said to be extra orbem, outside the sphere of land: Randles, ‘Le Nouveau Monde’ (2000), 31. 45. Bodin, Universæ naturæ theatrum (1596), 183–93; Bodin, Le Théatre de la nature universelle (1597), 252–65; Blair, Annotations in a Copy of Jean Bodin, Universae naturae theatrum (1990). 46. Schott, Anatomia physico-hydrostatica (1663), 245–8. 47. Cesari, Il trattato della sfera (1982), 144–7. 48. Copernicus, On the Revolutions (1978). 49. Rosen (ed.), Three Copernican Treatises (1959). 50. Goldstein, ‘The Renaissance Concept of the Earth’ (1972), is the key text, echoed in Grant, ‘In Defense of the Earth’s Centrality and Immobility’ (1984), 27 n. 90 and Grant, Planets, Stars and Orbs (1994), 636 n. 66. 51. Rosen, ‘Copernicus and the Discovery of America’ (1943). 52. Compare Swerdlow’s translation (Swerdlow, ‘The Derivation and First Draft of Copernicus’s Planetary Theory’ (1973), 444): ‘And thus the earth rotates together with the water that flows around it and the nearby air’; Swerdlow’s translation depends on emending circumfluis as circumflua, against the manuscript evidence. 53. For the apple, Mela, De orbis situ libri tres. Adiecta sunt praeterea loca aliquot ex Vadiani commentariis (1530), X5(v); Gaspar Peucer, Elementa doctrinae (1551), quoted in Besse, Les Grandeurs de la Terre (2003), 110; and Hooykaas, G. J. Rheticus’s Treatise on Holy Scripture and the Motion of the Earth (1984), 86, 128–31. Note, too, that circumfluere is the verb used in this context by Vadianus. Rheticus had evidently read Vadianus, and perhaps he learned of this text from Copernicus: Hooykaas, G. J. Rheticus’s Treatise on Holy Scripture and the Motion of the Earth (1984), 87. 54. If this is correct, Swerdlow’s commentary misleads in certain respects. Thus Copernicus’s second postulate cannot be taken to be simply a consequence of postulates 3 and 6, and Copernicus’s phrase centrum gravitatis means more than just ‘center towards which heavy things move’ (Swerdlow, ‘The Derivation and First Draft of Copernicus’s Planetary Theory’ (1973), 437–8). Similarly, the claim that ‘to understand Copernicus’s work properly, as he understood it, one must completely remove it from natural philosophy … and terrestrial physics’ (440) cannot be right. 55. Swerdlow takes the earliest possible date to be 1500. For a series of strong arguments for a date c.1508 (but omitting any reference to the crucial evidence discussed here), see Goddu, ‘Reflections on the Origin of Copernicus’s Cosmology’ (2006). Goddu (37–8, following Rosen) discusses Corvinus’s poem. 56. Digges & Digges, A Prognostication Everlasting (1576), M2r. 57. Swerdlow, ‘The Derivation and First Draft of Copernicus’s Planetary Theory’ (1973), 425–9. 58. Besse, Les Grandeurs de la Terre (2003), 91–6. 59. Copernicus, On the Revolutions (1978), 4. 60. Shank, ‘Setting up Copernicus?’ (2009). 61. A set of arguments against a moving earth are already to be found in Albert of Saxony, who is responding to Oresme: Sarnowsky, ‘The Defence of the Ptolemaic System’ (2007), 35–8. 62. Swerdlow, ‘The Derivation and First Draft of Copernicus’s Planetary Theory’ (1973), 425, 442, 474, 477. For a recent discussion of these issues (one which at least acknowledges the work of Margolis), see Clutton-Brock, ‘Copernicus’s Path to His Cosmology’ (2005), 209 and n. 27 (echoed in Goddu, ‘Reflections on the Origin of Copernicus’s Cosmology’ (2006), n. 55) 63. Rheticus, Narratio prima (1540), D3v, D4v; Rosen (ed.), Three Copernican Treatises (1959), 14 (‘like a ball on a lathe’), 149; Calcagnini, Opera aliquot (1544), 389 (where the surrounding elements serve to turn the Earth into a perfect sphere, pilae absolutae rotunditatis); and Hooykaas, G. J. Rheticus’s Treatise on Holy Scripture and the Motion of the Earth (1984), 49 (totum globum ex terrâ et aquâ, cum adiacentibus elementis), 54–5. 64. On Bruno in England, Massa, ‘Giordano Bruno’s Ideas in Seventeenth-century England’ (1977); McMullin, ‘Giordano Bruno at Oxford’ (1986); Ciliberto & Mann (eds.), Giordano Bruno, 1583–85 (1997); Feingold, ‘Giordano Bruno in England, Revisited’ (2004); and Rowland, Giordano Bruno (2008), 139–87. 65. Rowland, Giordano Bruno (2008), 145–6. 66. McNulty, ‘Bruno at Oxford’ (1960), 302–3. 67. Goldstein, ‘Theory and Observation’ (1972), 43. The question of whether Copernicus’s initial motivation in adopting heliocentrism was to avoid equants or to fix the order of the planets is a vexed one: see Westman, ‘The Copernican Question Revisited’ (2013). In favour of the view that the key issue was equants, it seems to me, is the evidence discussed in the next paragraph. 68. Gingerich, An Annotated Census (2002); see also Gingerich & Westman, ‘The Wittich Connection’ (1988); and Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read (2005). 69. Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper (1995). Bruno’s English world is wonderfully described in Bossy, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (1991), but its central claim, that Bruno was a spy, needs to be corrected in the light of Bossy, Under the Molehill (2001). 70. Rowland, Giordano Bruno (2008), 149–59. 71. Copernicus, On the Revolutions (1978), 16. 72. Grant, Planets, Stars and Orbs (1994), 395–403. 73. Singer & Bruno, Giordano Bruno (1950); Gatti, ‘Bruno and the Gilbert Circle’ (1999). 74. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957), 6–23; Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1991), 505; and Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes (1962), 429. 75. Redondi, ‘La nave di Bruno e la pallottola di Galileo’ (2001); Granada, ‘Aristotle, Copernicus, Bruno’ (2004). 76. McMullin, ‘Bruno and Copernicus’ (1987), who criticizes Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1991); on which, see also Westman & McGuire, Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution (1977); Gatti, Essays on Giordano Bruno (2011), Ch. 2. 77. It was first named in a radio programme, and in print the next year. 78. Digges & Digges, A Prognostication Everlasting (1576). 79. Johnson & Larkey, ‘Thomas Digges, the Copernican System’ (1934). 80. This was already apparent to Dreyer, although he had seen only the 1592 edition: Dreyer, History of the Planetary Systems (1906), 347. 81. Duhem, Le Système du monde, Vol. 10 (1959), 247–347; and Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957), 6–24. 82. Digges, Alae (1573); Pumfrey, ‘Your Astronomers and Ours Differ Exceedingly’ (2011). 83. Westman, The Copernican Question (2011). 84. Swerdlow, ‘Copernicus and Astrology’ (2012), 373. Rather oddly, Swerdlow appears to hold both that there are equants in Copernicus and that getting rid of equants was the main motivation for Copernicus’s adoption of heliocentrism (Westman, ‘The Copernican Question Revisited’ (2013), 104–15). 85. Ragep, ‘Copernicus and His Islamic Predecessors’ (2007); Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (2007), 193–232. 86. Although Oresme had already developed such a theory with considerable care: Oresme, The ‘Questiones de Spera’ (1966), Q. 8, and Oresme, Le Livre du ciel et du monde (1968), 518–39: he may be a common source for Digges and Bruno. 87. This argument continued to be important until the mid-seventeenth century; Riccioli thought it was the key argument against Copernicanism: Graney, ‘The Work of the Best and Greatest Artist’ (2012); and Graney, ‘Science Rather than God’ (2012). It was strengthened by the fact that telescope lenses turn stars from points into discs, so that, if Copernicanism required them to be at a great distance, the telescope required them to be of an even more enormous size. Flamsteed, for example, thought that some stars were as much bigger than the sun (itself now assumed to be a star) as the sun is than the Earth: Hunter, ‘Science and Astrology’ (1995), 280. 88. Johnson & Larkey, ‘Thomas Digges, the Copernican System’ (1934), 102, and (for a reference in the earlier Alae) 111; and Digges & Digges, A Prognostication Everlasting (1576), M2r, N4r. 89. Palingenius, The Zodiake of Life (1565); Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957), stresses the importance of Digges (35–9), but is aware of his close dependence on Palingenius (24–7, 38–9). The dark star is already in Oresme: Oresme, Le Livre du ciel et du monde (1968), 515. 90. Harvey, Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia (1913), 161. 91. Bacchelli, ‘Palingenio’ (1999); see also, Palingenius, The Zodiake of Life (1947); and Granada, ‘Bruno, Digges, Palingenio’ (1992). 92. Ariew, ‘The Phases of Venus before 1610’ (1987), assumes that the heavenly bodies must a) shine by their own light, b) be translucent or c) reflect light. The fourth option, that they could be ‘dark’, does not appear in his discussion. 93. Benedetti, Diversarum speculationum (1585), 195. Dreyer, History of the Planetary Systems (1906), 350, does not fully understand this passage. I have not seen it discussed elsewhere (it is not discussed, for example, in Di Bono, ‘L’astronomia Copernicana nell’opera di Giovan Battista Benedetti’ (1987), where it is mistakenly claimed that Benedetti thinks the moon and the Earth are similiar bodies; the passage quoted on 293–4 is not at odds with the interpretation presented here: ‘if the earth were to shine like the sun … ’ – but it doesn’t). 94. Gatti, ‘Bruno and the Gilbert Circle’ (1999). Gilbert, De mundo nostro sublunari philosophia nova (1651), 173. 95. Pumfrey, ‘The Selenographia of William Gilbert’ (2011); and Bacon, Works (1857), Vol. 2, 80. 96. Pumfrey, ‘Your Astronomers and Ours Differ Exceedingly’ (2011).
1. Bartholin, The Anatomical History (1653), 127.
1. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 6, 232; translation from Sharratt, Galileo: Decisive Innovator (1994), 140. 2. Gleeson-White, Double Entry (2011). 3. Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1967), 207–8. 4. For an historiographical survey, see Baldasso, ‘The Role of Visual Representation’ (2006). 5. On the dating, see Kemp, The Science of Art (1990), 9; Camerota, La prospettiva del Rinascimento (2006), 60; Tanturli, ‘Rapporti del Brunelleschi con gli ambienti letterari fiorentini’ (1980), 125. 6. White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (1987), 119; (and, for a cautionary note) Raynaud, L’Hypothèse d’Oxford (1998), 7. Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi (1992). (The description is largely reproduced in White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (1987), 113–17). 8. Key texts are Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (1975); Arnheim, ‘Brunelleschi’s Peepshow’ (1978); Kemp, ‘Science, Non-Science and Nonsense’ (1978); and Kubovy, The Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art (1986). 9. cf. Leonardo, ‘[I]t is impossible for a painting to look as rounded as a mirror image … except if you look at both with one eye only.’ Quoted from Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960), 83. 10. ‘Realism’ and ‘naturalism’ take a number of different forms in art (see, for example, Smith, ‘Art, Science and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe’ (2006); Smith, The Body of the Artisan (2006); and Ackerman, ‘Early Renaissance “Naturalism” and Scientific Illustration’ (1991)). What seems to me particularly important is what Ivins called ‘a rigorous two-way, or reciprocal, metrical relationship between the shapes of objects as definitely located in space and their pictorial representations’ (Ivins, On the Rationalization of Sight (1975), 9). A correspondence theory of truth is already to be found in Aquinas (De veritate, Q.1, A.1–3; cf. Summa theologiae, Q.16); although some would claim there are classical antecedents, I do not find them convincing. We will return to the question of ‘external’ reality. 11. Yiu, ‘The Mirror and Painting’ (2005), is helpful here. Schechner, ‘Between Knowing and Doing’ (2005), who works from surviving mirrors, would seem unduly pessimistic regarding the quality of mirrors in view of the material discussed by Yiu. 12. Vasari, Lives of the Artists (1965); Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture (1972) (Latin and English); and Alberti, On Painting (1991) (English only). 13. Tanturli, ‘Rapporti del Brunelleschi con gli ambienti letterari fiorentini’ (1980). 14. Belting, Florence and Baghdad (2011). 15. Raynaud, L’Hypothèse d’Oxford (1998). 16. Boccaccio quoted from Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960), 53. 17. Hahn, ‘Medieval Mensuration’ (1982). 18. See the appendix in Kemp, The Science of Art (1990), 344–5; and Camerota, La prospettiva del Rinascimento (2006), 63–7. 19. Additional elements are the representation of the three dimensions in two on astrolabes (Aiken, ‘The Perspective Construction of Masaccio’s Trinity Fresco’ (1995)), sundials (Lynes, ‘Brunelleschi’s Perspectives Reconsidered’ (1980)) and Ptolemy’s third method for mapping the Earth on a flat surface (Edgerton, The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry (1991), 152–3). 20. Filarete, Trattato di architettura (1972) (also on the Web at http://fonti-sa.sns.it/TOCFilareteTrattatoDiArchitettura.php). 21. Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror (2002), 18–19. 22. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960), 5. Gombrich is often misinterpreted: for a careful analysis, see Bertamini & Parks, ‘On What People Know about Images on Mirrors’ (2005). Although several authors have discussed this issue in this context (for example, Lynes, ‘Brunelleschi’s Perspectives Reconsidered’ (1980), 89), only Rotman illustrates the effect of this in his representation: Rotman, Signifying Nothing (1993), 15. Strangely, Camerota’s simulation, which appears to use a mirror, does not show this effect, and he seems to assume in the text that the mirror image and the original scene would appear to be the same size: Camerota, La prospettiva del Rinascimento (2006), 62. I can only assume that his images are not mirror images but printed reproductions, and that they are misleading. 23. The established view is that the Latin text preceded the Italian one, in which case Alberti apparently withdrew the claim in a text intended to be read by Brunelleschi (which might support my case). On the other hand, recently, scholars have argued that the Italian text preceded the Latin one, in which case Alberti apparently added the claim, perhaps after discussions with Brunelleschi (which might tell against my case): see Alberti, On Painting (2011). 24. Alberti, De pictura §§31, 32: Latin in Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture (1972); Italian in Alberti, De pictura (1980) (available on the Web). This revision is not noted in Alberti, On Painting (2011), whose source text, strangely, is not the Italian (supposed) original but the Basle Latin editio princeps. 25. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1991), 75–6 n. 3. 26. Camerota, La prospettiva del Rinascimento (2006), 66–7. 27. Field, The Invention of Infinity (1997), 43–61. 28. Vasari, Lives of the Artists (1965), 136. 29. Niceron, La Perspective curieuse (1652). See Massey, Picturing Space (2007). 30. Mackinnon, ‘The Portrait of Fra Luca Pacioli’ (1993). 31. Vergil, On Discovery (2002), 245. 32. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-century Italy (1972). 33. Gleeson-White, Double Entry (2011). I hope to return elsewhere to the influence of double-entry bookkeeping on ideas of rationality in the early modern period. 34. