The concept of electrical conductivity, or, as initially coined by Stephen Gray , ‘electrical communication’, has always been assigned an important role in the history of electrical research. Some thirty-five years after Gray's ‘electrical communication’ acquired wide attention, Priestley employed the concept of conductivity to define physical reality, thus giving a privileged position to the science he himself endeavoured to cultivate. As he argued in the introduction to The History and Present State of Electricity , ‘the electrical fluid is no (...) local, or occasional agent in the theatre of the world. Late discoveries show that its presence and effects are every where … It is not, like magnetism, confined to one kind of bodies, but every thing we know is a conductor or nonconductor of electricity’. Contemporary historians, for example, Heilbron, Home and Hackmann, link the concept of conductivity to a radical transformation of electrical research which pertained to its mode of organization and the definition of its subject-matter, and which culminated in its emergence as a distinctive branch of eighteenth-century ‘experimental philosophy’. (shrink)

Central to Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society was the description and justification of the method adopted and advocated by the Fellows of the Society, for it was thought that it was their method which distinguished them from ancients, dogmatists, sceptics, and contemporary natural philosophers such as Descartes. The Fellows saw themselves as furthering primarily a novel method, rather than a system, of philosophy, and the History gave expression to this corporate self-perception. However, the History's description of their method (...) was not necessarily accurate. Rather, as will be argued below, by a combination of subtle misrepresentation and selective exposition, Sprat portrayed a method which would further the aims of social and ecclesiastical stability and material prosperity, essential for the Royal Society since its continued existence depended upon the creation of a social basis for the institutionalized pursuit of natural philosophy. Some link had to be forged between the activities of the Society and the intellectual and social aspirations of the Restoration. To understand the intent and meaning of Sprat's History and the method there portrayed, we must therefore look to the institutional needs which it fulfilled. (shrink)

Visual academies were unique social formations in the ancien régime, so distinctive that they are best studied as prototype professions. Alone among academies, they were responsible for offering instruction. Alone among educational institutions, they linked liberal instruction to occupational practice. Alone among ‘learned’ occupations, they accommodated an irreducible manual component. The visual Académie in Paris in particular established literally the first ‘graduate school’ in any field of activity and admitted students on the basis of anonymously scored student competitions. Equivalent activities (...) will not begin to emerge in medicine or law until the mid-19th century. Our historical case, in short, calls into question the received orthodoxy regarding the time and place of the first professionalism projects. Instead of focusing on 19th-century Britain, we are now considering mid-17th-century France and thereby preparing the way for a new start in the sociology of professions. (shrink)

This article aims to challenge the thesis of the craft origins of scientific empiricism by demonstrating how the empirical practices of early experimentalism differed in significant ways from the activities of artisans. Through a phenomenological analysis of instrumental observation and experimental demonstrations, I aim to show how experimentalism privileged modes of experience that were foreign to craft traditions and which facilitated a newfound estrangement of human subjects from the objects of their knowledge. Firstly, we will review concerns surrounding the promotion (...) of optical instruments by early experimentalists to reveal how these technologies were understood not only to amplify the senses but also to obscure contextual and relative qualities available to unaided visual perception. Secondly, we will examine the experimental practices of the early Royal Society, to see how experimental demonstrations were deliberately structured to facilitate experiences of the natural world that were divorced from practical and personal contexts. It is here that the divergence from artisanal epistemology is rendered most apparent. For in contrast to craft practices, which favored forms of experience which were personal and engaged, I will argue that the new scientific practices of the 17th century played a central role in effecting the researcher's transformation into a new kind of epistemological subject – the spectator. (shrink)