Essay reviews: The spring-tide of experimental philosophy

1992 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-316
Keyword(s):  
Steady State ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Spring Tide ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
The Public ◽  
Experimental Learning ◽  
Middle Period ◽  
Public Demonstration

Marie Boas Hall, Promoting experimental learning: experiment and the Royal Society, 1660-1727 . Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii + 207, £35.00 ISBN 0-521-40503-3 In her welcome new book, Marie Hall traces the development and the subsequent decline of the public demonstration of experiments at the weekly meetings of the Royal Society, from the foundation in late 1660 to the end of Newton’s Presidency, at his death in 1727. The history is divided into three periods: the early optimistic Baconian phase, from 1660 to the mid-1670s; the more sombre middle period of the last quarter of the 17th century, when the attempted recapture of the early ideals met with only modest success; and the years spanned by Newton’s Presidency (1703- 27), when ‘Experiments of Fruit’ were largely abandoned in favour of ‘Experiments of Light’, and attention turned from useful inventions to the natural philosophy of a time-bounded universe in the steady-state, with its theosophic and theotechnic implications.

Halley’s Atheism and the end of the world

1977 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-40 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Exact Nature ◽  
The Public ◽  
Earth History ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority ◽  
The World ◽  
Consistent Picture ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
New Evidence

Edmond Halley’s views on theology and natural philosophy have often drawn puzzled attention both from his contemporaries and from subsequent scholars. There has seemed to be a contrast between some public statements he made when under pressure from ecclesiastical authority, and his continued, and privately-held, faith in the over-arching relevance of science (1). However, it now emerges from some unpublished papers which Halley read to the Royal Society in the 1690s that he made public his own debate over such issues as the eternity of the world. This new evidence gives us a much more consistent picture of Halley’s work, and it refutes the view that there were two Halleys—the public orthodox face and the private heterodox one. It is true that the work of Edmond Halley presents us with a picture of considerable diversity. Nevertheless, throughout the 1690s he was primarily concerned with an investigation of Earth history independently of scriptural authority, and this gave some unity to his varied researches. However, there were both ideological and institutional problems with such a programme. The Anglican establishment of the period after 1688 was filled with a sense of threat. This led to a series of statements antipathetic to Halley’s attitude, including a devaluation of the power of unaided reason and an emphasis on the power of God’s Providence. Halley’s failure to obtain the Savilian Chair of Astronomy in 1691/2 was due in part, perhaps, to this antipathy. Yet this failure was also precipitated by the personal antagonism aroused by Halley’s jocular style, and the innate irascibility of Flamsteed. Because of these other sources of controversy the exact nature of Halley’s atheism remains confused. Even his identification with the ‘infidel mathematician’ of Berkeley’s Analyst is problematic. Yet the fact is that Halley took these charges seriously enough to spend several years working to show that one of them was unjustified. He had been accused of believing that the world would continue for eternity, and he was to try and show that it must, in the end, come to a halt.

scholarly journals The origins of the Royal Society

1948 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-137 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Scientific Societies ◽  
John Wallis ◽  
Thomas Sprat

The official historians of the Royal Society, from Thomas Sprat in 1667 to Sir Henry Lyons in 1944, have not been concerned to probe very deeply into the origins of the Society. The fullest of their accounts of this part of its history is given by C. R. Weld (1848) who briefly summarizes the formation and development of some other academies and scientific societies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their relation to the Royal Society, and investigates, though not in great detail, some of the circumstances which may have led to its foundation. With the exception of Sprat, who wrote too early, the historians have based their account of the origins of the Royal Society on a letter from Dr John Wallis, F.R.S., to Dr Smith of Magdalen College, Oxford, dated 29 January 1696/1697. 2 In view of this, and in spite of its length, Wallis’s account is quoted here also: . . . About the year 1645, while I lived in London (at a time, when, by our Civil Wars, Academical Studies were much interrupted in both our universities:) beside the Conversation of divers eminent Divines, as to matters Theological; I had the opportunity of being acquainted with divers worthy Persons, inquisitive into Natural Philosophy, and other parts of Humane Learning: And particularly of what hath been called the New Philosophy or Experimental Philosophy.