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1991), 143: translating Palladio, Panofsky remarks that ‘orizzonte … in the older terminology always means “vanishing point”.’ 35. Alberti, On Painting (1991), 54 (§19). 36. Hintikka, ‘Aristotelian Infinity’ (1966); it is instructive to read Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654), 62–71, which atttempts to formulate a concept of space. 37. Rotman, Signifying Nothing (1993). 38. Vitruvius Pollio, De architectura (1521). Koyré regarded the concept of infinity as the key distinction between Aristotelian and modern physics: Koyré, Études d’histoire de la pensée scientifique (1973), 165. 39. Moffitt, Painterly Perspective and Piety (2008); Parronchi, ‘Un tabernacolo brunelleschiano’ (1980). 40. Song of Songs 4:12. 41. Edgerton, The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry (1991), 108–47; Long, ‘Power, Patronage and the Authorship of Ars’ (1997); Galluzzi, The Art of Invention (1999); Ackerman, ‘Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci’ (2002); Lefèvre, ‘The Limits of Pictures’ (2003); and Long, ‘Picturing the Machine’ (2004). 42. Chapman, ‘Tycho Brahe in China’ (1984). 43. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923), Vol. 5, 498–514. 44. Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing (2001), 16–22. Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance (1997), which argues that Renaissance anatomy is a continuation of classical anatomy, misses the fundamental transformation which resulted from the mechanical reproduction of illustrations. For an excellent case study of the difficulty of transmitting visual information within a manuscript culture, see Eagleton, ‘Medieval Sundials and Manuscript Sources’ (2006). 45. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing (2008); and Kusukawa, ‘The Sources of Gessner’s Pictures for the Historia animalium’ (2010). 46. Quoted from Ackerman, ‘Early Renaissance “Naturalism” and Scientific Illustration’ (1991), 202. 47. Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication (1953), is the classic text. Not everyone agreed with Fuchs and Vesalius on the value of images: Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature (2011), 124–31, on opposition to Fuchs, and 233–7 on opposition to Vesalius. 48. Swerdlow, ‘Montucla’s Legacy’ (1993), 299; Byrne, ‘A Humanist History of Mathematics?’ (2006). 49. Swerdlow, ‘Montucla’s Legacy’ (1993), 299. 50. Swerdlow, ‘Montucla’s Legacy’ (1993), 188 (translation modified). 51. Wootton, Galileo (2010), 22, 138, 165–6, 210. Compare Boyle, below, p. 416. Thus in its first phase the Scientific Revolution amounts to a rediscovery of Greek mathematical science: Russo, The Forgotten Revolution (2004). 52. The original text is reproduced in Jervis, Cometary Theory in Fifteenth-century Europe (1985), 170–93, along with her translation, 96–112. 53. Jervis, Cometary Theory in Fifteenth-century Europe (1985), 108–10. 54. Bennett, The Divided Circle (1987). 55. Regiomontanus is misleadingly described as generalizing from Ptolemy’s method of calculating the distance of the moon by Barker & Goldstein, ‘The Role of Comets in the Copernican Revolution’ (1988), 311. Ptolemy’s method involved only one measurement, not two: van Helden, Measuring the Universe (1985), 16; and Newton, ‘The Authenticity of Ptolemy’s Parallax Data – Part 1’ (1973). They may well be right that Regiomontanus’s method and the idea of applying it to comets had already occurred to Levi ben Gerson, but this part of his work was not known in the Renaissance. 56. Jervis, Cometary Theory in Fifteenth-century Europe (1985), 114–20. 57. Jervis, Cometary Theory in Fifteenth-century Europe (1985), 125. 58. Gingerich, ‘Tycho Brahe and the Nova of 1572’ (2005). 59. Barker & Goldstein, ‘The Role of Comets in the Copernican Revolution’ (1988), argues that this is an oversimplification, in that an alternative theory of comets, which saw them as lenses focusing the sun’s rays, had been propounded, and this theory was agnostic as to the location of comets. But, in the first place, this theory did not provide an adequate account of change in the heavens, and, in the second, had it provided an account of the path of comets through the heavens, that account would have been incompatible with the crystalline-spheres theory. They are right to argue that cometary theory is not the cause of Copernicanism (as I have argued, the one-sphere theory of the Earth is a crucial precondition), and right to argue that Copernicanism itself preserves much of the old astronomy; wrong to argue that it would have been possible to continue to make ad hoc adjustments to the Aristotelian–Ptolemaic system to account for cometary parallax, and wrong to claim that the idea of a consistent cosmological system is itself new with Kepler and Galileo. 60. Gingerich & Voelkel, ‘Tycho Brahe’s Copernican Campaign’ (1998). 61. There is a French translation: Brahe, Sur des phénomènes plus récents du monde éthéré, livre second (1984). On Brahe, Thoren, Lord of Uraniborg (2007); Mosley, Bearing the Heavens (2007); and Christianson, On Tycho’s Island (2000); on the comet, Hellman, The Comet of 1577 (1971). 62. Donahue, The Dissolution of the Celestial Spheres (1981); Randles, The Unmaking of the Medieval Christian Cosmos (1999); and Lerner, Le Monde des sphères (1997). 63. I am grateful to Christopher M. Graney for confirming this to me. On the decisive role of the telescope in resolving philosophical and astronomical debates, Aggiunti, Oratio de mathematicae laudibus (1627), 20; naturally, in view of the condemnation of Copernicanism in 1616, he avoids going into detail. 64. Bogen & Woodward, ‘Saving the Phenomena’ (1988). 65. Klein, Statistical Visions in Time (1997), 149–51. 66. Hellman, ‘A Bibliography of Tracts and Treatises on the Comet of 1577’ (1934); and Hellman, ‘Additional Tracts on the Comet of 1577’ (1948). 67. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979); Estienne, The Frankfurt Book Fair (1911); and Kepler in Jardine, The Birth of History and Philosophy of Science (1984), 277–80. 68. Barker, ‘Copernicus, the Orbs and the Equant’ (1990) (and see his note 4 for earlier literature). 69. See Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (1994), 59–97; and Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World (2010), xvii–xviii, 201. The phrase originates with Koyré, ‘Galileo and the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century’ (1943), 347, although it is only a restatement of ideas present in the Études of 1939. As it happens, it had already been used in Needham, The Sceptical Biologist (1929), 91. 70. Wootton, Galileo (2010), 58. A similar argument is already found in Calcagnini, Opera aliquot (1544), 389. 71. See p. 164. 72. Vergil, On Discovery (2002), Bk 1, Ch. 18, para. 3. 73. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1991), 57–8. 74. Hale, ‘The Early Development of the Bastion’ (1965); Henninger-Voss, ‘Measures of Success’ (2004); and Gerbino & Johnston, Compass and Rule (2009), 31–44. 75. Othello, I, i, 19. 76. Alberti, On Painting (2011). 77. Cuomo, ‘Shooting by the Book’ (1997). 78. Brook, Vermeer’s Hat (2008), 102. 79. For example, Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (1975), 91–123. 80. Wootton, Bad Medicine (2006), 73–93. 81. For example, Harley, ‘Maps, Knowledge and Power’ (2001). 82. Donne, ‘First Anniversary’, ll. 278–82. 83. Parker, The Army of Flanders (1972), 42–90; Hale, ‘Warfare and Cartography’ (2007). 84. Cipolla, European Culture and Overseas Expansion (1970). 85. For example, Long, ‘Power, Patronage and the Authorship of Ars’ (1997). 86. Jesseph, ‘Galileo, Hobbes and the Book of Nature’ (2004), 193. For further praise of mathematics, see, for example, the inaugural lecture of Galileo’s pupil Niccolò Aggiunti (unconvincingly attributed to Galileo by Peterson, Galileo’s Muse (2011)): Aggiunti, Oratio de mathematicae laudibus (1627). 87. Tuck, ‘Optics and Sceptics’ (1988).
1. 1610 from Georg Kepler’s letter to Kepler: see Kepler, The Six-cornered Snowflake (1966), 65 n. 1. 2. Kepler, The Six-cornered Snowflake (2010), 99. 3. Kepler, The Six-cornered Snowflake (2010), 31. Kepler apparently has in mind a creature smaller than the scabies mite: Kepler, L’Étrenne (1975), 88 n. 21. 4. Kepler, Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger (1965), 9–11. 5. Kepler, Dissertatio cum Nuncio sidereo (1993) (for an English text, Kepler, Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger (1965)). 6. Mario Biagioli has claimed that Galileo had seen a telescope. His evidence is a letter by Sarpi to Francesco Castrino (21 July 1609) in which Sarpi says a telescope has arrived ‘in Italy’. ‘In Italy’ need not mean ‘in Venice’, as is apparent from the context (Biagioli, ‘Did Galileo Copy the Telescope? A “New” Letter by Paolo Sarpi’ (2010)). Bucciantini, Camerota & others, Galileo’s Telescope (2015), 35–6, accept Biagioli’s line of argument at least in so far as they claim, as a fact, that Sarpi had handled a telescope before writing this letter, but this goes beyond what Sarpi says. Sarpi’s ‘new’ letter was first published in 1833. Biagioli puzzles over why Favaro did not include it in Galileo’s Opere. The explanation is simple: Favaro read it as a news report, not a description of Sarpi’s personal experience; on this reading (which seems to me perfectly legitimate), it is irrelevant to the question of Galileo’s knowledge of the telescope. 7. Wootton, Galileo (2010), 87–92; van Helden, ‘The Invention of the Telescope’ (1977). 8. Alexander, ‘Lunar Maps and Coastal Outlines’ (1998); and Pumfrey, ‘Harriot’s Maps of the Moon’ (2009). 9. Wootton, Galileo (2010), 130. 10. Freedberg, ‘Art, Science and the Case of the Urban Bee’ (1998), at 298; Power, Experimental Philosophy (1664), had few and poor illustrations. 11. Wootton, Bad Medicine (2006), 110–38; Wilson, The Invisible World (1995); Ruestow, The Microscope in the Dutch Republic (1996). 12. Plutarch, ‘The Face of the Moon’ (1957), §§21–2, 133–49. 13. Kepler, Kepler’s Somnium (1967); Kepler, Kepler’s Dream (1965). See Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos (2011), 17–44; and Campbell, Wonder and Science (1999), 133–43. 14. Quoted from Wootton, Galileo (2010), 65. 15. Kepler, Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger (1965), 11, 34–9, 44–5; Campanella to Galileo, 13 Jan. 1611, Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 11, 21–2. 16. Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), 98–9. 17. Kepler, Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger (1965), passim, but especially 38: ‘Therefore, Galileo, you will not envy our predecessors their due praise. What you report as having been quite recently observed by your own eyes, they predicted, long before you, as necessarily so.’ 18. Alexander, ‘Lunar Maps and Coastal Outlines’ (1998), 346–7. 19. Gingerich & van Helden, ‘From Occhiale to Printed Page’ (2003), 260–1. 20. My discussion here and in the following paragraphs draws extensively on Palmieri, ‘Galileo and the Discovery of the Phases of Venus’ (2001). 21. Shank, ‘Mechanical Thinking’ (2007), 22–6, on Regiomontanus; Ragep, ‘Copernicus and His Islamic Predecessors’ (2007), discusses the Islamic tradition, which he characterizes as a failure (71). 22. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 10, 483. 23. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 10, 409–505, Vol. 11, 11–12; Kepler, Dioptrice (1611), 11–12; and Kepler, Dioptrice (1611), 21–3. 24. Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo (1994), 199–202. 25. Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo (1994), 186–93. 26. Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo (1994), 193–5; Lattis does not seem to have grasped that no one (except perhaps Galileo) had yet seen Venus ‘as a circle like the full moon’ – superior conjunction had last occurred in May 1610 and would not reoccur until December 2011. 27. Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo (1994), 205–16. 28. Galilei & Scheiner, On Sunspots (2008), 173. 29. Galilei & Scheiner, On Sunspots (2008), 93. 30. Galilei & Scheiner, On Sunspots (2008), 196. 31. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 11, 177; Galilei & Scheiner, On Sunspots (2008), 265. 32. Hooke, Micrographia, or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies (1665), 234. 33. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 2, 1052; Pascal, Pensées, no. 199; and Locke, An Essay (1690), 277, 296. 34. Ball, Curiosity (2012), 215–55; and Cressy, ‘Early Modern Space Travel’ (2006). 35. Act II, scene 4. The text was not published until 1623. 36. Godwin, The Man in the Moone (2009). 37. Empson, Essays on Renaissance Literature (1993), 220–54; Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos (2011), 45–55; Campbell, Wonder and Science (1999), 155–71; and Campbell, ‘Speedy Messengers’ (2011). 38. Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos (2011), 56–63; and Chapman, ‘A World in the Moon – Wilkins and His Lunar Voyage of 1640’ (1991). 39. Cyrano de Bergerac, Les États et empires de la lune et du soleil (2004); Darmon, Le Songe libertin (2004); Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos (2011), 63–71; and Campbell, Wonder and Science (1999), 171–80. 40. Borel, A New Treatise (1658), 93–4. 41. Hunter, ‘Science and Astrology’ (1995), 280–1. Hunter, in his notes, mistakes Borel (Borellus) for Giovanni Alphonso Borelli (Borellius). 42. Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1955); Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos (2011), 79–94; and Campbell, Wonder and Science (1999), 143–9. 43. Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos (2011), 95–125. 44. Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism (1692), 241–2. 45. Chang, Inventing Temperature (2004), 10. 46. Crease, World in the Balance (2011). 47. Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos (2011), 139. 48. Griffith, Mercurius Cambro-Britannicus, or, News from Wales (1652), preface (*2r). 49. Voltaire, ‘Micromégas’: A Study (1950); but on the date of the composition, Barber, ‘The Genesis of Voltaire’s “Micromégas” ’ (1957). 50. Ball, Curiosity (2012), 222. 51. Power, Experimental Philosophy (1664), preface (c2v–c3r). 52. Ball, Curiosity (2012), 318; but ‘may’ is an important word here, as Hooke does not actually mention the microscope in this context (Hooke, The Posthumous Works (1705), 140). 53. Bertoloni Meli, Mechanism, Experiment, Disease (2011). 54. Pinto-Correia, The Ovary of Eve (1997). 55. Pascal, Pensées (1958), no. 72. 56. Cyrano de Bergerac, Les États et empires de la lune et du soleil (2004), 116–17; Pascal, Pensées (1958); and Borges, Other Inquisitions (1964), ‘Pascal’, 100. Borges thinks this idea was already present in Anaxagoras, but this seems wrong: see Vlastos, ‘Wege und Formen frühgriechischen Denkens, Hermann Fränkel’ (1959). 57. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (2012), 158–9. 58. Cyrano de Bergerac, The Comical History (1687), 13–14. 59. Pascal, Pensées (1958), no. 206. 60. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and Roberval’ (2002), 170. (Malcolm argues that the view may be as much Hobbes’s as Roberval’s.) 61. Cyrano de Bergerac, The Comical History (1687), 41. 62. Locke, An Essay (1690), 46. 63. Aggiunti, Oratio de mathematicae laudibus (1627), 19–20. 64. See, among many examples, Shapin & Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), 6–7.
