This article explores the speed and form in which the mechanical philosophy was absorbed into the college curriculum in Louis XIV’s France. It argues that in general a mechanist approach to nature only began to be received sympathetically after 1690. It also emphasizes that it was the Cartesian not Gassendist form of the mechanical philosophy that professors espoused. While admitting that at present it is impossible to explain successfully the history of the reception of the mechanical philosophy in the classroom, (...) the article concludes by attempting to throw light on the French preference for Descartes. This, it is suggested, is linked to the relative familiarity of Cartesian mechanism, the way the philosophy was packaged, and the political and religious environment. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis essay describes the emergence and stabilization in French and English experimental accounts, in second half of the seventeenth century, of the narrative sequence: X did (some process in the laboratory) and X saw (something happen), where X stands for a pronoun, I or we in English,je, nousoronin French. Focussing on the French case, it shows how the use of the collective pronounonin the experimental accounts registered in the files of the Académie des Sciences is directly related to the (...) will of this newly created institution to assert a collective authority on the production and legitimization of experimental matters-of-fact produced in the laboratory. It is argued, through the case of the discovery of the blind spot in the eye by Mariotte, that this new narrative form imbeds a construal of the experiment as a public spectacle, and of the proof as a witnessing event, which eludes the Academy's attempts to monopolize the process of fact validation and favors the diffusion and display of experiments in front of larger audiences. The question of whether a privileged witness such as the King of France who patronized the Academy could not have constituted by himself a suitable audience to ensure a full legitimization of experimental matters-of-fact while remaning within the bounds of academic practices is addressed. It is answered in the negative by providing evidence for the lack of interest of the absolute monarch in experiments. On the other hand, the outdoor practices of observation and measurement are shown to interfere in a constructive manner with the absolutist power and to capture the attention of the absolutist monarch, where laboratory experiments had failed. It is proposed that natural philosophers in the early modern period bear the burden of proof in buying credibility for the phenomena they try, by paying a tribute to the standing of the patrician elites that witness their experiments. This makes sense in a straightforward manner of the lack of interest of the King of France in a practice which exalts the power of the very group he is trying hard to control through the absolutist structure of power. (shrink)

The ArgumentEtienn-François Geoffroy' Table des Rapports is generally regarded as a landmark in the evolution of chemistry during the eighteenth century. Issues have arisen among historians concerning the significance and originality of the Table that require fuller attention to the immediate context of chemical research in the Academie des sciences during the two decades that preceded its appearance. The present paper argues that, despite the transition from communal to individual research projects that marked the reorganization of the Academy in 1699, (...) chemists continued to pursue shared problems within a communal ethos. The interactions between Wilhelm Homberg, Etienne-François Geoffroy, and Louis Lemery were particularly prominent. The paper traces one example of this interaction, involving the sulfur principle and its influence on one entry in Geoffroy's Table. Further such studies are needed to elucidate the relation between the concepts of chemical composition and reactions implied in Geoffroy's table and the concepts embodied in the previous work of Geoffroy and his associates in the Academy. (shrink)

I argue and demonstrate in this essay that interconnected systems of science and technology, or technoscience, existed long before the late nineteenth century, and that eighteenth-century chemistry was such an early form of technoscience. Based on recent historical research on the early development of carbon chemistry from the late 1820s until the 1840s—which revealed that early carbon chemistry was an experimental expert culture that was largely detached from the mundane industrial world—I further examine the question of the internal preconditions within (...) the expert culture of carbon chemistry that contributed to its convergence with the synthetic-dye industry in the late 1850s. I argue that the introduction of new types and techniques of organic-chemical reactions and organic substances in this experimental expert culture, along with the application of chemical formulae as paper tools for modeling reactions as well as the chemical constitution and structure of substances, enabled academic chemists to make specific, novel contributions to chemical technology and industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

This essay explores seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century programs of natural inquiry where conjecture—an uncertain category of knowledge—played a vital role in the advancement of the sciences. It shows how early modern investigators used conjectures as a bridge between knowledge and ignorance and the process of conjecturing as a way to expand the mental state of inquiry. In publishing their conjectures, they were heeding Francis Bacon’s call to inspire hope and urge fellow experimenters to continue researching complex natural phenomena. Fellow investigators (...) could help to test, verify, revise, invalidate, or propose new inferences in a dialectical, collaborative process. The author argues that, by the eighteenth century, public conjecturing marked a particular kind of broad-minded experimental philosopher. This essay situates conjectures within agnotology—the study of culturally produced ignorance—and Baconian communication of knowledge and ignorance. It explores the philosophical and moral tensions investigators navigated when specifying nature’s unknowns. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article argues that during the seventeenth century chemistry achieved intellectual and institutional recognition, starting its transition from a practical art – subordinated to medicine – into an independent discipline. This process was by no means a smooth one, as it took place amidst polemics and conflicts lasting more than a century. It began when Andreas Libavius endeavored to turn chemistry into a teaching discipline, imposing method and order. Chemistry underwent harsh criticism from Descartes and the Cartesians, who reduced natural (...) phenomena to the mechanical affections of matter, leaving little room for chemistry as an independent discipline. Boyle rejected the chemical principles and promoted the fusion of chemistry with corpuscularianism. He did not reduce chemical phenomena to the mechanical affections of matter, but strived to promote chemistry as part of natural philosophy. Lemery gave strong impulse to the recognition of chemistry as a discipline in its own right by fostering a compromise of chemistry and mechanism. Lemery adopted the chemical principles, but did not see them as the ultimate ingredients of bodies. In order to promote chemistry, he distanced it from alchemy and pursued the reform of chemical terminology. (shrink)

Si les savants du xviie siècle revendiquaient la responsabilité morale qui découlait de leur connaissance particulière, leurs mécènes préféraient les applications fidèles et utiles de cette connaissance. Un savant osait-il, donc, s’opposer à son mécène? Trois associés, au moins, de l’Académie royale des sciences se distinguatient de Louis XIV sur des questions de philosophie naturelle, de religion et de politique. Le cas de l’un d’eux, Nicolas Hartsoeker, un savant hollandais et fabricant d’instruments d’optique, espion de Louis XIV pendant la guerre (...) de la Ligue d’Augsbourg, révèle des liens complexes entre science et conscience pendant la révolution scientifique. (shrink)

Throughout the sixteenth century, learned physicians across Europe performed a diverse array of “trials” of phenomena and published reports about them. This essay traces the phrase “periculum facere” (“to make a trial”) and related terms through natural history investigations, drug testing, chymical analysis, and anatomical discoveries. Physicians used ancient precedents, their learned expertise, and pedagogical authority to anchor the epistemic status of their trials and incorporated the historical narratives of their trial-making within arguments to factual and causal knowledge, even philosophical (...) scientia. Developed from engagement with things, ancient texts, other healers, and students, this lively tradition of contrived, first-person empirical trials flourished in some academic institutions, especially the University of Padua. The frequency and visibility of sixteenth-century medical trials, especially in the education of hundreds of students annually, is essential evidence for understanding how experimentation came to be widespread in early modern Europe. (shrink)