From a Metaphysical to a Scientific Object: Mechanizing Light in Galilean Science
Ancient philosophers generally offered three lines of thought for conceiving of light. Classical atomism took light to be a material emission of small and swift particles; Plato spoke about light as a phenomenon charged with metaphysical tones; and Aristo
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From a Metaphysical to a Scientific Object: Mechanizing Light in Galilean Science Susana Gómez
Ancient philosophers generally offered three lines of thought for conceiving of light. Classical atomism took light to be a material emission of small and swift particles; Plato spoke about light as a phenomenon charged with metaphysical tones; and Aristotle, who surprisingly only spoke of light in two brief passages in his entire corpus, asserted that light was not a substance but a quality of the medium. During the Middle Ages phenomena related to light were studied mathematically by geometrical optics, though it is well known that the mathematical approach was not, strictly speaking, a part of natural philosophy. The nature of light in that period was only studied—with few exceptions—by authors who expressed conceptions of nature that were closer to Neoplatonic cosmologies. In most cases, the study of light was nearer to metaphysics than to natural philosophy.1 The Neoplatonic revival of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was, undoubtedly, a great impulse in the direction of modern science. However, the new generation of seventeenth-century natural philosophers was not at all satisfied with the style of inquiry that came along with Neoplatonism. These natural philosophers strongly criticized the Neoplatonic understanding of occult qualities, action at a distance, sympathies, signatures, etc., and made a great effort to reinterpret those categories. As an alternative to the Neoplatonic natural philosophies of the Renaissance they proposed a conception of nature as a great machine. This mechanized conception of nature could only conceivably have arisen together with certain epistemological changes, among them the rise of experimentation and mathematization. For many seventeenth-century scientists, understanding natural phenomena in this way was essential to the process of bringing them into the domain of the genuinely scientific. 1
About the relation of metaphysical and physical arguments in medieval and renaissance philosophies of light, see Lindberg, “The Genesis of Kepler’s Theory of Light.”
S. Gómez (*) Faculdad de Filosofia, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] D. Garber and S. Roux (eds.), The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 300, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4345-8_8, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013
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The development of Galileo’s conception of light as it changes in the different phases of his work nicely exemplifies this effort to make a natural phenomenon an object worthy of science. In his first works Galileo tried to consolidate physical and mathematical approaches to nature. The earlier tradition of geometrical optics was not satisfactory for a natural philosopher and mathematician, who was trying to understand the nature of light. It is understandable, then, that initially Galileo was sympathetic toward those Neoplatonic thinkers who had made an effort to explain exactly what light is. Neve
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