1. Popper, Objective Knowledge (1972), 23.
1. Barthes, ‘Le Discours de l’histoire’ (1967). 2. Kuhn, The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science (1992), 6; reprinted in Kuhn, The Road since Structure (2000). 3. Kepler, Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, Books 4 & 5 (1995), 5. 4. The major works are: Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact (1998); Shapiro, A Culture of Fact (2000); and Daston & Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (1998), 215–53. There are a number of significant essays by Daston: ‘The Factual Sensibility’ (1988); ‘Marvellous Facts and Miraculous Evidence’ (1991); ‘Baconian Facts’ (1994); ‘Strange Facts, Plain Facts’ (1996); ‘The Cold Light of Facts’ (1997); ‘The Language of Strange Facts’ (1997); and ‘Perché i fatti sono brevi?’ (2001). Highly influential are Shapin & Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), 22–79; and Shapin, A Social History of Truth (1994), 193–242. 5. This is presumably what misled Lorraine Daston into stating that the modern usage of the word ‘fact’ is contemporary with Bacon. OED gives two early usages of ‘fact’ under impersonal definitions, but they are, in fact, agency usages. The earliest impersonal usage it records is from Evelyn, discussed above. Daston and I also offer different accounts of how fact-establishing originates: she turns to the establishing of strange and wonderful facts (monstrous births, for example), while I suggest Kepler was establishing facts. 6. Paula Findlen thinks that Pliny the Elder used the word factum to refer to a singular piece of information; his Natural History would then be the source of the modern concept of the fact. She cites Pliny, Natural History, preface, 17–18 in the Loeb edition: Findlen, ‘Natural History’ (2008), 437–8; Pliny, Natural History (1938), Vol. 1, 12–13. This is an uncharacteristic lapse. The word factum does not appear in the passage cited, and the word which Rackham translates as ‘fact’ is, as one would expect, res. 7. An early example is Bossuet, Quakerism À-la-Mode (1698), 91: ‘To what purpose are his Arguments, when Matters of Fact speak?’ 8. Hume, Philosophical Essays (1748), 47 (First Enquiry, Part 4, section 1). 9. Hume, Political Discourses (1752), 211 (‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’). 10. Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646), a5r (‘To the Reader’). 11. Barnhart, The American College Dictionary (1959). 12. Latour, ‘The Force and the Reason of Experiment’ (1990), 63–5. 13. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995), 1–30, 121. 14. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 10, 226–7. 15. See below, p. 332. 16. Wootton, ‘Accuracy and Galileo’ (2010). 17. Hume, Political Discourses (1752), 155–261. For two examples of exceptionally early attempts at statistical accuracy, see Giovanni Villani’s Cronica for 1338 (discussed in Biller, Measure of Multitude (2000), 406–14), and Giovanni Botero’s contribution to Tolomei, Guicciardini & others, Tre discorsi appartenenti alla grandezza delle citta (1588); the most recent modern edition is in Botero, On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities, 1588 (2012). 18. McCormick, William Petty (2009); Holmes, ‘Gregory King’ (1977); Slack, ‘Measuring the National Wealth in Seventeenth-century England’ (2004); and Slack, ‘Government and Information in Seventeenth-century England’ (2004). 19. Kepler, New Astronomy (1992), 210–11. 20. Goldstein & Hon, ‘Kepler’s Move from Orbs to Orbits’ (2005). 21. Kepler, New Astronomy (1992), 405, 410–16. 22. Gingerich, ‘Johannes Kepler’ (1989), 63. 23. Gingerich, ‘Circles of the Gods’ (1994), 23. 24. Shapin & Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), 22–79. 25. Westman, The Copernican Question (2011), 401. (I have modified Westman’s translation; there is a French translation, Kepler, L’ Étoile nouvelle dans le serpentaire (1998)). 26. Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’ (1986). 27. Kepler, New Astronomy (1992), 27. 28. Owen, ‘Tithenai ta phainomena’ (1975). For seventeenth-century English attacks on the notion that consensus could provide a reliable basis for knowledge, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric (1996), 257–67. 29. For an example of someone wrestling with this, see Piccolomini, La prima parte delle theoriche (1558), 29r–30v, which argues that public opinion is to be trusted in questions of morality but not natural philosophy. 30. Gingerich, ‘Johannes Kepler’ (1989), 63. 31. Duhem, To Save the Phenomena (1969). 32. Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know? (2012), 136–54, 209–17. 33. Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know? (2012), 140; the whole discussion of garlic and magnets covers 136–54. 34. Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646), 67. 35. Della Porta, Natural Magick (1658), 212. 36. Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know? (2012), 143. This is Lehoux’s translation of Plutarch, Quaestiones convivales, Bk 2, Ch. 7. 37. Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know? (2012), 145–6. 38. Della Porta, Natural Magick (1658), 10. 39. Shea, Designing Experiments (2003), 116–17; Augst, ‘Descartes’ Compendium on Music’ (1965). Descartes also explained why a corpse bleeds in the presence of its murderer: Daston & Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (1998), 241. 40. Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654), 358. 41. Balbiani, La magia naturalis (2001), 20. 42. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature (1994), 194–229; Tarrant, ‘Giambattista della Porta and the Roman Inquisition’ (2013), which simplifies Porta’s response to censorship; and Valente, ‘Della Porta e l’Inquisizione’ (1999). 43. Clubb, Giambattista della Porta, Dramatist (1965), 23–4, 26, 51. 44. Della Porta, Natural Magick (1658), Book 6; della Porta, La Magie naturelle (1678), Book 3, Ch. 4. 45. Della Porta, La Magie naturelle (1678), préface aux lecteurs (A4v). For some reason the prefaces are missing from the Italian translation, della Porta, De i miracoli (1560); della Porta, Natural Magick (1658), preface to the reader. 46. Garzoni, Trattati della calamità (2005); Ugaglia, ‘The Science of Magnetism before Gilbert’ (2006). 47. Muraro, Giambattista della Porta, mago e scienziato (1978), 143–71. 48. Hobson, ‘A Sale by Candle in 1608’ (1971); Grendler, ‘Book Collecting in Counter-Reformation Italy’ (1981). 49. Garzoni, Trattati della calamità (2005), 81–2. 50. Gilbert as the first modern: Zilsel, ‘The Origin of William Gilbert’s Scientific Method’ (1941); Monica Ugaglia argues that Gilbert had both direct access to Garzoni and to a lost manuscript by Paolo Sarpi. The evidence seems to me less than conclusive (and Sarpi’s manuscript may well have post-dated Gilbert’s book). Garzoni, Trattati della calamità (2005), 60–79. 51. Della Porta, Natural Magick (1658), 190. 52. Della Porta, Natural Magick (1658), 212. 53. Della Porta, Natural Magick (1658), 213. 54. Della Porta, Natural Magick (1658), 214. 55. Della Porta, Natural Magick (1658), preface to the reader. 56. Della Porta, Natural Magick (1658), 8–10. 57. Cesi, Mineralogia (1636), 40 (Lehoux’s translation), 534 (the major discussion, which is not cited by Lehoux). 58. Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know? (2012), 144. 59. An almost identical point is made by Lehoux himself in an earlier version of his argument: Lehoux, ‘Tropes, Facts and Empiricism’ (2003), 13 n. 12, where he says that Alessandro Vicentini ‘is really making an old-fashioned generalized appeal to experiences of the world rather than to experiment as we understand it’. cf. Dear, Discipline and Experience (1995), 149. 60. Quoted from Garzoni, Trattati della calamità (2005), 91 n. 4. 61. Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica (1672), 70. (I quote the 1672 edition as the 1646 text appears corrupt.) 62. Rohault, Traité de physique (1671), 234. 63. De Boodt, Gemmarum et lapidum historia (1609), 225. The authority of the sailors presumably derived from the traditional principle that Boyle summarized as ‘the Logicians Rule, the Skilfull Artists should be Credited in their own Art’ (Serjeantson, ‘Testimony and Proof’ (1999), 218; Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646), 26). 64. De Boodt, Gemmarum et lapidum historia (1609), 222, 234–5. 65. De Boodt, Gemmarum et lapidum historia (1609), 60. 66. Jonkers, Earth’s Magnetism in the Age of Sail (2003), 166. 67. Helmont & Charleton, A Ternary of Paradoxes (1649), 40–1; Fletcher & Fletcher, Athanasius Kircher (2011), 150; and Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923), Vol. 2, 310–11. 68. Midgeley, A New Treatise of Natural Philosophy (1687), 31. 69. Ross, Arcana microcosmi (1652), 110. 70. Starkey, Nature’s Explication and Helmont’s Vindication (1657), b7v (‘Epistle to the Reader’). For Galileo’s version of this argument, see Wootton, Galileo (2010), 164. 71. Nor do I wish to overstate de Boodt’s modernity: he had an interest in alchemy, on which see Purs, ‘Anselmus Boëtius de Boodt’ (2004). 72. Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays (1669), 33 = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 2, 29–30; and Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays (1661), 31, 27, 7 = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 2, 28 (where ‘barely’ is mistranscribed as ‘basely’), 27, 13. Note that Boyle is not particularly concerned about the social status of his witnesses, as he would be if authority were what was at issue (contra Shapin, A Social History of Truth (1994)); what matters is that they have direct knowledge and enough expertise not to misinterpret their experience. Note also that we are not dealing here with a peculiarly English empiricism. 73. Boyle, Experimenta et observationes physicæ (1691), 30 = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 11, 386. 74. The best introductions to the world that existed before the scientific method became common sense remain Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief (1982), first published 1942; Koyré, ‘Du monde de “l’à-peu-près” à l’univers de la précision’ (1971), first published 1948; and Febvre, ‘De l’à peu près à la précision’ (1950). 75. Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), 233–4. 76. Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), 24; see also Glanvill, Plus ultra (1668), 77–9. 77. On the new culture of eyewitness testimony, see Frisch, The Invention of the Eyewitness (2004). 78. Della Porta, De telescopio (1962). 79. Garzoni, Trattati della calamità (2005), 94. 80. Adorno, ‘The Discursive Encounter of Spain and America’ (1992). 81. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Leben (1793), Vol. 3, 177–8 (‘Ueber das Wörtlein “Thatsache” ’); Grimms Wörterbuch gives 1756 as the date for the first use of ‘Thatsache’. 82. Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646), 3. 83. III.vii.44–7. 84. Daston and Park are thus wrong to see innovation in Bacon’s distinction between matters of fact and matters of judgement: Daston & Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (1998), 230. 85. Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water (1986). 86. Bacon, Sylva sylvarum (1627), 243 = Bacon, Works (1857), Vol. 2, 642. 87. Johnson, in his Dictionary, relies on an earlier passage: ‘Those Effects, which are wrought by the Percussion of the Sense, and by Things in Fact, are produced likewise, in some degree, by the Imagination.’ Bacon, Sylva sylvarum (1627), 206 = Bacon, Works (1857), Vol. 2, 598. 88. Biggs, Mataeotechnia medicinae praxeos (1651), 37. 89. Ross, Arcana microcosmi (1652), 132. 90. Evelyn, The Diary (1955), Vol. 2, 38. 91. Daston, ‘Baconian Facts’ (1994). But Daston does not attribute the word ‘fact’ to Bacon, unlike Shapiro, ‘The Concept “Fact” ’ (1994), 15–16, which fails to distinguish Latin and English usages. 92. Wootton, Galileo (2010), 99–100. See also Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 5, 389. 93. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact (2000), 133–5. 94. See also Roberval’s use of ‘fait’ to mean ‘fact’ twice in an undated fragment: Pascal, Oeuvres (1923), 49–51 (Roberval died in 1675, which establishes a terminus ante quem). The text may date to 1648. 95. http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/dictionnaires-dautrefois; one has to search under ‘faire’. 96. Serjeantson, ‘Testimony and Proof’ (1999), n. 84, gives two examples: Bacon, Works (1857), Vol. 1, 402, Vol. 3, 736. To these may be added: Vol. 3, 775, and perhaps Vol. 1, 210 (where the usage is evidently metaphorical). 97. Digby, Two Treatises (1644), 330. 98. ‘Betwixt our Divine and Physician, there is at all no dispute de facto, about the verity of the fact; for both unanimously concede the cure to be wrought upon the wounded person: The contention lies onely in this, that the Physician asserts this Magnetical Cure to be purely Natural, but the Divine will needs have it Satanical’ (Helmont & Charleton, A Ternary of Paradoxes (1649), 4); ‘Inter theologum & medicum non est quaestio facti’ (Helmont, Ortus medicinae (1652), 595b); ‘I know an Herb, commonly obvious, which if it be rubbed, and cherished in thy hand, until it wax warm, you may hold fast the hand of another person, until that also grow warm, and he shall continually burn with an ardent love, and fixt dilection of thy person, for many days together. I held in my hand, first bathed in the steam of this love procuring plant the foot of a dog, for some few minutes: The dog, wholly renouncing his old Mistress, instantly followed me, and courted me so hotly, that in the night he lamentably howled at my Chamber door, that I should open and admit him. There are some now living in Bruxels, who are witnesses to me, and can attest the truth of this fact’ (14); ‘Adsunt Bruxellae mihi hujus facti testes’ (599a); ‘Since in earnest I have held forth examples of the Fact, in Sublunaries, and brought upon the stage very many and very apposite instances, as that of the insititious or engrafted Nose, of the Saphire, of Arsmarte, Asarum, and most other Herbs’ (35); ‘Siquidem in sublunaribus exempla facti’ (604b); ‘For it is an action of insolent petulancy for any, therefore to deny the contingence of that fact, which is every where so trivial and frequent, that it can hardly escape the observation of any’ (35); ‘Idcirco inseolentis est petulantiae, negare facti esse’ (604b) 99. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), 21, 30–1, 40, 200; Hobbes, Of Libertie and Necessitie (1654), 75. 100. EEBO assumes he is George Wither, but this seems unlikely to me. 101. Hobbes, Humane Nature (1650), 31–41; cf. Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (2006), 31, 47–8; and Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), 189–93. 102. Pascal, Les Provinciales, or, The Mysterie of Jesuitisme (1657); and Pascal, Les Provinciales, or, The Mystery of Jesuitisme (1658). 103. Keynes, John Evelyn, a Study in Bibliophily (1937), 119–24; Jansen, De Blaise Pascal à Henry Hammond (1954). 104. Digby, A Late Discourse (1658), 4. 105. Della Porta, Natural Magick (1658), 229. See Hedrick, ‘Romancing the Salve’ (2008), 162 n. 5; and McCord, ‘Healing by Proxy’ (2009). 106. Helmont & Charleton, A Ternary of Paradoxes (1649), d1r. Charleton’s change of mind is often attributed to a conversion to mechanism: this is disputed by Lewis, ‘Walter Charleton and Early Modern Eclecticism’ (2001). 107. Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654), 380–2. 108. Weld, A History of the Royal Society, with Memories of the Presidents (1848), Vol. 2, 527. 109. Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society (1667), 47–8, 70; also 73, 99, 359. 110. Pomata, ‘Observation Rising: Birth of an Epistemic Genre, 1500–1650’ (2011). 111. De Bils, The Coppy of a Certain Large Act (1659), A2v = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 1, 43; Boyle, The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 1636–1691 (2001), Vol. 1, 396. (I owe this reference to Michael Hunter.) 112. For example, Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact (1998), 112–15. 113. Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), 159–68. 114. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (2002), 317–35. 115. Hedrick, ‘Romancing the Salve’ (2008), 184. 116. Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society (1667), 36. 117. Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), 207. 118. Salusbury (ed.), Mathematical Collections (1661), Vol. 1: 240, 413, 428, 445 (twice), 455; Vol. 2: 57; and de facto, which, like ‘fact’ has acquired a new sense: Vol. 1, 21, 161, 367, 376, 401, 455. 119. Boyle, New Experiments Physico-mechanical (1660), 229–32 = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 1, 238–9; Galilei, Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche (1638), 12. 120. Hunter, Establishing the New Science (1989), article 14, 42 (but the upper part shows not ‘the earth and planets’ but Jupiter and its moons, discovered by Galileo). 121. This revolution is best described in Serjeantson, ‘Testimony and Proof’ (1999). 122. Pierre Du Moulin in 1598, quoted from Serjeantson, ‘Testimony and Proof’ (1999), 203, with a revision to Serjeantson’s translation. 123. Pascal, Oeuvres complètes (1964), 772–85; Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646), 25–6. 124. Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646), 26. 125. Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), 143; Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society (1667), 25, 29. 126. In this respect, the argument of Shapin, A Social History of Truth (1994), is incontrovertible. 127. Daston, ‘Strange Facts, Plain Facts’ (1996); and Daston, ‘The Language of Strange Facts’ (1997). 128. Berkel, Isaac Beeckman (2013), 144–5. 129. Clark, Thinking with Demons (1997). 130. Arnauld & Nicole, La Logique (1970), Part 4, Ch. 14. 131. Accademia del Cimento, Saggi di naturali esperienze (1667), 146; Accademia del Cimento, Essayes of Natural Experiments (1684), 77. 132. Westrum, ‘Science and Social Intelligence about Anomalies’ (1978). 133. Nield, Incoming! (2011), 67–72. 134. Pantin, ‘New Philosophy and Old Prejudices’ (1999), 260. Gilbert uses the phrase ‘libere philosophare’ in the preface to the reader of De magnete. 135. Goulding, ‘Henry Savile and the Tychonic World-system’ (1995), 175. 136. Jacquot, ‘Thomas Harriot’s Reputation for Impiety’ (1952), 167. 137. Pascal, Oeuvres complètes (1964), 779. 138. Sutton, ‘The Phrase “Libertas Philosophandi” ’ (1953); Broman, ‘The Habermasian Public Sphere’ (1998); Daston, ‘The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters’ (1991). 139. Latour, ‘Visualization and Cognition’ (1990). 140. Stigler, ‘John Craig and the Probability of History’ (1986). 141. Montaigne, Essayes (1613), A3v (prefatory poems). 142. Gilbert, On the Magnet (1900), ii. 143. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 10, 441; Schneider, Disputatio physica de terrae motu (1608), seems the best candidate. It is worth remarking that some Renaissance scientists held a theory according to which the material out of which the Earth is made is in imperceptible movement, as it transmutes into other elements and encounters heat and water, as a result constantly shifting the Earth’s centre of gravity (for example, Prosdocimo de’ Beldomandi). This theory of the movement of the Earth is presumably the subject of the lost treatise on the subject by Galileo’s friend and mentor Guidobaldo del Monte, as there is no reason to think that he was a Copernican (Grant, Planets, Stars and Orbs (1994), 624–6; Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923), Vol. 4, 239, Vol. 7, 230, 601). 144. Reiss & Hinderliter, ‘Money and Value in the Sixteenth Century’ (1979). 145. Bayle, Projet (1692); Joubert and Primerose were known to Browne: Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646), a5r. 146. Grafton, The Footnote (1997). 147. Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654), 3. 148. For example, Grafton, ‘Review: The Importance of Being Printed’ (1980); for a manifesto laying out an alternative approach to those of Eisenstein and Latour, Johns, ‘Science and the Book in Modern Cultural Historiography’ (1998). 149. Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della pittura (1651) = Traitté de la Peinture (2012): 382–3. 150. Mosley, Bearing the Heavens (2007); and Gingerich & Westman, ‘The Wittich Connection’ (1988). 151. Buringh & van Zanden, ‘Charting the “Rise of the West” ’ (2009). 152. G. W., The Modern States-man (1653), 21–3. 153. Culverwel, An Elegant and Learned Discourse (1652), 171, 138. 154. Below, p. 457. 155. Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734), Vol. 1, preface (b3r). 156. Quoted in Carpenter, John Theophilus Desaguliers (2011), 70.