scholarly journals Evaluating John Theophilus Desaguliers' Newtonianism: the case of waterwheel knowledge in A course of experimental philosophy

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-477
Author(s):  
Andrew M. A. Morris
Keyword(s):  
Fluid Mechanics ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
Natural Philosophers

John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683–1744) was a French-born English Huguenot who made his name as a public lecturer in London and a demonstrator at the Royal Society, writing a very popular introduction to Isaac Newton's natural philosophy, the two-volume A course of experimental philosophy (1734–1744). This paper looks at the influence of three French natural philosophers, Edme Mariotte (1620–1684), Antoine Parent (1666–1716) and Bernard Forest de Bélidor (1698–1761), on the account of waterwheel functioning in the second volume of that work. The aim of the paper is to show that, although Desaguliers demonstrated a commitment to Newton's work, his own natural philosophical objectives also led him to borrow ideas from natural philosophers outside Newton's direct sphere of influence. To do this I shall give an account of what Desaguliers appropriated from Newton's Principia , how it fitted in with his own project and how he also made use of other natural philosophers' theories in his discussion of fluid mechanics. This will hopefully result in a more nuanced conception of Desaguliers' ‘Newtonianism’ that takes into account the diverse sources and influences in his work.

Manufacturing nature: science, technology and Victorian consumer culture

1996 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iwan Rhys Morus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Public Place ◽  
The Public ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Science Technology

The public place of science and technology in Britain underwent a dramatic change during the first half of the nineteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century, natural philosophy was still on the whole the province of a relatively small group ofaficionados. London possessed only one institution devoted to the pursuit of natural knowledge: the Royal Society. The Royal Society also published what was virtually the only journal dealing exclusively with scientific affairs: thePhilosophical Transactions. By 1851, when the Great Exhibition opened its doors in Hyde Park to an audience of spectators that could be counted in the millions, the pursuit of science as a national need, its relationship to industrial progress were acceptable, if not uncontested facts for many commentators.

Margaret Cavendish among the Baconians

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-84
Author(s):  
Daniel Garber ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Philosophical Thought

Margaret Cavendish is a very difficult thinker to place in context. Given her stern critique of the “experimental philosophy” in the Observations on the Experimental Philosophy, one might be tempted to place Cavendish among the opponents of Francis Bacon and his experimental thought. But, I argue, her rela­tion to Baconianism is much more subtle than that would suggest. I begin with an overview of Cavendish’s philosophical program, focusing mainly on her later natural philosophical thought in Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663), Philosophical Letters (1664), Observations on the Experimental Philosophy (1666/68) and her Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668). I then turn to Francis Bacon, and talk about how he understood his philosophical program in the 1620s, and how it had been transformed by later Baconians in the 1650s and 1660s. While Bacon held a vitalistic natural philosophy, what was most visible, particularly in Royal Society propaganda, was his experimentalism. But Margaret Cavendish’s natural philosophical program is, in a way, the exact contrary. While she was skeptical of Bacon’s experimentalism, she was an enthusiastic advocate for a vitalistic materialism that may well have been inspired, at least in part, by Bacon’s thought. Because of her opposition to the experimental philosophy, her contemporaries may not have seen her as a Baconian. But even so I think that she was a philosopher whom Bacon himself would have recognized as a kindred spirit.

Francis Bacon and the Origins of Christian Virtuosity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
The Mind

Although the vocation of Christian virtuoso was invented and named by Robert Boyle, Francis Bacon provided the archtype. A Christian virtuoso is an experimental natural philosopher who professes Christianity, who endeavors to unite empiricism and supernatural belief in an intellectual life. In his program for the renewal of the learning Bacon prescribed that the empirical study of nature be the basis of all the sciences, including not only the study of physical things, but of human society, and literature. He insisted that natural causes only be used to explain natural events and proposed not to mix theology with natural philosophy. This became a rule of the Royal Society of London, of which Boyle was a principal founder. Bacon’s rule also had a theological use, to preserve the purity and the divine authority of revelation. In the mind of the Christian virtuoso, nature and divine revelation were separate but complementary sources of truth.

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.

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