The Nature of the Early Royal Society: Part I

1976 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Theodore Hoppen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Scientific Enterprise ◽  
Scientific Debate ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Working Out

The foundation of the Royal Society marks an important step in the institutionalization of seventeenth-century British natural philosophy. The society's existence and activities provided a focus for the exchange of opinions, while its meetings and publications became forums for scientific debate. Some writers, however, have claimed much more than this for the society and have seen its establishment as marking a real watershed between, on the one hand, intellectually ‘conservative elements’ and, on the other, a set of ‘definite philosophical principles … inspiring … progressive minds’. Others have gone still further and argued not only that the society's activities ‘enormously’ accelerated ‘the development of natural sciences’, but that these activities were the result of the ‘working out of a conscious, deliberately-conceived ideal’. But views which see a single, logically consistent conception of the nature of the scientific enterprise informing the work and outlook of the Royal Society and its members involve a serious oversimplification of the complexity of natural philosophy in the late seventeenth century. Despite some important work published in recent years, we are still far from achieving a satisfactory understanding of the complicated web of traditions, sources, and intellectual systems that provided both an inspirational dynamic for the work of natural philosophers such as those in the Royal Society and patterns of expression through which their preoccupations could be articulated. Thus the many studies which have been devoted to establishing connexions between the scientific movement and patterns of religious or political belief have been flawed from the start by unreal assumptions about the degree of intellectual coherence presented by the natural philosophy of the time. And until we can present a more three-dimensional picture of what the 'scientific movement’ was in fact all about, and until wider agreement has been reached as to satisfactory definitions of various types of socio-theological attitude and behaviour, such studies are no more than attempts to tie together two unknowns by means of a rope of sand.

Political Science

2018 ◽  
pp. 104-133
Author(s):  
Tita Chico
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Core ◽  
Gulliver's Travels ◽  
Experimental Project ◽  
History Of ◽  
Natural Philosophers

Late seventeenth-century natural philosophers inherited the conjunction of politics and science at the core of Francis Bacon’s experimental project. Thomas Sprat’s The History of the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels use the conventions of literary knowledge to express their scientific-political visions, insisting that natural philosophy cannot be understood apart from the political institutions enabling and enabled by its practice and promulgation. These writers use the experimental imagination to envisage, in turn, civil government, absolutist monarchy, and imperialism. Sprat advances scientific triumphalism and a model for schooling gentlemen into civil society.

Representation of Innovation in Seventeenth-Century England

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-42
Author(s):  
Benoît Godin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Science And Research ◽  
Radical Transformation ◽  
Present Understanding

Our present understanding of innovation is closely linked to science and research on the one hand and economy and industry on the other. It has not always been so. Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the concept was mainly used in religious and political discourses. In these contexts, actors used it in a pejorative sense. Innovation, imagined as a radical transformation, was considered a peril to the established social order. Such was natural philosophers’ understanding. This article documents Francis Bacon’s work as an eminent example of such a representation. To Bacon, natural philosophy and innovation are two distinct spheres of activity. It is documented that Bacon’s uses of the concept of innovation are found mainly in political, legal, and moral writings, not natural philosophy, because to Bacon and all others of his time, innovation is poli tical.

Thomas Henshaw and Sir Robert Paston's pursuit of the red elixir: An early collaboration between fellows of The Royal Society

1997 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald R. Dickson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
British Library ◽  
Closed World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Culture Of Science ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
The Right ◽  
Shed Light

The problems involved in using Baconian categories to understand the great instauration Bacon hoped to foster are now well known. Natural philosophers were, for Bacon, empiricists, who tested their observations of nature openly, and their foes were superstitious dogmatists, who speculated by conjuring hypotheses in secret. As Joseph Agassi has wryly remarked, ‘once a person, historian or not, accepts a division of mankind into open-minded and closed-minded, he almost invariably finds himself on the right side’.1We now appreciate how broad even the Royal Society's conception of natural philosophy was, given the hermetic interests of many of its early members.2 By examining an early collaborative effort of Thomas Henshaw and Sir Robert Paston, who were both respected Fellows of the Royal Society as well as ‘chemical alchemists’ or ‘chemical philosophers’ following a rigorous, quantitative programme of experimentation, this essay will confirm that the actual practice of natural philosophy was broad indeed, and hardly revolutionary.3 Our view of these shadowy figures is usually obscured by the backdrop against which they are set, a backdrop that was created as the category of ‘natural magic’ disappeared, with part becoming science and the rest being discarded as superstition. The evidence to be examined includes an alchemical treatise in the British Library (Sloane 2222) and Henshaw's correspondence discussing it. Although the status of alchemy certainly changed during the course of the seventeenth century, it did so because more rigorous experimentation proved the alchemist's claims to be unverifiable, not because any underlying theories had been altered. The letters, especially, illustrate this process and also shed light on the differences between the closed world of alchemy and the more open culture of science then emerging.

The Isomorphism of Space, Time and Matter in Seventeenth-century Natural Philosophy

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 296-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Rita Palmerino
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Space Time ◽  
The Other ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Acceleration And Deceleration ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis article documents the general tendency of seventeenth-century natural philosophers, irrespective of whether they were atomists or anti-atomists, to regard space, time and matter as magnitudes having the same internal composition. It examines the way in which authors such as Fromondus, Basson, Sennert, Arriaga, Galileo, Magnen, Descartes, Gassendi, Charleton as well as the young Newton motivated their belief in the isomorphism of space, time and matter, and how this belief reflected on their views concerning the relation between geometry and physics. Special attention is paid to the fact that most of the authors mentioned above regarded rarefaction and condensation, on the one hand, and acceleration and deceleration, on the other hand, as analogous phenomena, which consequently had to be explained in similar terms.