1. Antinori, ‘Notizie istoriche’ (1841), 27. 2. On barometer/vacuum experiments, Waard, L’Expérience barométrique (1936); Middleton, The History of the Barometer (1964); and Shea, Designing Experiments (2003). The primary sources for Pascal’s experiments are in Pascal, Oeuvres complètes (1964), Vol. 2; key texts are translated in Pascal, The Physical Treatises of Pascal (1937). 3. Boyle, A Defence (1662), 48 = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 3, 50. As Hunter and Davis note, Boyle acknowledges the phrase as coming from Bacon, but Bacon’s phrase was instantia crucis (he was thinking of an observation rather than an experiment), so that later uses of the phrase experimentum crucis by Hooke and Newton evidently derive from Boyle. (Boyle’s role in establishing the phrase and, consequently, his reference to Pascal are missed in the earlier literature: for example, Dear, Discipline and Experience (1995), 22.) 4. Newton, ‘A Letter of Mr Isaac Newton’ (1672), 3078. 5. For a slightly earlier example that lacks only rapid dissemination, Graney, ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ (2012); and Koyré, Études d’histoire de la pensée scientifique (1973), 289–319; for another alternative candidate, see Gassendi’s 1640 public experiments to prove the relativity of motion: Koyré, Études d’histoire de la pensée scientifique (1973), 329. For an excellent survey of seventeenth-century experimentation, see Bertoloni Meli, ‘Experimentation in the Physical Sciences of the Seventeenth Century’ (2013). 6. On Roberval’s experiments and arguments, see Auger, Un savant méconnu (1962), 117–33; and Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and Roberval’ (2002), 193–6. The difficulty in reaching agreement about the meaning of the Torricellian experiments is well illustrated by Hale, Difficiles nugae (1674). 7. Dear, ‘The Meanings of Experience’ (2006), 106; Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking (1994), 331–2, 349. The key article on experiment is Schmitt, ‘Experience and Experiment’ (1969), whose scope is much broader than its title would suggest. 8. Bacon, Works (1857), Vol. 8, 100–1. 9. Hobbes, Humane Nature (1650), 35–6; see Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature (2002), for an earlier example of this distinction. 10. Daston & Lunbeck (eds.), Histories of Scientific Observation (2011). 11. The earliest occurrence I can find of expérimentation (apart from in Italian–French dictionaries and a charter dating from 1639) is in Scarpa, Réflexions et observations anatomico-chirurgicales sur l’anéurisme (1809), 3, a translation from Italian. 12. Valente, ‘Della Porta e l’Inquisizione’ (1999), 422. 13. For lively debates on this subject, see Pesic, ‘Proteus Rebound’ (2008); Merchant, ‘The Violence of Impediments’ (2008); Vickers, ‘Francis Bacon, Feminist Historiography and the Dominion of Nature’ (2008); and Park, ‘Response to Brian Vickers’ (2008). The fact that nature is female does not seem to me particularly relevant in this case – men and women were tortured indiscriminately. Compare the two legal mottos magister rerum usus and magistra rerum experientia: the fact that experience is a mistress, and practice (usus) a master, is irrelevant. Or our own tradition of referring to boats as female. On the other hand, it does matter to Machiavelli that fortune is a woman who can consequently be overpowered, and so it might be relevant that nature is female. 14. Gilbert, De magnete (1600), ‘Verborum quorundam interpretatio’ (*vi[r]). There are two translations of Gilbert, of which the first is to be preferred: Gilbert, On the Magnet (1900); Gilbert, De magnete (1951). On pointing, Gilbert, On the Magnet (1900), ii. Shapin introduced the concept of ‘virtual witnessing’ in the context of Boyle’s experimental reports: Shapin, ‘Pump and Circumstance’ (1984), but there is virtual witnessing before Boyle; in particular, Pecquet, New Anatomical Experiments (1653), a work read by Boyle, uses all the literary techniques identified by Shapin in its description of vivisections. (I owe this point to Jamie Newell.) 15. The discussion that follows is much influenced by Palmieri, ‘The Cognitive Development of Galileo’s Theory of Buoyancy’ (2005), although my interpretation differs from his. The key source in translation is in Drake, Cause, Experiment and Science (1981), and a crucial discussion is Shea, Galileo’s Intellectual Revolution (1972), 16–22. 16. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 4, 52–4. 17. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 4, 54–5. 18. Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know? (2012), 143 n. 22; Lindberg, ‘Alhazen’s Theory of Vision’ (1967). The Latin translation has been newly edited: Ibn al-Haytham, Alhacen’s Theory of Visual Perception (2001) and subsequent volumes. 19. King, ‘Medieval Thought-experiments’ (1991). 20. Boyle, Hydrostatical Paradoxes (1666), 5–6 = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 5, 206; on Galileo, Wootton, Galileo (2010), 78 (the mistaken view originates with Koyré, ‘Galilée et l’expérience de Pise’ (1973), first published in 1937). 21. Westfall, Never at Rest (1980), 60–4. 22. Sacrobosco, Peuerbach & others, Textus sphaerae (1508), 87v. 23. Eastwood, ‘Robert Grosseteste’s Theory of the Rainbow’ (1966). 24. Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking (1994), 348. For an example of someone falsely claiming to have conducted an experiment, see ibid., 380–1. Crombie’s evolving interpretation of Grosseteste can be traced from his earliest texts, in which Grosseteste is a founder of experimental science (Crombie, ‘Grossesteste’s Position in the History of Science’ (1955)), through his later texts, to the very cautious formulations with which he ended his career: see Eastwood, ‘On the Continuity of Western Science’ (1992). For further criticism, Eastwood, ‘Grosseteste’s “Quantitative” Law of Refraction’ (1967); Eastwood, ‘Medieval Empiricism’ (1968); Serene, ‘Robert Grosseteste on Induction’ (1979); and Southern in Crombie (ed.), Scientific Change (1963), 305. 25. Cranz, Reorientations of Western Thought (2006). 26. Eastwood, ‘Medieval Empiricism’ (1968), 306–11; and Serene, ‘Robert Grosseteste on Induction’ (1979), 103. 27. The issues here are complex, and I do not pretend to have a full grasp of them. As I see it, there are three distinct phases: for the Greeks, the knower is one with the known; for the medieval philosophers, the knower can have true sensory knowledge of the known; and for the early modern scientists, sensation comes to be an unreliable instrument. See: Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham (1988); Smith, ‘Knowing Things Inside Out’ (1990); the opening section of Buchwald & Feingold, Newton and the Origin of Civilization (2013); Tuck, ‘Optics and Sceptics’ (1988); and Cranz, Reorientations of Western Thought (2006). 28. Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1729) (Cotes’s preface, unpaginated). An alternative view, of course, is that much that happens in nature is not regular and predictable: Céard, La Nature et les prodiges (1996); and Daston & Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (1998). 29. Quoted from Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking (1994), 1102 (for the original text, see Sarpi, Pensieri naturali (1996), 3). 30. Webster, ‘William Harvey’s Conception of the Heart as a Pump’ (1965). 31. Pérez-Ramos, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science (1988). 32. Weeks, ‘Francis Bacon and the Art–Nature Distinction’ (2007). 33. Dear, Discipline and Experience (1995), 153–61. 34. See further discussion in Chapter 12. 35. Grant (ed.), A Source Book in Medieval Science (1974), 435–41; and Crombie, Robert Grosseteste (1953), 233–59. 36. Boyer, The Rainbow from Myth to Mathematics (1959), 125; and Topdemir, ‘Kamal al-Din al-Farisi’s Explanation of the Rainbow’ (2007). 37. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste (1953), 233. 38. Boyer, The Rainbow from Myth to Mathematics (1959), 141. 39. Trutfetter, Summa in tota[m] physicen (1514); Trutfetter, Summa philosophiae naturalis (1517). 40. Buchwald, ‘Descartes’ Experimental Journey’ (2008). 41. Sabra, ‘The Commentary that Saved the Text’ (2007). 42. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1949), preface to the second edition (1787). 43. To be exact, it first appeared in print before 1520, but the edition is extraordinarily rare, and there is no evidence of anyone ever having read it. The standard edition is Peregrinus, Opera (1995). 44. Pumfrey, Latitude: The Magnetic Earth (2001). 45. Digges & Digges, A Prognostication Everlasting (1576), O3v–O4r. 46. See the references to him in Melchior Inchofer’s justification for the condemnation of Galileo in Blackwell, Behind the Scenes at Galileo’s Trial (2006). 47. Pumfrey, ‘O tempora, O magnes!’ (1989). 48. Zilsel, ‘The Sociological Roots of Science’ (1942), and Zilsel, ‘The Origin of William Gilbert’s Scientific Method’ (1941) provide the classic Marxist account. For de Maricourt, Radelet de Grave & Speiser, ‘Le “De magnete” de Pierre de Maricourt’ (1975), 203 (French translation). 49. Gilbert, On the Magnet (1900), 7–8. 50. Wootton, Galileo (2010), 91–2, 102–3. 51. On Harriot, Schemmel, The English Galileo (2008); and Shirley, Thomas Harriot (1983). 52. Wootton, Galileo (2010), 36–42; Wootton, ‘Accuracy and Galileo’ (2010), 49; Dear, Discipline and Experience (1995), 67–85, 124–44; Bertoloni Meli, ‘The Role of Numerical Tables in Galileo and Mersenne’ (2004); Sarasohn, ‘Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc’ (1993); and Palmerino, ‘Experiments, Mathematics, Physical Causes’ (2010). 53. Wootton, Galileo (2010), 168–9; Wootton, ‘Galileo: Reflections on Failure’ (2011), 16–18; Shea, Designing Experiments (2003), 17–24. 54. Shea, Designing Experiments (2003), 24–39; Shank, ‘Torricelli’s Barometer’ (2012). 55. Pascal, Oeuvres (1923), 486; and Shea, Designing Experiments (2003), 41–7. The public performance was not a peculiarly French phenomenon: Valeriano Magni performed his own version of the Torricellian experiment in Warsaw in July 1647 in front of the king, queen and courtiers (Dear, Discipline and Experience (1995), 187–8). 56. Koyré, ‘Galilée et l’expérience de Pise’ (1973) (first published 1937); Wootton, Galileo (2010), 273–4 n. 10; Devreese & Vanden Berghe, ‘Magic is No Magic’ (2008), 152–4. 57. Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654), table of contents for Ch. 5; and Shank, ‘Torricelli’s Barometer’ (2012), 162; see also Glanvill, Plus ultra (1668), 94; and Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays (1661), 189 = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 2, 155. 58. Shea, Designing Experiments (2003), 47–127. 59. Webster, ‘The Discovery of Boyle’s Law’ (1965); Pecquet, New Anatomical Experiments (1653). 60. Bertoloni Meli, ‘The Collaboration between Anatomists and Mathematicians in the Mid-seventeenth Century’ (2008), 672 (where the concept is attributed to Pecquet rather than Roberval). 61. Boyle, A Defence (1662), 63–4. The question of the nature of the various contributions made by Boyle’s collaborators is a vexed one. Agassi, ‘Who Discovered Boyle’s Law?’ (1977), makes some valuable arguments but also contains some basic errors (regarding the date, for example, of Hooke’s first experiments); Pugliese, ‘The Scientific Achievement of Robert Hooke’ (1982) is reliable. 62. Hunter, Boyle (2009), 190; Boyle, A Continuation of New Experiments (1682), a3v, a4r = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 9, 128–9. Boyle had, it is true, laid out the principle of acknowledging others in 1661 (Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays (1661), 32 = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 2, 29), but he certainly did not live by it then. 63. Hale, Difficiles nugae (1674), 8. 64. Ugaglia, ‘The Science of Magnetism before Gilbert’ (2006), 72–3; Duhem, ‘Le Principe de Pascal’ (1905); and Pascal, Oeuvres complètes (1964), Vol. 2, 1037 – the work was published only posthumously, but it seems to have been ready for the press in 1654; there is nothing to suggest that Pascal intended to add any acknowledgement of his sources. 65. Abercromby, Academia scientiarum (1687). Sprat distinguished authors from ‘Finishers’: Iliffe, ‘In the Warehouse’ (1992), 32. 66. Mersenne describes his virtual academy as being ‘entirely mathematical’: Garber, ‘On the Frontlines of the Scientific Revolution’ (2004), 156. 67. Pascal, Oeuvres (1923), 161–2. 68. Schott, Mechanica hydraulico-pneumatica (1657). 69. Webster, ‘New Light on the Invisible College’ (1974). 70. Pascal, Oeuvres complètes (1964), 777–85; and Shea, Designing Experiments (2003), 187–207. 71. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants (1965). 72. Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know? (2012), 10–11. 73. The first occurrence of the phrase is apparently 1635: Anstey, ‘Experimental versus Speculative Natural Philosophy’ (2005), 217. 74. Ibn al-Haytham, The Optics: Books I–III, on Direct Vision (1989), Book 2, 15–19. 75. Schmitt, ‘Experience and Experiment’ (1969), 115–22. 76. Siraisi, Communities of Learned Experience (2013). 77. Shea, Designing Experiments (2003), 43; and Power, Experimental Philosophy (1664), 88. 78. Collins, Changing Order (1985); and Pinch, Confronting Nature (1986). 79. Shapin & Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985). 80. Secord, ‘Knowledge in Transit’ (2004), 657. 81. Webster, ‘Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy’ (1967), 169. 82. Shapin & Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), 225–82. 83. Shapin & Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), 254. 84. There is an interesting discussion of anomalous suspension, not mentioned by Shapin and Schaffer, in Papin, A Continuation of the New Digester (1687). Boyle was already aware of the problem of replication in 1661: see the two essays on unsuccessful experiments (mainly chemical) in Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays (1661); the problem was later discussed in Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society (1667), 243–5. 85. Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654), 35. 86. The recent literature on alchemy is vast. Particularly noteworthy are: Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy (1975); Smith, The Business of Alchemy (1994); Principe, The Aspiring Adept (1998); Newman, Gehennical Fire (2003); Newman, Promethean Ambitions (2004); and Newman & Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire (2005). 87. Hunter & Principe, ‘The Lost Papers’ (2003). 88. Principe, The Aspiring Adept (1998); Hunter, ‘Alchemy, Magic and Moralism’ (1990), esp. 404–5 (repeal of the act); and Hunter, Boyle (2009). 89. Principe, The Aspiring Adept (1998), 98–113, 190–201. 90. Principe, The Aspiring Adept (1998), 115–34; Malcolm, ‘Robert Boyle, Georges Pierre des Clozets and the Asterism’ (2004); and Principe, ‘Georges Pierre des Clozets’ (2004). On the question of fraud and alchemy, Nummedal, ‘On the Utility of Alchemical Fraud’ (2007); and Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (2007), 147–75. 91. Newman & Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire (2005), 189. 92. Principe, The Aspiring Adept (1998), 110, 159; and Starkey, Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks (2004), xxii–xxiii, 2–41 (assuming that the gold which was turned into a black powder was the same gold he had previously made). 93. Du Chesne, The Practise of Chymicall, and Hermeticall Physicke (1605), K1v, K2r, K3r. 94. Newman & Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire (2005), 175–6. 95. Vickers, ‘The “New Historiography” ’ (2008), 127. For Newman’s reply to this essay, Newman, ‘Vickers on Alchemy’ (2009). 96. Vickers, ‘The “New Historiography” ’ (2008), 132; and Principe & DeWitt, Transmutations (2002). 97. Hunter, ‘Alchemy, Magic and Moralism’ (1990), 403–4. 98. For example, Newman & Principe, ‘Alchemy versus Chemistry’ (1998); Newman, Atoms and Alchemy (2006); and Newman, ‘Recent Historiography’ (2011). 99. For emphasis on this chronology, see, for example, Principe, ‘Alchemy Restored’ (2011), 306. 100. Powers, ‘Ars sine arte’ (1998), 176 (translation altered). 101. Powers, ‘Ars sine arte’ (1998), 177. 102. Klein, ‘Origin of the Concept of Chemical Compound’ (1994); Chalmers, The Scientist’s Atom and the Philosopher’s Stone (2009); Newman, ‘How Not to Integrate the History and Philosophy of Science’ (2010); Chalmers, ‘Understanding Science through Its History’ (2011); and Chalmers, ‘Klein on the Origin of the Concept of Chemical Compound’ (2012). 103. Hunter, ‘The Royal Society and the Decline of Magic’ (2011), 105. 104. Hunter, ‘Alchemy, Magic and Moralism’ (1990), 407. 105. Wootton, ‘Galileo: Reflections on Failure’ (2011). 106. Newman & Principe, ‘Alchemy versus Chemistry’ (1998), 60–1. 107. Glanvill, Plus ultra (1668), 12. 108. Quoted from Newman & Principe, ‘Alchemy versus Chemistry’ (1998), 62. 109. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).
