Ofer Gal - Böcker

In Baroque Science Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris present a radically new perspective on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Instead of celebrating the triumph of reason and rationality, they study the paradoxes and anxieties that stemmed from the New Science and the intellectual compromises that shaped it and enabled its spectacular success. Gal and Chen-Morris show how the protagonists of the new mathematical natural philosophy grasped at the very far and very small by entrusting observation to the mediation of artificial instruments, and how they justified this mediation by naturalizing and denigrating the human senses. They show how the physical-mathematical ordering of heavens and earth demanded obscure and spurious mathematical procedures, replacing the divine harmonies of the late Renaissance with an assemblage of isolated, contingent laws and approximated constants. Finally, they show how the new savants, forced to contend that reason is hopelessly estranged from its surrounding world and that nature is irreducibly complex, turned to the passions to provide an alternative, naturalized foundation for their epistemology and ethics.The New Science, Gal and Chen-Morris reveal, is a Baroque phenomenon: deeply entrenched in and crucially formative of the culture of its time.

In "Baroque Science", Ofer Gal and Raz D. Chen-Morris present a radically new perspective on the study of early modern science. Instead of the triumph of reason and rationality and the celebration of the discoveries and breakthroughs of the period, they examine science in the context of the baroque, analyzing the tensions, paradoxes, and compromises that shaped the New Science of the seventeenth century and enabled its spectacular success. Gal and Chen-Morris show how scientists during the seventeenth century turned away from the trust in the acquisition of knowledge through the senses toward a growing reliance on the mediation of artificial instruments, such as lenses and mirrors for observation and mechanical and pneumatic devices for experimentation. Likewise, the mathematical techniques and procedures that allowed the success of mathematical natural philosophy turned increasingly obscure and artificial, and in place of divine harmonies they revealed an assemblage of isolated, contingent laws and constants.In its attempts to enforce order in the face of threatening chaos, blur the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, and mobilize passions in the service of objective knowledge, Gal and Chen-Morris reveal, the New Science is a baroque phenomenon.

The Origins of Modern Science is the first synthetic account of the history of science from antiquity through the Scientific Revolution in many decades. Providing readers of all backgrounds and students of all disciplines with the tools to study science like a historian, Ofer Gal covers everything from Pythagorean mathematics to Newton's Principia, through Islamic medicine, medieval architecture, global commerce and magic. Richly illustrated throughout, scientific reasoning and practices are introduced in accessible and engaging ways with an emphasis on the complex relationships between institutions, beliefs and political structures and practices. Readers gain valuable new insights into the role that science plays both in history and in the world today, placing the crucial challenges to science and technology of our time within their historical and cultural context.

The Origins of Modern Science is the first synthetic account of the history of science from antiquity through the Scientific Revolution in many decades. Providing readers of all backgrounds and students of all disciplines with the tools to study science like a historian, Ofer Gal covers everything from Pythagorean mathematics to Newton's Principia, through Islamic medicine, medieval architecture, global commerce and magic. Richly illustrated throughout, scientific reasoning and practices are introduced in accessible and engaging ways with an emphasis on the complex relationships between institutions, beliefs and political structures and practices. Readers gain valuable new insights into the role that science plays both in history and in the world today, placing the crucial challenges to science and technology of our time within their historical and cultural context.

This text is a historical-epistemological study of one the most consequential idea of early-modern celestial mechanics: Robert Hooke's proposal to "compoun[d] the celestial motions of the planets of a direct motion by the tangent & an attractive motion towards a central body," a proposal which Isaac Newton adopted and realized in his "Principia". Hook's "Programme" was revolutionary both cosmologically and mathematically. It presented "the celestial motions," the proverbial symbol of stability and immutability, as a process of continuous change, and prescribed only parameters of rectilinear motions and rectilinear attractions for calculating their closed curved orbits. Yet the traces of Hooke's construction of his "Programme" for the heavens lead through his investigations in such earthly disciplines as microscopy, practical optics and horology, and the mathematical tools developed by Newton to accomplish it appear no less local and goal-oriented than Hooke's lenses and springs.This transgression of the boundaries between the theoretical, experimental and technological realms is reminiscent of Hooke's own free excursions in and out of the circles occupied by gentlemen-philosophers, university mathematicians, instrument makers, technicians and servants. It presents an opportunity to examine the social and epistemological distinctions, relations and hierarchies between those realms and their inhabitants, and compels a critical assessment of the philosophical categories they embody.