Material doubts: Hooke, artisan culture and the exchange of information in 1670s London

1995 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Iliffe
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Construction Work ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
History Of ◽  
Natural Philosophers

In this paper I analyse some resources for the history of manipulative skill and the acquisition of knowledge. I focus on a decade in the life of the ‘ingenious’ Robert Hooke, whose social identity epitomized the mechanically minded individual existing on the interface between gentleman natural philosophers, instrument makers and skilled craftsmen in late seventeenth-century London. The argument here is not concerned with the notion that Hooke had a unique talent for working with material objects, and indeed my purpose is to rethink the ways in which we account for such virtuosity. In this vein, I do not adopt solely a realist or constructivist attitude to skill but seek to show how, in a purposeful way, Hooke drew from the resources of techniques and information made available to him by his social interaction with labourers, servants, craftsmen, gentlemen and noblemen. In Hooke's local culture, intelligence flowed between the sites where these individuals worked and socialized. I examine the practical, social and situational links between the worlds of the coffee house, the workshop and the rooms of the Royal Society at Arundel House (between 1667 and 1674) and Gresham College. From this perspective, there were no rigid boundaries between the domains of natural philosophy, banausic culture and construction work on which Hooke was engaged, and I argue that we should examine his world in term of a series of networks of capital exchange comprised of finance, social power and mechanical expertise.

George Gabriel Stokes

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fluid Dynamics ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Mathematical Analysis ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Public Servant ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Natural Philosophers

George Gabriel Stokes was one of the most significant mathematicians and natural philosophers of the nineteenth century. Serving as Lucasian professor at Cambridge he made wide-ranging contributions to optics, fluid dynamics and mathematical analysis. As Secretary of the Royal Society he played a major role in the direction of British science acting as both a sounding board and a gatekeeper. Outside his own area he was a distinguished public servant and MP for Cambridge University. He was keenly interested in the relation between science and religion and wrote extensively on the matter. This edited collection of essays brings together experts in mathematics, physics and the history of science to cover the many facets of Stokes’s life in a scholarly but accessible way.

‘Philosophical’ grammar in John Wilkins’s ‘Essay’

1975 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivian Salmon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Real Character ◽  
Philosophical Language ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
Century Thought ◽  
Insight Into

Recent studies of John Wilkins, author ofAn essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language(1668) have examined aspects of his life and work which illustrate the modernity of his attitudes, both as a theologian, sympathetic to the ecumenical ideals of seventeenth-century reformers like John Amos Comenius (DeMott 1955, 1958), and as an amateur scientist enthusiastically engaged in forwarding the interests of natural philosophy in his involvement with the Royal Society. His linguistic work has, accordingly, been examined for its relevance to seventeenth-century thought and for evidence of its modernity; described by a twentieth-century scientist as “impressive” and as “a prodigious piece of work” (Andrade 1936:6, 7), theEssayhas been highly praised for its classification of reality (Vickery 1953:326, 342) and for its insight into phonetics and semantics (Linsky 1966:60). It has also, incidentally, been examined for the evidence it offers on seventeenth-century pronunciation (Dobson 1968).

Methodology and Apologetics: Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society

1980 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. B. Wood
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Social Basis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Novel Method ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Natural Philosophers

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.

Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural Philosophy

1987 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Schaffer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
World Picture ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
The World ◽  
Work World ◽  
Natural Philosophers

The ArgumentRecent historiography of the Scientific Revolution has challenged the assumption that the achievements of seventeenth-century natural philosophy can easily be described as the ‘mechanization of the world-picture.’ That assumption licensed a story which took mechanization as self-evidently progressive and so in no need of further historical analysis. The clock-work world was triumphant and inevitably so. However, a close examination of one key group of natural philosophers working in England during the 1670s shows that their program necessarily incorporated souls and spirits, attractions and congruities, within both their ontology and their epistemology. Any natural philosophical strategy which excluded spirits and sympathies from its world was condemned as tending to subversion and irreligion. This examination shows that the term ‘mechanical philosophy’ was a category given its meanings within local contexts and carries no universal sense separate from that accomplished by these natural philosophers. It also shows how the experimental praxis was compelled to treat souls and spirits, to produce them through experimental labor, and then to extend these experimentally developed entities throughout the cosmos, both social and natural. The development of mechanical philosophy cannot be used to explain the cognitive and social structure of this program, nor its success: instead, the historical setting of experimental work shows how a philosophy of matter and spirit was deliberately constructed by the end of the seventeenth century.

Atomism and Eschatology: Catholicism and Natural Philosophy in the Interregnum

1982 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Henry
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Many ◽  
Natural Philosophers

In spite of vigorous opposition by a number of historians it has now become a commonplace that the rapid development of the ‘new philosophy’ sprang from the ideology of Puritanism. What began its career as the ‘Merton thesis’ has now been refined, developed, and so often repeated that it seems to be almost unassailable. However, the two foremost historians in the entrenchment of this new orthodoxy are willing, in principle, to concede that ‘in reality things were very mixed up’, and that non-Puritan natural philosophers at the time were operating ‘in a precisely similar manner’ to their Puritan contemporaries. Indeed, it would be impossible not to concede this in the face of the many critiques launched against the Merton thesis.

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