1. Baillet, La Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (1691), Vol. 1, 77–86, is the key source; for modern discussions, see Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (1995), 104–11; and Clarke, Descartes: A Biography (2006), 58–63. 2. Beeckman, Journal (1939); Berkel, Isaac Beeckman (2013); Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (1995), 68–103, 222–4; and Clarke, Descartes: A Biography (2006), 46–52, 142. 3. Beeckman, Journal (1939), Vol. 1, 244; translation from Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (1995), 69. 4. Beeckman, Journal (1939), Vol. 1, 101, 253, 260–1, 265, Vol, 3, 104, but he also uses theorema (Vol. 1, 256) and ratio naturalis (Vol. 3, 104); see also Berkel, Isaac Beeckman (2013), 238 n. 52, on his use of modus. 5. Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (1995), 90. 6. French translations of the Latin letters in Descartes, Oeuvres philosophiques (1963), Vol. 1, 270–84. 7. Descartes, Philosophical Writings (1984), Vol. 1, 116. 8. Camerota, ‘Galileo, Lucrezio e l’atomismo’ (2008); Favaro, ‘Libreria di Galileo Galilei’ (1886), nos. 353, 354. 9. Boyle, The Origine of Formes and Qualities (1666), 10, 43 = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 5, 308, 317. 10. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Vol. 2, 37–40. 11. For example, Schuster, ‘Waterworld’ (2005); and Buchwald, ‘Descartes’ Experimental Journey’ (2008). 12. Hoare, The Quest for the True Figure of the Earth (2004). 13. Quoted in Wilson, ‘From Limits to Laws’ (2008), 13. 14. Boas Hall, Nature and Nature’s Laws (1970). What we call Boyle’s law, reported by Boyle in 1662, had become a law by 1676 (Dear, Discipline and Experience (1995), 207). 15. Westfall, Never at Rest (1980), 632. 16. Boyer, ‘Aristotelian References to the Law of Reflection’ (1946), 92. 17. Key discussions are: Zilsel, ‘The Genesis of the Concept of Scientific Progress’ (1945); Needham, ‘Human Laws and Laws of Nature in China and the West (I)’ (1951); Needham, ‘Human Laws and Laws of Nature in China and the West (II)’ (1951); Oakley, ‘Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science’ (1961); Milton, ‘The Origin and Development of the Concept of the “Laws of Nature” ’ (1981); Ruby, ‘The Origins of Scientific “Law” ’ (1986); Steinle & Weinert, ‘The Amalgamation of a Concept’ (1995); Milton, ‘Laws of Nature’ (1998); Henry, ‘Metaphysics and the Origins of Modern Science’ (2004); Oakley, Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights (2005); Joy, ‘Scientific Explanation’ (2006); and Harrison, ‘The Development of the Concept of Laws of Nature’ (2008). 18. ‘Lex naturae est in rebus creatis regulatio motuum et operationum et tendentiarum in suos fines.’ Quoted from Oberman, ‘Reformation and Revolution’ (1975), 425 n. 47. 19. Ruby, ‘The Origins of Scientific “Law” ’ (1986), 342–3, 353–5, 357. 20. Fernel, Therapeutice, seu medendi ratio (1555), 1r–6r. See also Fernel, On the Hidden Causes of Things (2005), 30 n. 90. I owe these references to Sophie Weeks. 21. Steinle & Weinert, ‘The Amalgamation of a Concept’ (1995), 320–1. 22. Hine, ‘Inertia and Scientific Law in Sixteenth-century Commentaries on Lucretius’ (1995). 23. Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know? (2012), 49–54; Cohen, ‘ “Quantum in se est” ’ (1964); ‘Nos in jure naturae enucleando et rerum foederibus interpretandis paulo diligientiores erimus … ’: ‘The History of the Sympathy and Antipathy of Things’, Bacon, Works (1857), Vol. 2, 81. 24. Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1991), 585–7; and Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes (1962), 504–5. 25. Screech (ed.), Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius (1998), 229. 26. Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654), 263. 27. Boyle, A Free Enquiry (1686), 256–7 = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 10, 524. 28. http://www.iep.utm.edu/lawofnat/. 29. I am grateful to Sophie Weeks for making this point to me. 30. Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1729), Mr Cotes’s Preface, A8r (a translation of the Latin edition of 1713). 31. Russell, ‘Kepler’s Laws’ (1964) and Wilson, ‘From Kepler’s Laws, So-called, to Universal Gravitation’ (1970), on the reception of Kepler’s ‘laws’. 32. Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana (1654), 343, 258, 395. 33. Steinle, ‘Negotiating Experiment, Reason and Theology’ (2002). 34. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949). 35. Descartes is explicit on this: Descartes, Principia philosophiæ (1644), Part 3, § iii; and Descartes, Les Principes de la philosophie (1668),114–15. 36. Harrison, ‘The Development of the Concept of Laws of Nature’ (2008); see also the debate between Harrison and Henry on voluntarism: Harrison, ‘Voluntarism and Early Modern Science’ (2002); Henry, ‘Voluntarist Theology at the Origins of Modern Science’ (2009); and Harrison, ‘Voluntarism and the Origins of Modern Science’ (2009). 37. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 5, 283. 38. Henry, The Scientific Revolution (2002), 92. 39. Harrison, ‘Newtonian Science, Miracles, and the Laws of Nature’ (1995). 40. Snobelen, ‘William Whiston, Isaac Newton’ (2004). 41. Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1991), 588; and Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes (1962), 506.
1. Newton, Papers & Letters (1958), prints the key published texts and letters; Kuhn’s analysis is on 27–45. Westfall’s accounts are: Westfall, ‘The Development of Newton’s Theory of Color’ (1962); and Westfall, Never at Rest (1980), 156–74. My own chronology is based on Westfall, Shapiro, ‘Introduction’ (1984); Guerlac, ‘Can We Date Newton’s Early Optical Experiments?’ (1983); and Hall, All was Light: An Introduction to Newton’s Opticks (1993), 33–59. 2. Westfall, ‘The Development of Newton’s Theory of Color’ (1962), 352. 3. Newton, Papers & Letters (1958), 34 n. 11. 4. Dear, ‘Totius in verba’ (1985), 155. 5. Lohne, ‘Isaac Newton: The Rise of a Scientist, 1661–1671’ (1965), 138. 6. Newton, Papers & Letters (1958), 47, 53, 93. 7. Newton, Papers & Letters (1958), 79. 8. Newton, Papers & Letters (1958), 92. 9. Newton, Papers & Letters (1958), 105. 10. Newton, Papers & Letters (1958), 108. 11. Westfall, ‘The Development of Newton’s Theory of Color’ (1962), 350. 12. Newton, Papers & Letters (1958), 109. 13. Newton, Papers & Letters (1958), 49. 14. Descartes, Philosophical Writings (1984), Vol. 1, 255–6. 15. The best general discussion is Koyré, ‘Concept and Experience in Newton’s Scientific Thought’ (1965). 16. Blake, Ducasse, and others, Theories of Scientific Method (1960), 22–49; Gingerich, ‘From Copernicus to Kepler’ (1973); Martens, Kepler’s Philosophy and the New Astronomy (2000), 60–8; Granada, Mosley, and others, Christoph Rothmann’s Discourse (2014), 55–64. 17. Carpenter, Geographie Delineated (1635), 143. 18. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and Roberval’ (2002), 167. 19. For the details of Digges’s hypothesis see Johnston, ‘Theory, Theoric, Practice’ (2004). Borough, A Discours of the Variation of the Cumpas (1581), Giiir/v, uses the word ‘hypothesis’ in exactly the same way. Both Borough and Digges had been taught by John Dee, whose somewhat eccentric use of ‘hypothesis’, to mean, apparently, a true claim unsupported by argument, is worth noting: Dee, General and Rare Memorials (1577), 41. 20. Norman, The New Attractive (1581), Aiiirv. 21. The same move is to be found in Scaliger, Opuscula varia ante hac non edita (1610), 424–5 = Hues, Tractatus de globis (1617), 111 = Hues, A Learned Treatise of Globes (1659), 142. 22. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 5, 395. See also Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 7, 485. 23. Locke, Essay, iv, 12, §13. On Locke on hypotheses, Laudan, ‘Nature and Sources’ (1967); Osler, ‘John Locke’ (1970) (though, strangely, Osler had not read Laudan); Farr, ‘The Way of Hypotheses’ (1987). For a wide-ranging discussion of hypothetical arguments in this period, Roux, ‘Le scepticisme et les hypothèses de la physique’ (1998). 24. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (1989), 67, and references in index, s.v. ‘hypothesis’; also, for example, Dini to Galileo, 2 May 1615: Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 12: no. 1115. 25. Descartes, Principia philosophiae (1644), especially Vol. 3, 44, 45, 47; Descartes, Philosophical Writings (1984), Vol. 1, 255–8, 267; Martinet, ‘Science et hypothèses chez Descartes’ (1974); Clarke, Occult Powers and Hypotheses (1989), 131–63. For the impact of the trial of Galileo on Descartes, Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992 (2007), 43–51. 26. Gilbert, De magnete (1600), *iii[r]; translation modified from Gilbert, On the Magnet (1900), iii–vi. 27. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 5, 225. 28. Wilkins, A Discourse (1640), 19, describes Copernicanism as an hypothesis confirmed by later ‘inventions’ (meaning discoveries). 29. Boyle, New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall (1660), 133, 382. 30. Cohen, ‘The First English Version of Newton’s Hypotheses non fingo’ (1962); Koyré, ‘Concept and Experience in Newton’s Scientific Thought’ (1965); Cohen, ‘Hypotheses in Newton’s Philosophy’ (1966); Sabra, Theories of Light (1967), 231–50; Hanson, ‘Hypotheses fingo’ (1970); McMullin, ‘The Impact of Newton’s Principia on the Philosophy of Science’ (2001); Anstey, ‘The Methodological Origins of Newton’s Queries’ (2004); Anstey, ‘Experimental versus Speculative Natural Philosophy’ (2005). 31. On Bacon’s astronomy, Jalobeanu, ‘A Natural History of the Heavens’ (2015). 32. Descartes, A Discourse (1649), 100, 103–5. 33. Laudan, ‘The Clock Metaphor and Probabilism’ (1966). 34. Sabra, Theories of Light (1967), 168–9, translating from Huygens, Oeuvres completes, 21:472. 35. Conant, Robert Boyle’s Experiments in Pneumatics (1950), 4. 36. On ‘theory’ before 1600, see Westman, The Copernican Question (2011), 38–43; on hypothesis, Brading, ‘Development of the Concept of Hypothesis’ (1999); and Ducheyne, ‘The Status of Theory and Hypotheses’ (2013). Ducheyne (188) thinks Boyle and Hooke use ‘hypothesis’ and ‘theory’ interchangeably. This is not so: Hooke, for example, repeatedly uses the phrase ‘true theory’; he never writes of a ‘true hypothesis’. See also Anstey, ‘Experimental versus Speculative Natural Philosophy’ (2005). 37. Conveniently available at: https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/dictionnaires-dautrefois. 38. Bacon, Sylva sylvarum (1627), 204–5 = Bacon, Works (1857), 2:596. 39. Helmont & Charleton, A Ternary of Paradoxes (1649); Helmont, Deliramenta catarrhi (1650); and Descartes, Excellent Compendium of Musick (1653). 40. Boyle, A Defence (1662), 63–8 = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 3, 61–5. 41. Wallis, ‘An Essay of Dr John Wallis’ (1666); Boyle, ‘Tryals Proposed by Mr Boyle to Dr Lower’ (1667) = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 5, 554–6. 42. Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society (1667), 18, 155. 43. Newton, ‘A Letter of Mr Isaac Newton’ (1670); and Newton, Opticks (1704), Advertisement, Book 1, 12, Book 2, 1, 78, 102, 111. 44. Hooke, Lectiones Cutlerianæ (1679), 31; and ‘Lampas’, 9. 45. ‘Erotick’ is to be found in Powell, The Passionate Poet (1601), and in Ferrand, Erotomania, or, A Treatise Discoursing of the Essence, Causes, Symptomes, Prognosticks and Cure of Love or Erotic Melancholy (1645). 46. Helmont & Charleton, A Ternary of Paradoxes (1649), c1rv.