It was in 1660s England, according to the received view, in the Royal Society of London, that science acquired the form of empirical enquiry we recognize as our own: an open, collaborative experimental practice, mediated by specially-designed instruments, supported by civil discourse, stressing accuracy and replicability. Guided by the philosophy of Francis Bacon, by Protestant ideas of this worldly benevolence, by gentlemanly codes of decorum and by a dominant interest in mechanics and the mechanical structure of the universe, the members of the Royal Society created a novel experimental practice that superseded former modes of empirical inquiry, from Aristotelian observations to alchemical experimentation.This volume focuses on the development of empiricism as an interest in the body – as both the object of research and the subject of experience. Re-embodying empiricism shifts the focus of interest to the ‘life sciences’; medicine, physiology, natural history. In fact, manyof the active members of the Royal Society were physicians, and a significant number of those, disciples of William Harvey and through him, inheritors of the empirical anatomy practices developed in Padua during the 16th century. Indeed, the primary research interests of the early Royal Society were concentrated on the body, human and animal, and its functions much more than on mechanics. Similarly, the Académie des Sciences directly contradicted its self-imposed mandate to investigate Nature in mechanistic fashion, devoting a significant portion of its Mémoires to questions concerning life, reproduction and monsters, consulting empirical botanists, apothecaries and chemists, and keeping closer to experience than to the Cartesian standards of well-founded knowledge.These highlighted empirical studies of the body, were central in a workshop in the beginning of 2009 organized by the unit for History and Philosophy of Science in Sydney. The papers that were presented bysome of the leading figures in this area are presented in this volume.

This book is a historical-epistemological study of one the most consequential idea of early modern celestial mechanics: Robert Hooke's proposal to "compoun[d] the celestial motions of the planets of a direct motion by the tangent & an attractive motion towards a central body," a proposal which Isaac Newton adopted and realized in his Principia. Hooke's Programme was revolutionary both cosmologically and mathematically. It presented "the celestial motions," the proverbial symbol of stability and immutability, as a process of continuous change, and prescribed only parameters of rectilinear motions and rectilinear attractions for calculating their closed curved orbits. Yet the traces of Hooke's construction of his Programme for the heavens lead through his investigations in such earthly disciplines as microscopy, practical optics and horology, and the mathematical tools developed by Newton to accomplish it appear no less local and goal-oriented than Hooke's lenses and springs.This transgression of the boundaries between the theoretical, experimental and technological realms is reminiscent of Hooke's own free excursions in and out of the circles occupied by gentlemen-philosophers, university mathematicians, instrument makers, technicians and servants. It presents an opportunity to examine the social and epistemological distinctions, relations and hierarchies between those realms and their inhabitants, and compels a critical assessment of the philosophical categories they embody.

It was in 1660s England, according to the received view, in the Royal Society of London, that science acquired the form of empirical enquiry we recognize as our own: an open, collaborative experimental practice, mediated by specially-designed instruments, supported by civil discourse, stressing accuracy and replicability. Guided by the philosophy of Francis Bacon, by Protestant ideas of this worldly benevolence, by gentlemanly codes of decorum and by a dominant interest in mechanics and the mechanical structure of the universe, the members of the Royal Society created a novel experimental practice that superseded former modes of empirical inquiry, from Aristotelian observations to alchemical experimentation.This volume focuses on the development of empiricism as an interest in the body – as both the object of research and the subject of experience. Re-embodying empiricism shifts the focus of interest to the ‘life sciences’; medicine, physiology, natural history. In fact, manyof the active members of the Royal Society were physicians, and a significant number of those, disciples of William Harvey and through him, inheritors of the empirical anatomy practices developed in Padua during the 16th century. Indeed, the primary research interests of the early Royal Society were concentrated on the body, human and animal, and its functions much more than on mechanics. Similarly, the Académie des Sciences directly contradicted its self-imposed mandate to investigate Nature in mechanistic fashion, devoting a significant portion of its Mémoires to questions concerning life, reproduction and monsters, consulting empirical botanists, apothecaries and chemists, and keeping closer to experience than to the Cartesian standards of well-founded knowledge.These highlighted empirical studies of the body, were central in a workshop in the beginning of 2009 organized by the unit for History and Philosophy of Science in Sydney. The papers that were presented bysome of the leading figures in this area are presented in this volume.

This volume examines the New Science of the 17th century in the context of Baroque culture, analysing its emergence as an integral part of the high culture of the period.

It is unique in taking its global nature as fundamental and contains studies of the theme of motion and knowledge in China, Europe and the Pacific from the 16th to the 18th century.People living around the turn of the 17th century were experiencing motion in ways beyond the grasp of anyone less than a century earlier.

This volume examines the New Science of the 17th century in the context of Baroque culture, analysing its emergence as an integral part of the high culture of the period. The collected essays explore themes common to the new practices of knowledge production and the rapidly changing culture surrounding them, as well as the obsessions, anxieties and aspirations they share, such as the foundations of order, the power and peril of mediation and the conflation of the natural and the artificial. The essays also take on the historiographical issues involved: the characterization of culture in general and culture of knowledge in particular; the use of generalizations like ‘Baroque’ and the status of such categories; and the role of these in untangling the historical complexities of the tumultuous 17th century. The canonical protagonists of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ are considered, and so are some obscure and suppressed figures: Galileo side by side with Scheiner;Torricelli together with Kircher; Newton as well as Scilla.   The coupling of Baroque and Science defies both the still-triumphalist historiographies of the Scientific Revolution and the slight embarrassment that the Baroque represents for most cultural-national histories of Western Europe. It signals a methodological interest in tensions and dilemmas rather than self-affirming narratives of success and failure, and provides an opportunity for reflective critique of our historical categories which is valuable in its own right.  ​