Descartes Opticien: The Optical Triumph of the 1620s
This chapter reconstructs the genealogy of Descartes’ discovery of the law of refraction; initial development of a theory of lenses; and first attempts, in the years 1626–1628, to explain the law through a mechanistic theory of light. These events of the
- PDF / 621,067 Bytes
- 57 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 44 Downloads / 184 Views
Descartes Opticien: The Optical Triumph of the 1620s
4.1
Genealogical Detective Work— Hints, Clues and the Problematical Text of the Dioptrique
This chapter reconstructs the genealogy of Descartes’ discovery of the law of refraction, initial development of a theory of lenses, and first attempts to explain the law through a mechanistic theory of light. These events of the mid to late 1620s constitute the greatest of Descartes’ achievements in mixed-and physico-mathematics and were also of the upmost importance for his emergence, from the late 1620s, as a systematic corpuscular-mechanical natural philosopher. He would use the discovery of the law of refraction as a putative example of his supposedly all conquering method. More importantly, the optical work led him to the mature formulation of the central concepts of his dynamics—the causal register of his emerging system of corpuscularmechanism. That system was first embodied in the text, Le Monde (1629–1633), tellingly subtitled ‘traité de la lumière’, in which the recently polished dynamics, itself a product of the optical work, ran a corpuscular-mechanical theory of light in its cosmological setting.1 The optical triumph of the 1620s is, from one point of view, the culmination of the physico-mathematical agenda of the young Descartes, whilst viewed prospectively, it is the exemplary basis and resource for large swathes of his mature, systematic natural philosophical work. Nothing could be more important to understand about the early career of Descartes, and nothing, with the exception of his fantasy of method, has proven so difficult and allusive to reconstruct. The materials for this reconstruction are few and scattered, and this sort of reconstruction—especially one grounded in the realization that Descartes was a physicomathematician leaning toward corpuscular mechanism—has not previously been attempted. For reasons that will become quite clear as we proceed, this inquiry takes
1 The centrality of light and its action in the system of corpuscular-mechanical natural philosophy, as a set of phenomena and as an exemplar of action and explanation, will be discussed in Chap. 10.
J. Schuster, Descartes-Agonistes: Physico-mathematics, Method & CorpuscularMechanism 1618-33, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 27, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4746-3_4, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
167
168
4
Descartes Opticien: The Optical Triumph of the 1620s
the form of a detective story. We have to start from work published much later—the Dioptrique, published in 1637 as one of the three ‘Essais’ supporting the Discours de la Méthode—working back through scattered earlier hints and clues to uncover the genealogy of the discovery of the law, its application to lenses and attempted mechanistic explanations. We do have a slight head start, because we already know something about Descartes’ physico-mathematics and embryonic corpuscularmechanism, and the place that the optical fragment of 1620 holds in that enterprise. We know, for example, of his early in
Data Loading...