1. Serjeantson, ‘Testimony and Proof’ (1999), 211. On the history of the word ‘evidence’ in English, Wierzbicka, Experience, Evidence and Sense (2010), 94–148. 2. Thus Buchwald & Feingold, Newton and the Origin of Civilization (2013), provides an admirable study of Newton’s use and understanding of evidence, but no account of why he very rarely uses the word. 3. Boyle, Occasional Reflections (1665), 156 (3rd pagination) = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 5, 154. 4. Locke, An Essay (1690), 163. 5. Locke, An Essay (1690), 264. 6. Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654), 19; see Gassendi, Animadversiones (1649), 158: ‘Opinio illa vera est, cui vel suffragatur, vel non refragatur Sensus evidentia … Opinio illa falsa est, cui vel refragatur, vel non suffragatur Sensus evidentia.’ 7. Compare Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), 24, 77, 90, 109, where it seems clear that ‘evidence of sense’ is used in the modern sense. 8. Jackson, Justifying Faith (1615), 13. 9. Cowell, The Interpreter (1607), s.v. ‘evidence’. 10. Helmont & Charleton, A Ternary of Paradoxes (1649), 37. 11. Cowell, The Interpreter (1607), s.v. ‘bankrupt’. 12. Helmont & Charleton, A Ternary of Paradoxes (1649), 18. 13. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education (2001), 362–3 (translation modified). 14. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education (2001), 419. 15. Parsons, The Seconde Parte of the Booke of Christian Exercise (1590), 157–8. 16. Wilkins, Natural Religion (1675), 1–11. Ian Hacking claims that there is a new concept of evidence (Evidence-Indices) present in this text, but this is a misinterpretation of what Wilkins says. Wilkins is discussing experience, and none of his examples is of Evidence-Indices. Experience does not mix demonstration and testimony, but sensation and demonstration (Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (2006), 83; the pagination is the same in the first, 1984, edition). The mixed character of experience had already been discussed by Gassendi: Gassendi, Opera omnia (1727), 72b. 17. Jackson, Justifying Faith (1615), 14. 18. Locke, An Essay (1690), 268. 19. Locke, An Essay (1690), 336 20. Baxter, A Treatise of Knowledge and Love Compared (1689), 59. 21. Weiner, ‘The Civil Jury Trial and the Law–Fact Distinction’ (1966). 22. Sheppard, The Honest Lawyer (1616), J4v. 23. Franklin, The Science of Conjecture (2001), 12–63; and Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof (1977). 24. I owe a number of these points about linguistic usage to Alan Sokal. 25. Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (2006), 32–5, 79, 83–4 26. Hacking calls this the evidence of things, but this seems misleading, as others (Wilkins, for example) refer to sensation as the evidence of things. ‘Clues’ is also problematic, as it is a nineteenth-century term: Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues (1990). 27. Quoted, Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (2006), 32, from Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962), 115. 28. Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (2006), 39–48. 29. Maclean, ‘Foucault’s Renaissance Episteme’ (1998). 30. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education (2001), 325–7, 355–9. 31. Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (2006), 46–7; LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi (2007), 94–9; on the classical doctrine, Allen, Inference from Signs (2001). 32. Quoted from Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature (1994), 283; Latin text at Gassendi, Opera omnia (1727), Vol. 1, 108. 33. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education (2001), 375–415 (at 379), 461, 483, 501. 34. For Gassendi on witnesses, Gassendi, Opera omnia (1727), 86. 35. Quoted in Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (2006), 79 (my interpolations). 36. Hooker, Ecclesiasticall Politie (1604), 100. 37. Wilkins, Mathematicall Magick (1648), 120–1. 38. Graunt, Natural and Political Observations … Made upon the Bills of Mortality (1662), 20; and Petty, A Treatise of Taxes (1662), 27. Graunt also uses the phrase ‘in all probability’, pace Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988), 12. 39. Clavius, In sphaeram (1585), 450–2, translation from Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking (1994), Vol. 1, 535–6. 40. Boyle, Some Considerations (1663), 81 = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 3, 255–6 (see Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking (1994), Vol. 2, 1175–6). 41. Piccolomini, La prima parte delle theoriche (1558), 22v; translation from Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking (1994), Vol. 1, 532. 42. Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society (1667), 100. 43. Boyle, New Experiments Physico-mechanical (1660), 176 (Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 1, 218, where ‘transmuted’ is misread as ‘transmitted’). But see Boyle’s references to judges and witnesses (above, p. 280) and the discussion in Sargent, The Diffident Naturalist (1995), 42–61, esp. 54. I cannot find an early modern scientist who uses the word ‘evidence’ as freely as, for example, Glanvill in his Vanity of Dogmatizing. 44. Boyle, Hydrostatical Paradoxes (1666), a1r = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 5, 196. 45. Quoted in Buchwald & Feingold, Newton and the Origin of Civilization (2013), 140–1. 46. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605), 31; and Brown, ‘The Evolution of the Term “Mixed Mathematics” ’ (1991). 47. Galileo’s second letter on sunspots (1612), in Galilei & Scheiner, On Sunspots (2008), 107–70. 48. ‘Préface sur le traité du vuide’, in Pascal, Oeuvres complètes (1964), Vol. 2, 772–85. 49. Dear, Discipline and Experience (1995), 15, 180; for an example published by Riccioli in 1651, 78. 50. Palmerino, ‘Experiments, Mathematics, Physical Causes’ (2010); and Westfall, ‘Newton and the Fudge Factor’ (1973). 51. The legal issues and their history were recently summarized in the House of Lords judgement on Regina v. Pendleton, 13 Dec. 2001. 52. Locke, An Essay (1690), 333. 53. Hobbes, Humane Nature (1650), 38–9; quoted in Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (2006), 48 54. Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), 301. 55. Seneca, Seneca’s Morals Abstracted (1679), Part 3, 99–100. 56. I thus have some sympathy with Feyerabend’s claim that there is a radical incoherence in earlier accounts of the validity of empirical knowledge: Feyerabend, ‘Classical Empiricism’ (1970). 57. Locke, An Essay (1690), 353; on Locke on judgement, Laudan, ‘Nature and Sources’ (1967), 214–16. For an example of how judgement was exercised in day-to-day scientific procedure, Buchwald & Feingold, Newton and the Origin of Civilization (2013), 66–71: Hevelius would make repeated measurements to determine the position of a star; he would not then average the results but make a judgement as to which result was the right one. 58. Bates, The Divinity of the Christian Religion (1677), 41–2. 59. Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society (1667), 31, 360. 60. Wilkins, An Essay towards a Real Character (1668), 289–90. 61. Wilkins, Natural Religion (1675), 35–6. 62. Locke, An Essay (1690), 269. 63. Daston & Galison (eds.), Objectivity (2007). However, the discussion of ‘objectivity’ in Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture (2006), 239–45, is in part at least a discussion of ‘judgement’. 64. Merton, ‘Science and Technology in a Democratic Order’ (1942), reprinted as Merton, ‘The Normative Structure of Science’ (1973). 65. Shapin & Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), 72–6. 66. Kuhn, ‘Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions’ (1976), reprinted in Kuhn, The Essential Tension (1977). This line of argument is already sketched out in Conant, Robert Boyle’s Experiments in Pneumatics (1950), 67–8 under the heading ‘The Two Traditions’. 67. Locke, An Essay, Book 3, Ch. 6, §2.
1. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (1945), 8–9. 2. Cipolla, Clocks and Culture, 1300–1700 (1967); White, ‘The Medieval Roots of Modern Technology’ (1978); Gimpel, The Medieval Machine (1976); Reynolds, Stronger than a Hundred Men (1983); North, God’s Clockmaker (2005); and Walton, Wind and Water (2006). Some would argue that it did: Kaye, Economy and Nature (1998). On Renaissance and early modern machinery, Sawday, Engines of the Imagination (2007); and Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts (1970). 3. Drabkin & Drake (eds.), Mechanics in Sixteenth-century Italy (1969). 4. Kirk, Raven & others, The Presocratic Philosophers (1983), 410. 5. On the mechanical philosophy, Boas, ‘The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy’ (1952); and Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture (1961), translated from a Dutch original first published in 1950. 6. Berkel, Isaac Beeckman (2013), 83 and n. 42. 7. See p. 24. 8. More, The Immortality of the Soul (1659), preface (b7r). More had earlier welcomed Cartesianism as a ‘Fortification about Theology’ to defend it from the assaults of the atheists: McGuire & Rattansi, ‘Newton and the “Pipes of Pan” ’ (1966), 131. The classic study of More and Descartes is Webster, ‘Henry More and Descartes, Some New Sources’ (1969). 9. Parker, Disputationes de Deo et providentia divina (1678), 64; and Bayle (ed.), Nouvelles (1684), Vol. 2, 753 10. Boyle, A Defence (1662), preface (*1v) = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 3, 9; Boyle, Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664), preface (A4r) = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 4, 7: ‘corpuscular philosophy’. See also Power, Experimental Philosophy (1664), preface (b2r): ‘the Atomical and Corpuscularian Philosophers’. 11. Boyle, Nouveau traité (1689), title page. 12. Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654), 343–4. 13. Popplow, ‘Setting the World Machine in Motion’ (2007): an article on which I draw extensively. 14. Wilkins, Natural Religion (1675), 62. See John Dee’s 1563 formula ‘the huge frame of this world’, quoted in Bennett (1986), 10. 15. Shank, ‘Mechanical Thinking’ (2007), 19–22. On planetaria, see King & Millburn, Geared to the Stars (1978). 16. Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking (1994), Vol. 1, 404. 17. Popplow, ‘Setting the World Machine in Motion’ (2007), 57. 18. Bedini, ‘The Role of Automata’ (1964), 29–30 19. De Caus, Les Raisons des forces mouvantes (1615). 20. Baltrusaitis, Anamorphoses (1955), 37. 21. Power still prefers ‘engine’ to ‘machine’; and Boyle uses ‘engine’ much more often than he uses ‘machine’, as in ‘Pneumatic Engine’ (the air-pump) and ‘living Engine’ (biological creatures). The awkwardness of the linguistic shift is reflected in Boyle’s frequent use of the phrase ‘Mechanical Engine’, as if there were any other sort. On ‘engine’, see Carroll, Science, Culture and Modern State Formation (2006), 30–2. 22. OED engine 6a is 1538, and mechanical 5a (2nd example) is 1579–80; but machine 6b is 1659 (a translation from the French of Cyrano de Bergerac); mechanism 2a is 1665; and automaton 2b is 1664; both these last two examples are evidently influenced by Descartes. 23. Mayr, Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery (1986), 63; and Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (1995), 1. 24. La Mettrie, La Mettrie’s ‘L’homme machine’: A Study (1960). 25. Riskin, ‘The Defecating Duck’ (2003); Schaffer, ‘Enlightened Automata’ (1999); and Standage, The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-century Chess-playing Machine (2002). 26. Mayr, Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery (1986), 64; Schuster, ‘Waterworld’ (2005). 27. Laudan, ‘The Clock Metaphor and Probabilism’ (1966). 28. pace Power, Experimental Philosophy (1664), preface (b2r), who thought he might see atoms. 29. De Caus, Les Raisons des forces mouvantes (1615), Book 1, problem 6. 30. Mayr, Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery (1986), 190–3, which misses de Caus. 31. Mayr, Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery (1986), 155–80; Wootton, ‘Liberty, Metaphor and Mechanism’ (2006). 32. Finley, ‘Aristotle and Economic Analysis’ (1970). 33. Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (2006), 82–3. 34. More, Divine Dialogues (1668), 20–8; and Lessius, Rawleigh, His Ghost (1631), 27–41; on Lessius, Franklin, The Science of Conjecture (2001), 244–5. 35. Cicero, De natura deorum (1933), 213. 36. Above, p. 265. 37. Boyle, A Free Enquiry (1686), 11–12 = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 10., 448. 38. Bedini, ‘The Role of Automata’ (1964), 37–9; Riskin, ‘The Defecating Duck’ (2003), 625–9. 39. See p. 27n. 40. Mayr, Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery (1986), 57, 64–5, 92. 41. Yolton, Thinking Matter (1983). 42. Newton, Unpublished Scientific Papers (1962), 142–4 (Latin on 109–10). 43. Cook, ‘Divine Artifice and Natural Mechanism’ (2001). The revolt against teleology, while it made possible the Scientific Foundation, simultaneously destroyed the traditional framework of ethical discourse: MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981). For the claim that even this overstates the importance of the mechanical philosophy: Chalmers, ‘The Lack of Excellency of Boyle’s Mechanical Philosophy’ (1993); Chalmers, The Scientist’s Atom and the Philosopher’s Stone (2009); and Chalmers, ‘Intermediate Causes and Explanations’ (2012). 44. Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733), 109–11. Compare ‘After Copernicus astronomers lived in a different world’ (Kuhn, Structure (1962), 117). 45. Pascal, Pensées (1958), 61. 46. ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1918): Weber, The Vocation Lectures (2004), 13.
1. Weber, The Vocation Lectures (2004), 12–13. 2. Hunter, ‘New Light on the “Drummer of Tedworth” ’ (2005). 3. Glanvill, Saducismus triumphatus (1681), 93–4. 4. Glanvill, Saducismus triumphatus (1681), 81. 5. Jobe, ‘The Devil in Restoration Science’ (1981). 6. McLaughlin, ‘Humanist Concepts of Renaissance and Middle Ages in the Tre- and Quattrocento’ (1988), 135; Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe (2008), 259–61. 7. Thomas, The Ends of Life (2009), 4, on ‘early modern’. 8. Tassoni, Dieci libri di pensieri diversi (1627); Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts (1970), 91–3; and Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (1993), 589–90. 9. Walsham, ‘The Reformation and “The Disenchantment of the World” Reassessed’ (2008). 10. Jones, Ancients and Moderns (1936); and, primarily on the literary aspects, Levine, The Battle of the Books (1991). On Wotton, Hall, ‘William Wotton and the History of Science’ (1949); and on Swift, Elias, Swift at Moor Park (1982). 11. Jones, Ancients and Moderns (1936), treated the debate over science as the central issue in the battle between the ancients and the moderns; the emphasis was corrected by Levine, The Battle of the Books (1991) and Levine, Between the Ancients and the Moderns (1999), but in the process the debate over science, and with it Wotton’s reply to Temple, were lost to view. 12. Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1955). 13. The surviving fragment is printed in Hunter (ed.), Robert Boyle: By Himself and His Friends (1994), 111–48. 14. Swift, A Tale of a Tub (2010), 199–200; Wotton, A Defense of the Reflections (1705), 14–15, 45–7; and Elias, Swift at Moor Park (1982), 76–7. Note especially Wotton’s suggestion that Swift’s use of the hiatus was in imitation of Temple’s, which slyly implies that Swift may have had a hand in Temple’s text. For an echo of Temple’s (or Swift’s) passage in the Battle, see Elias, Swift at Moor Park (1982), 298 (but note that spittle was an important part of the healing performances of Valentine Greatrakes, who was endorsed by Boyle). 15. Lynall, Swift and Science (2012). 16. Temple, Miscellanea. The Third Part (1701), 281–3. 17. Elias, Swift at Moor Park (1982), 116–20, 191. 18. Swift, A Tale of a Tub (2010), 155. 19. Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), 206–18; and Wotton & Bentley, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning. The Second Part (1698), 46–53. 20. Hall, ‘William Wotton and the History of Science’ (1949), 1061–2. 21. Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), 3. 22. Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), 300–1. The numbering is Wotton’s, but the paragraph divisions are mine. 23. Wotton may well have been right: Womersley, ‘Dean Swift Hears a Sermon’ (2009). 24. Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), 128–30; and Temple, Miscellanea. The Third Part (1701), 292–5. 25. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1997); see Macfarlane, ‘Civility and the Decline of Magic’ (2000). 26. Spectator, no. 117, 14 July 1711: Addison and Steele (eds.), The Spectator (1712), Book 2, 189. 27. Bostridge, Witchcraft and Its Transformations (1997). 28. For example, Bentley, Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Free-thinking (1713), 33. 29. Macfarlane, ‘Civility and the Decline of Magic’ (2000). 30. Hunter, ‘Science and Heterodoxy’ (1990); Hunter, ‘The Royal Society and the Decline of Magic’ (2011); and Hunter, ‘The Decline of Magic’ (2012) are crucial. 31. On Sprat, Wood, ‘Methodology and Apologetics’ (1980). 32. Schaffer, ‘Halley’s Atheism and the End of the World’ (1977); ODNB, ‘Saunderson, Nicholas’; and Tunstall & Diderot, Blindness and Enlightenment (2011), 41–6. 33. Hunter, Boyle (2009). 34. Schaffer, ‘Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers’ (1987); and Webster, ‘Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy’ (1967), 173–6. 35. Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677), 203–4. 36. Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677), 147–8, 197–215. 37. Yolton, Thinking Matter (1983). 38. Hunter, ‘The Decline of Magic’ (2012), 405–8. Hunter explores the extent to which this tradition survived after 1691, but the conclusion would seem to be: barely. 39. Glanvill, Saducismus triumphatus (1681), preface (F3r). 40. Hunter, ‘New Light on the “Drummer of Tedworth” ’ (2005). 41. Hunter, The Occult Laboratory (2001). 42. Jobe, ‘The Devil in Restoration Science’ (1981). 43. Wootton, ‘Hutchinson, Francis’ (2006); and Trenchard & Gordon, Cato’s Letters, or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects (1995), Vol. 3, no. 79, 2 June 1722. 44. Gulliver, The Anatomist Dissected (1727), 5–6. 45. Wootton, ‘Hume’s “Of Miracles” ’ (1990). 46. Shank, The Newton Wars (2008). 47. Valenza, Literature, Language (2009), 58. 48. Haugen, Richard Bentley (2011). 49. Newton to Bentley, 10 December 1692: Bentley, The Correspondence (1842), 47; see also Stewart, The Rise of Public Science (1992), 31–59. 50. Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism (1692), 225, 102, 277. 51. Croft, Some Animadversions (1685), 40–1. 52. Stewart, The Rise of Public Science (1992), 33–7, 41, 67–73. 53. Bentley, Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Free-thinking (1713), 33–4. 54. Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society (1667), 362, 360. 55. Spencer, A Discourse Concerning Prodigies (1663), 76. 56. Burns, ‘ “Our Lot is Fallen into an Age of Wonders” ’ (1995); Burns, An Age of Wonders (2002). 57. Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society (1667), 360. 58. Spencer, A Discourse Concerning Prodigies (1663), 11–12 (square brackets Spencer’s). 59. Obviously, this process can be read in Habermasian terms: Broman, ‘The Habermasian Public Sphere’ (1998). 60. Du Châtelet, Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings (2009). 61. Findlen, A Forgotten Newtonian (1999); and Cieslak-Golonka & Morten, ‘The Women Scientists of Bologna’ (2000). 62. Valenza, Literature, Language (2009), 78–86; and Feingold, The Newtonian Moment (2004), 119–41. 63. Johnson, ‘The Vanity of Authors’ (1752), 53. 64. Wigelsworth, Selling Science in the Age of Newton (2011), 147–74; Jacob & Stewart, Practical Matter (2004), 61–92; Stewart, The Rise of Public Science (1992), 94–182; and Carpenter, John Theophilus Desaguliers (2011). 65. Valenza, Literature, Language (2009), argues that ‘difficulty itself was translated by his followers into a commercial product’ (55).
