What Was the Relation of Baroque Culture to the Trajectory of Early Modern Natural Philosophy?
This paper attempts to answer the question posed in its title, by focusing attention on the institution and contested field of discourse of natural philosophy, and its processes of change in the early and mid Seventeenth century. Following the seminal wor
- PDF / 423,875 Bytes
- 33 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 68 Downloads / 203 Views
What Was the Relation of Baroque Culture to the Trajectory of Early Modern Natural Philosophy? John A. Schuster
Abstract This paper attempts to answer the question posed in its title, by focusing attention on the institution and contested field of discourse of natural philosophy, and its processes of change in the early and mid Seventeenth century. Following the seminal work of José Antonio Maravall, Baroque culture is taken as a set of concerted responses to a wide religio-political crisis. The paper then argues that this period saw a veritable ‘crisis within a crisis’ occurring in natural philosophy and its cognate and subordinate disciplines, with recruitment of ‘Baroque’ aims, styles and rules of contestation into natural philosophy by competing players. It is also suggested that some of these Baroque ‘cultural genes’ survived in the subsequent history of natural philosophy, and thence, following its disintegration, into the social dynamics of the emergent modern sciences, shaping their agonistic natures.
Introduction: Thinking About “Baroque Science” There are three broad options available for approaching the question, “What, if anything, were the relations between the Baroque and (the process of) the Scientific Revolution?” (1) With historians of fine art, music, literature and architecture, one could define Baroque style and trace its expression across creative domains including natural philosophy and the sciences. (2) With social and political historians in the manner of, say, Carl Friedrich, one could delineate a social or cultural period as Baroque, so that concrete relations might be delineated between this culture and contemporary natural philosophising.1 The idea would be that in a culture or social formation more than artistic expression is at stake—for example, forms and norms of social interaction, resources for self-understanding and public expression by
J.A. Schuster (*) Campion College and University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] O. Gal and R. Chen-Morris (eds.), Science in the Age of Baroque, International Archives of the History of Ideas 208, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4807-1_2, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
13
14
J.A. Schuster
actors, organisational forms and styles, any of which might affect natural philosophy and its subordinate sciences. (3) One could try to show that there is something importantly Baroque about the end product[s] of the Scientific Revolution, in modern science as a whole, perhaps. It is fair to say that the Baroque Science Project—as conceived by the Editors of this volume and exemplified in their Introduction and respective substantive contributions—offers novel findings along all three of the above options (provided that one does not see option (1) in terms of surface stylistic analogies, but rather in terms of commonalities at deeper epistemic and cultural grammar levels). This paper is more limited in scope. It explores possibilities in option (2), based on the belief that the Scientific Revolution was a co
Data Loading...