1. Boyle, Some Considerations (1663), Vol. 2, 3 = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 2, 64. 2. Bacon, Works (1857), Vol. 1, 500 (my translation). 3. Quoted in Papin, A Continuation of the New Digester (1687), 105. 4. See, for example, Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso (1676); and Carroll, Science, Culture and Modern State Formation (2006), 40–3. 5. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (2012), 257–8. 6. Hessen (1931) reprinted in Hessen & Grossman, The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution (2009) (quotation on 56); Merton, ‘Science, Technology and Society’ (1938); for a Mertonian approach, see Webster, The Great Instauration (1975); and for a more recent study, Westfall, ‘Science and Technology’ (1997) (although Westfall should not be taken to be a follower of Hessen: see Ravetz & Westfall, ‘Marxism and the History of Science’ (1981)). If the old, Mertonian sociology of science assumed science served practical purposes, the new, post-Foucauldian sociology/history of science has had surprisingly little to say about technology in the Scientific Revolution. Thus Shapin, ‘Understanding the Merton Thesis’ (1988), offers a valuable re-reading of Merton’s 1938 text but offers no judgement on either the Hessen thesis or the Merton thesis. 7. The classic article is Fleming, ‘Latent Heat and the Invention of the Watt Engine’ (1952); for recent scholarship, see Miller, James Watt, Chemist (2009). 8. This is generally quoted as ‘attributed’. On Google Books the quotation appears unattributed from 1957; the attribution to Henderson and the date first appear in 1963. 9. Hall, ‘Engineering and the Scientific Revolution’ (1961), 337; Hall, ‘What Did the Industrial Revolution in Britain Owe to Science?’ (1974); and Kuhn, ‘The Principle of Acceleration: A Non-dialectical Theory of Progress: Comment’ (1969). Hall’s argument is already sketched out in Conant, Robert Boyle’s Experiments in Pneumatics (1950), 69–70. 10. Hall, for example, was one of the editors of the standard Oxford history of technology. His position was first articulated in Hall, Ballistics in the Seventeenth Century (1952); see especially Hall, ‘What Did the Industrial Revolution in Britain Owe to Science?’ (1974); Hall, ‘Engineering and the Scientific Revolution’ (1961) (contrast Kerker, ‘Science and the Steam Engine’ (1961)); and Singer, Hall & others, A History of Technology (1954). A classic essay is Layton Jr, ‘Technology as Knowledge’ (1974). I have found Wengenroth, ‘Science, Technology and Industry’ (2003), helpful. 11. Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy (2009); Mokyr, The Lever of Riches (1990); Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena (2004); Mokyr, ‘The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth’ (2005); van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution (2009); and Allen, The British Industrial Revolution (2009); for a comparison of Mokyr and Allen, see Crafts, ‘Explaining the First Industrial Revolution’ (2011). For an earlier study, Musson & Robinson, Science and Technology (1969). For a Marxisant approach, Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (1997). H. Floris Cohen is almost alone among contemporary historians of science in emphasizing the contribution of science to industry: Cohen, ‘Inside Newcomen’s Fire Engine’ (2004). And yet his major work, Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World (2010), does not discuss the topic. 12. Hall, ‘What Did the Industrial Revolution in Britain Owe to Science?’ (1974), 136. 13. Segre, ‘Torricelli’s Correspondence on Ballistics’ (1983). 14. Steele, ‘Muskets and Pendulums’ (1994). Hall, with characteristic pessimism, pushes this revolution back into the nineteenth century: Hall, ‘Engineering and the Scientific Revolution’ (1961), 334; and Hall, Ballistics in the Seventeenth Century (1952), 159. 15. Bedini, The Pulse of Time (1991); and Wootton, Galileo (2010), 130–1, 167, 169. 16. Brown, Jean Domenique Cassini and His World Map of 1696 (1941), 39, 47, 58–60; Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps (2012), 306. 17. Pumfrey, ‘O tempora, O magnes!’ (1989); see also Waters, ‘Nautical Astronomy and the Problem of Longitude’ (1983). 18. Sobel, Longitude (1995). 19. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution (2009), 173. 20. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution (2009), 204–6. On the introduction of interchangeable parts, see Alder, ‘Making Things the Same’ (1998). 21. This line of argument is foreshadowed in Koyré, ‘Du monde de l’à-peu-près à l’univers de la précision’ (1971), first published in 1948. 22. Landes, ‘Why Europe and the West?’ (2006). 23. Latin text of letter to Herwart von Hohenburg quoted in Koyré, The Astronomical Revolution (1973), 378; translation from Snobelen, ‘The Myth of the Clockwork Universe’ (2012), 177 n. 18. 24. Patrick, A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-Men (1662), 19. 25. Maffioli, Out of Galileo (1994); and Maffioli, La via delle acque (2010). 26. Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734), 532. 27. Smeaton, An Experimental Enquiry (1760); Schaffer, ‘Machine Philosophy’ (1994); and Reynolds, Stronger than a Hundred Men (1983). 28. OED, s.v. ‘civil’. 29. Stewart, ‘A Meaning for Machines’ (1998), 272–6. 30. Rolt & Allen, The Steam Engine of Thomas Newcomen (1977), 145. 31. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution (2009), 173. 32. Ketterer, ‘The Wonderful Effects of Steam’ (1998). 33. Galloway & Hebert, History and Progress of the Steam Engine with a Practical Investigation of Its Structure and Application (1836), preface (i). 34. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution (2009), 25–56. 35. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution (2009), 157–8. 36. OED s.v. ‘wind-gun’; Wilkins, Mathematicall Magick (1648), 153; Bertoloni Meli, Thinking with Objects (2006), 130; and Boyle, A Continuation of New Experiments (1682), 16–18 = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 9, 147–9. 37. A survey of the early history of the steam engine is provided by Dickinson, A Short History of the Steam Engine (1963), 1–17. Von Guericke designed a vacuum-powered gun of which Papin made a version: Papin, ‘Shooting by the Rarefaction of the Air’ (1686); Papin then calculated the speed at which air would enter the exhausted cylinder, Papin, ‘A Demonstration’ (1686). 38. Boyle, A Continuation of New Experiments (1682), preface to the Latin edition (A3v–a1r) = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 9, 124–5. I take it that Papin was responsible not just for the experimental notes (in French) but also for the Latin text: it is hard to see what else Boyle’s statement that the ‘style’ and ‘choice of words’ were his can mean (cf. Shapin, ‘Boyle and Mathematics’ (1988), 35). 39. Tönsmann, ‘Wasserbauten und Schifffahrt in Hessen’ (2009). Papin makes a major appearance in Shapin, ‘The Invisible Technician’ (1989) and Shapin, A Social History of Truth (1994) as an anomalous case of a ‘technician’ whom Boyle identifies by name. Shapin nowhere mentions that Papin was elected FRS (presumably in acknowledgement of his contribution to the Continuation), which was a clear recognition that he was more than a technician: Hunter, The Royal Society and Its Fellows (1982), 87, 133 n. 3, F369. 40. Dickinson, A Short History of the Steam Engine (1963), 9–11. Further details on Papin in Galloway, The Steam Engine and Its Inventors (1881); Ernouf, Denis Papin (1883); Wintzer, Dénis Papins Erlebnisse in Marburg, 1688–1695 (1898); Schaffer, ‘The Show that Never Ends’ (1995), 13–14 (but Schaffer confuses the atmospheric piston with the Hessian pump, a centrifugal pump or bellows described in Papin, Recueil de diverses pièces (1695); and he repeats the old myth that Papin built a steam-powered boat, on which, see below); Stewart, The Rise of Public Science (1992), 24–7 (but ‘Hellish Bellows’ on p. 25 is a misreading for ‘Hessian Bellows’), 131–2, 175–8; Shapin, previous note; Boschiero, ‘Translation, Experimentation and the Spring of the Air: Richard Waller’s “Essayes of Natural Experiments” ’ (2009); and Ranea, ‘Theories, Rules and Calculations’ (2015), which I saw too late to take account of. The Latin text with German translation of Papin’s Nova methodus (1690) is in Tönsmann & Schneider (eds.), Denis Papin (2009), 136–41, and there is a French translation in Ducoux, Notice sur Denis Papin (1854), 56–63 and in Figuier, Exposition et histoire (1851), Vol. 3, 419–23; there is an English translation of Papin’s Nouvelle manière pour lever l’eau par la force du feu in Smith, ‘A New Way of Raising Water by Fire’ (1998). Papin’s works were collected in Papin, La Vie et les ouvrages de Denis Papin (1894); the first volume reprints Péan & La Saussaye, La Vie et les ouvrages (1869) (the only volume printed). Of an intended eight volumes, six and and a half were, it seems, printed and bound, but all (I suspect) are missing the planned plates. This extremely rare work is apparently available on the internet in the USA (at http://www.hathitrust.org), but not currently in Europe. Worldcat lists one ‘complete’ set, the one copied for the Web, at Wisconsin, and there is another in the municipal library at Blois: Smith, ‘A New Way of Raising Water by Fire’ (1998), 178–9. (The copy at Oklahoma is missing Vol. 1, and all the other copies listed are missing several volumes. There is not a single complete copy listed in COPAC (Consortium of Online Public Access Catalogues). The copy I cite is my own, seemingly one of four extant complete sets.) The Works contains the complete Papin–Leibniz correspondence in Vols. 7 & 8 – a fact which has escaped authors on the vis viva controversy, most recently Rey, ‘The Controversy between Leibniz and Papin’ (2010) (whose dating of the letters sometimes varies from that of the Works). An extensive selection from the Papin–Leibniz correspondence, along with other letters, was published in Leibniz, Huygens & others, Leibnizens und Huygens’ Briefwechsel mit Papin (1881), of which there is a modern reprint. This edition was unknown to the editors of the Works. To Papin’s works must be added ‘Dr Pappins Letter containing a Description of a Wind-fountain’, an account of a fountain powered by compressed air, in Hooke, Lectures de potentia restitutiva (1678), 25–8. 41. Letter to Leibniz, 25 July 1698 (Papin, La Vie et les ouvrages de Denis Papin (1894), Vol. 8, 17–19 = Leibniz, Huygens & others, Leibnizens und Huygens’ Briefwechsel mit Papin (1881), 233–4). There is, unfortunately, no way of knowing how this worked; but Papin was considering pistons driven by atmospheric pressure in 1704: letter to Leibniz, 13 March (Papin, La Vie et les ouvrages de Denis Papin (1894), Vol. 8, 151–4 = Leibniz, Huygens & others, Leibnizens und Huygens’ Briefwechsel mit Papin (1881), 284–7: a reply, it seems to me, to Leibniz’s undated letter at Papin, La Vie et les ouvrages de Denis Papin (1894), Vol. 8, 215–19 and at Leibniz, Huygens & others, Leibnizens und Huygens’ Briefwechsel mit Papin (1881), 276–80). 42. Letter to Leibniz, 13 March 1704, and Leibniz’s undated letter, as above. 43. Letter to Leibniz, 7 September 1702 (Papin, La Vie et les ouvrages de Denis Papin (1894), Vol. 8, 126–9 = Leibniz, Huygens & others, Leibnizens und Huygens’ Briefwechsel mit Papin (1881), 264–7; and subsequent correspondence until 23 March 1705 (Papin, La Vie et les ouvrages de Denis Papin (1894), Vol. 8, 223–6 = Leibniz, Huygens & others, Leibnizens und Huygens’ Briefwechsel mit Papin (1881), 342–4). 44. The interpretation of this sketch is controversial. Dickinson thought, correctly in my view, that it was an atmospheric-pressure engine, but see the note of his editors, who argue it was a high-pressure engine: Dickinson, Sir Samuel Morland (1970), 79. North evidently thought that the engine worked on the up-stroke, but such a misunderstanding is hardly surprising if he only saw a drawing or maquette. In any case, as Papin worked with both atmospheric-pressure and high-pressure systems, the issue may not be important for present purposes. Rhys Jenkins, Dickinson & Rolt attribute the engine to Morland (Rolt & Allen, The Steam Engine of Thomas Newcomen (1977), 18–19), which implies that North was sketching from memory an engine he had seen many years earlier. They do not note the evident similarity to Papin’s drive mechanism, or the ambiguity of the word ‘model’. Wallace attributes the engine to Savery (Wallace, The Social Context of Innovation (1982), 58–60), despite Savery’s conviction that pistons were impractical because there would be too much friction to overcome. The attribution to Papin, or, at the limit, someone working from Papin’s publications, seems to me secure. 45. It would appear, however, to carry the modern meaning when Savery contrasts a model with a draft (or drawing): Smith, ‘A New Way of Raising Water by Fire’ (1998), 172. 46. Gibbon, A Summe or Body of Divinitie Real (1651). 47. Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734), 465–6. 48. Dickinson, A Short History of the Steam Engine (1963), 18–27. 49. Gaulke, ‘Die Papin–Savery-Kontroverse’ (2009). 50. Papin, Nouvelle manière pour élever l’eau (1707). Newcomen discovered by chance that it was better to inject the water into the cylinder: Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734), 533. 51. Savery, Navigation Improv’d (1698); Papin, La Vie et les ouvrages de Denis Papin (1894), Vol. 1, 206–7; letters to Leibniz 13 March 1704, 7 July 1707 (Papin, La Vie et les ouvrages de Denis Papin (1894), Vol. 8, 280–2 = Leibniz, Huygens & others, Leibnizens und Huygens’ Briefwechsel mit Papin (1881), 378–80); and letter of Drost von Zeuner to Leibniz, 29 September 1707 (Papin, La Vie et les ouvrages de Denis Papin (1894), Vol. 8, 294 = Leibniz, Huygens & others, Leibnizens und Huygens’ Briefwechsel mit Papin (1881), 385): ‘sa petite machine d’un vaisseau à roues’; Leibniz to Sloane, quoted in Tönsmann, ‘Wasserbauten und Schifffahrt in Hessen’ (2009), 99. 52. The myth originates with Figuier, Exposition et histoire (1851), Vol. 3, 70–106, 419–32 (which becomes Vol. 1 in later editions). Gerland, ‘Das sogenannte Dampfschiff Papin’s’ (1880) gets the facts right. The false story continues to be told (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Papin, accessed 3 June 2014); see also Gerth, ‘Der Dampfkochtopf = Digestor – Eine Erzählung’ (1987); and above, note 40. http://www.schillerinstitute.org/educ/pedagogy/steam_engine.html for the conspiracy. 53. Smith, ‘A New Way of Raising Water by Fire’ (1998), 169–77. 54. cf. Leibniz to Papin, 24 or 27 June 1699 (Papin, La Vie et les ouvrages de Denis Papin (1894), Vol. 8, 101–2, 303–4 = Leibniz, Huygens & others, Leibnizens und Huygens’ Briefwechsel mit Papin (1881), 248–9); Stewart, The Rise of Public Science (1992), 14–15; Boas Hall, Promoting Experimental Learning (1991), 122; and Heilbron, Physics at the Royal Society (1983), esp. 14, 21, 31, 43. 55. Savery identified this as a problem (Smith, ‘A New Way of Raising Water by Fire’ (1998), 174). 56. Hence Papin’s view that his steamboat could not run on the Fulda but needed to be tried at a seaport: letter to Leibniz, 7 July 1707. See also his letter to Leibniz, 15 September 1707: ‘Je suis persuadé que si Dieu me fait la grâce d’arriver heureusement à Londres et d’y faire des vaisseaux de cette construction qui aient assez de profondeur pour appliquer la machine à feu à donner le mouvement aux rames [paddles], je suis persuadé, dis-je, que nous pourrions produire des effects qui paroïtront incroyables … ’ (Papin, La Vie et les ouvrages de Denis Papin (1894), Vol. 8, 291–3 = Leibniz, Huygens & others, Leibnizens und Huygens’ Briefwechsel mit Papin (1881), 383–5). Tönsmann, ‘Wasserbauten und Schifffahrt in Hessen’ (2009), correctly identifies the claim that Papin had built a working steamboat as a legend, but mistakenly assumes that Papin’s plans for a steamboat relied on his atmospheric-pressure-driven piston of 1690 rather than his Savery-type engine of 1707. 57. Smith, ‘A New Way of Raising Water by Fire’ (1998), 169. 58. Royal Society archives; mistranscribed at Papin, La Vie et les ouvrages de Denis Papin (1894), Vol. 7, 74. 59. De la Saussaye, following Bannister, Denis Papin: Notice sur sa vie et ses écrits (Blois: F Jahyer, 1847), 23 (worldcat lists only one copy of this work; another is in this author’s collection), quotes undated passages from Leibniz’s correspondence which he claims establish that Papin was in Hesse in 1714: Papin, La Vie et les ouvrages de Denis Papin (1894), Vol. 1, 251–2. But see Leibniz, Huygens & others, Leibnizens und Huygens’ Briefwechsel mit Papin (1881), 114, 256–60. 60. Rolt & Allen, The Steam Engine of Thomas Newcomen (1977), 39. 61. Wallace, The Social Context of Innovation (1982), 60–1. 62. Rolt & Allen, The Steam Engine of Thomas Newcomen (1977), 38–9. 63. Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World (2010), 31 and note; compare Rolt & Allen, The Steam Engine of Thomas Newcomen (1977), 36. 64. Compare Mokyr, ‘The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth’ (2005), 298 note, with Wallace, The Social Context of Innovation (1982), 55–6. 65. Quoted Wallace, The Social Context of Innovation (1982), 56. 66. Anon, ‘Account of Books’ (1697). 67. Dickinson, Sir Samuel Morland (1970), 57–8. 68. Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734), 472; Hills, Power from Steam (1989), 33; Savery’s engine lacked a safety valve (steam could blow straight through it if the water was not being raised too high); Desaguliers introduced one as an improvement in 1717. 69. This is sometimes said to be a later development, but see Rolt & Allen, The Steam Engine of Thomas Newcomen (1977), 79–80. The valves could be opened and closed by hand in a test run, but the machine would have to operate too slowly to be practical without automation. 70. Leibniz had grasped this principle: letter to Papin, 28 August 1698 (Papin, La Vie et les ouvrages de Denis Papin (1894), Vol. 8, 28–32 = Leibniz, Huygens & others, Leibnizens und Huygens’ Briefwechsel mit Papin (1881), 239). 71. Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734), Vol. 2, 489–90. 72. Hills, Power from Steam (1989), 21–2. 73. The English Short Title Catalogue lists twenty-eight copies, compared, for example, to thirty-nine copies of Robert Boyle’s Continuation of New Experiments of 1682; and we can be confident a much higher proportion of Boyle’s book survived than of this one, which has some obvious characteristics of an ephemeral publication. A French translation of both the original New Digester and the Continuation appeared in 1688: Papin, La Manière d’amollir les os (1688). 74. No mention, for example, in the literature on the air-pump: Andrade, ‘The Early History of the Vacuum Pump’ (1957); van Helden, ‘The Age of the Air-pump’ (1991); and Schimkat, ‘Denis Papin und die Luftpumpe’ (2009); or the classic study, Wilson, ‘On the Early History of the Air-pump in England’ (1849). 75. This is presumably the model used for the experiments in Boyle, A Continuation of New Experiments (1682), which Boyle tells us in the preface differed from his own air-pump (also designed by Papin), which is described and illustrated at the beginning of Boyle, Experimentorum novorum (1680) and Boyle, A Continuation of New Experiments (1682) (= Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 9, 134; the copy of Boyle, A Continuation of New Experiments (1682) on EEBO is defective in that it lacks the illustrations). However, it incorporates an improvement dating to 1684: Papin, La Vie et les ouvrages de Denis Papin (1894), Vol. 5, 7–11. 76. Papin, A Continuation of the New Digester (1687), 45. 77. Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734), Vol. 2, 470, 482–3, 533. 78. Papin, A Continuation of the New Digester (1687), 54–5. 79. Papin, A Continuation of the New Digester (1687), 41, 48, 116. 80. Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734), Vol. 2, 474 (see also 532–3). 81. Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734), Vol. 2, 468.
1. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 7, 78 (my translation). 2. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1909), Bk 4, Ch. 1, §2. And yet Chunglin Kwa writes: ‘The idea that scientific progress has led to the constant expansion of our power over nature is a romantic myth.’ Kwa, Styles of Knowing (2011), 11. 3. Gray, Heresies (2004), 3. 4. Sarton, The Study of the History of Science (1936), 5. 5. Koyré, Études Galiléennes (1966), 11. 6. Kuhn, The Essential Tension (1977): see index under ‘progress of science’. 7. Kuhn, Structure (1970), 170. 8. Rorty, ‘Science as Solidarity’ (1991), 39. See also Rorty, ‘Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics’ (1999), at 179–80. For a swift and efficient critique of Rorty on science, see Williams, Essays and Reviews, 1959–2002 (2014), 204–15. 9. Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1951). That the Duhem-Quine thesis is not universally true, and that its applicability must be demonstrated for each particular case, is proven by Grünbaum, ‘The Duhemian Argument’ (1960). Moreover, Duhem never held the Duhem-Quine thesis: Ariew, ‘The Duhem Thesis’ (1984). Laudan, ‘Demystifying Underdetermination’ (1990), provides a devastating critique of misconceived applications of the thesis. Popper had already addressed the Duhem thesis in 1935: Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959), 42, 78–84. 10. Biagioli, ‘Scientific Revolution, Social Bricolage and Etiquette’ (1992); Johns, The Nature of the Book (1998) (and see Eisenstein, ‘An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited’ (2002); Johns, ‘How to Acknowledge a Revolution’ (2002)); Livingstone & Withers (eds.), Geography and Revolution (2005); Ogborn & Withers, ‘Book Geography, Book History’ (2010). Localism and contingency are fundamental to the strong programme: cf. Bloor, ‘Anti-Latour’ (1999). For an expression of concern that localism has not been balanced by a study of how science travels, Secord, ‘Knowledge in Transit’ (2004), 660; and, for a bold but misconceived attempt to escape from the localism/globalism binary, see Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1993). 11. Hunter, The Royal Society and Its Fellows (1982), 107. 12. In this respect the approach of Horton, Patterns of thought (1997) seems to me exemplary. 13. cf. Bourdieu, Science of Science (2004). 14. Hacking, ‘How Inevitable are the Results of Successful Science?’ (2000), 64–6, and Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (1999), 163–5. 15. Cohen, ‘Roemer and the First Determination of the Velocity of Light (1676)’ (1940); Van Helden, ‘Roemer’s Speed of Light’ (1983); Kristensen & Pedersen, ‘Roemer, Jupiter’s Satellites and the Velocity of Light’ (2012). 16. The figures in the first table are from Boyer, ‘Early Estimates of the Velocity of Light’ (1941), and in the second from Fowles, Introduction to Modern Optics (1989), 6 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light#First_measurement_attempts (accessed 8 December 2014). See also MacKay & Oldford, ‘Scientific Method, Statistical Method and the Speed of Light’ (2000). 17. Hasok Chang avoids the word ‘competition’, preferring ‘epistemic iteration’: Chang, Inventing Temperature (2004), 44–8, 212–17, 226–31. 18. Willmoth, ‘Römer, Flamsteed, Cassini and the Speed of Light’ (2012), 49. 19. Schaffer, ‘Glass Works’ (1989), 100, 20. Shapiro, ‘The Gradual Acceptance of Newton’s Theory of Light’ (1996). A valuable alternative to Schaffer’s account of the opposition to Newton’s first publication is provided by Bechler, ‘Newton’s 1672 Optical Controversies’ (1974); for Bechler the central issue was not replication, but Newton’s claim to certainty. 21. Whitley, ‘Black Boxism’ (1970); Callon, ‘Boïtes noires’ (1981); Pinch, ‘Opening Black Boxes’ (1992); the paradigmatic usage is established by Pinch, Confronting Nature (1986). 22. Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays (1661), 27–8 = Boyle, The Works (1999), 2:26 (which I follow in adopting ‘(not the Arteries)’ from the second edition). 23. Mela, De orbis situ libri tres. Adiecta sunt praeterea loca aliquot ex Vadiani commentariis (1530), S2(rv). 24. Brook, Vermeer’s Hat (2008), 26–53. 25. Williams, Voyages of Delusion (2002); Fleming, Barrow’s Boys (1998). 26. Alessandro Achillini claims that if the earth were luminous, then from a distance the earth would shine like the moon, or even one of the planets: Achillini, De Elementis (1505), 85r. But immediately before he maintains that the earth is not luminous. 27. Wootton, Galileo (2010), 64. 28. Palmieri, ‘Galileo and the Discovery of the Phases of Venus’ (2001). 29. Jardine, The Scenes of Inquiry (2000). 30. Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (1978). 31. For reasonably sophisticated defences of realism see Leplin (ed.), Scientific Realism (1984). 32. For an influential critique of path-dependency, Pinch & Bijker, ‘The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts’ (1987); for an insistence on its importance, Pickering, The Mangle of Practice (1995), 185, 209. It is necessary here to distinguish between the actual path followed by someone in exiting from a maze – which is likely to be highly erratic and contingent – and the path which allows one to exit, which is predetermined. On questions and answers, Collingwood, An Autobiography (1939). My argument here is very different from that of Hacking, ‘The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences’ (1992); clearly in the case of some laboratory sciences there is an interplay between the equipment used and the results obtained, so that the two become mutually supporting. But this does not seem to me the case with the examples I discuss below. 33. Weinberg, ‘Sokal’s Hoax’ (1996); for hostile commentary see Weinberg himself, Labinger and Collins (eds.), The One Culture? (2001), 238, Brown, Who Rules in Science? (2001), 19, Rorty, ‘Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics’ (1999), 182–7. 34. Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos (2011), 105. 35. Hacking, ‘How Inevitable are the Results of Successful Science?’ (2000); see also Jardine, The Scenes of Inquiry (2000); Stanford, Exceeding Our Grasp (2010). Mathematics provides an interesting case study. Against path dependency, Heeffer, ‘On the Curious Historical Coincidence of Algebra and Double-entry Bookkeeping’ (2011); but Pascal seems to have reinvented Euclidean geometry from scratch, and Srinivasa Ramanujan reinvented much of modern mathematics, although he also produced numerous results that were distinctive and unparalleled. 36. Sokal, Beyond the Hoax (2008), 234–5, but note that Sokal’s and Bricmont’s formulation is cautious and ambiguous. 37. O’Grady, ‘Wittgenstein and Relativism’ (2004), 328–9. 38. Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues (1990), 96–125, is fundamental for thinking about these issues. Wittgenstein might well have been able to recognize the force of this argument: O’Grady, ‘Wittgenstein and Relativism’ (2004). 39. Moore, A Defence of Common Sense (1925). For an historian’s approach, Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History (2011). 40. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 4, 154, 217. 41. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol 4, 218–19. 42. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 4, 364–5, 391. 43. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 4, 393. 44. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 4, 385 45. Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (1998), 94 – but see 105, where this circle is acknowledged. 46. Geis & Bunn, A Trial of Witches (1997). 47. Chalmers, ‘Qualitative Novelty in Seventeenth-century Science’ (2015) 48. Biagioli, ‘The Social Status of Italian Mathematicians, 1450–1600’ (1989). 49. Galilei, Le opere (1890), Vol. 5, 386. 50. Above, note 45. 51. Cunningham, ‘Getting the Game Right’ (1988), 370 52. Latour, ‘On the Partial Existence of Existing and Non-existing Objects’ (2000); even Hacking finds this ‘irresponsibly playful’: Hacking, Historical Ontology (2002), 11. 53. Compare Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know? (2012), 232–3, 237; Kuhn, The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science (1992), 9. 54. Kuhn, The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science (1992), 14 55. Kuhn, The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science (1992), 9. Pinch, ‘Kuhn – The Conservative and Radical Interpretations’ (1997) (originally published in 1982) provides a valuable guide to the ambiguities of Kuhn’s legacy. 56. Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know? (2012), 232–3. An interesting example is the speed of sound: for over a century there was a major discrepancy between theoretical and experimental values for the speed of sound. Nature kept pushing back (Finn, ‘Laplace and the Speed of Sound’ (1964)). 57. Chang, Is Water H2O? (2012), 203–51, especially 215–24. Brown and Sokal uses the term ‘objectivism’ to serve the same purpose: Brown, Who Rules in Science? (2001), 92; Sokal, Beyond the Hoax (2008), 229. But, as Brown himself shows (101–4), the concept of objectivity is liable to cause much confusion. 58. Kuhn, The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science (1992), 9. 59. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959), 22 (from the 1958 preface). The new epigraph (14) was added when the book was first reprinted (see the acknowledgement on 23). The pagination differs in later editions. 60. Kuhn, Structure (1970), 135–42.
1. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), 47. 2. Hexter, ‘The Historian and His Day’ (1954), 231. 3. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), v. 4. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), 16. 5. Wilson & Ashplant, ‘Whig History’ (1988). 6. Ashplant & Wilson, ‘Present-centred History and the Problem of Historical Knowledge’ (1988), 274. 7. Mayer, The Roman Inquisition: A Papal Bureaucracy (2013); Mayer, The Roman Inquisition: Trying Galileo (2015). 8. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes’s Science of Politics and His Theory of Science’ (2002); Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and Roberval’ (2002), 187–9; Hull, ‘Hobbes and the Premodern Geometry of Modern Political Thought’ (2004), especially 121–2 9. Shapin & Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), 150. 10. Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (1651), 284; Shapin & Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), 153–4. 11. Shapin & Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), 332. 12. Compare Bloor, Wittgenstein (1983), 3. 13. Shapin & Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), 148, quoting the translation of De Corpore, 65–6. 14. Laslett, ‘Commentary’ (1963), 863 (the original text has an obvious typographical error: it reads ‘the historians’); see the discussion in Jardine, ‘Whigs and Stories’ (2003). 15. Goldie, ‘The Context of the Foundations’ (2006), 32. 16. Merton, ‘Unanticipated Consequences’ (1936). 17. Mayr, ‘When is Historiography Whiggish?’ (1990); Alvargonzález, ‘Is the History of Science Essentially Whiggish?’ (2013). For the claim that historians who express views such as these should be driven out of the historical profession, see Shapin, ‘Possessed by the Idols’ (2006); and my response in the letters page of the next issue. 18. Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir (1969). 19. James, ‘The Problem of Mechanical Flight’ (1912). 20. Weinberg, ‘Sokal’s Hoax’ (1996). 21. Rorty, ‘Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics’ (1999), 186. 22. For a striking, but unconvincing, relativist approach to the history of the bicycle, see Pinch & Bijker, ‘The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts’ (1984), 411–19. 23. The phrase originates with Romain Rolland, and was used on the masthead of Gramsci’s newspaper, L’ordine nuovo.