Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Socio-Political Coordinates of Early-Modern Mechanics: A Preliminary Discussion

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Book cover Emergence and Expansion of Preclassical Mechanics

Part of the book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science ((BSPS,volume 270))

Abstract

How does a cultural-political understanding of science integrate socio-economic treatments? How can a historiography that takes subjectivity into account avoid the pitfall of post-modern relativism? The history of mechanics is a paradigmatic field to use in answering these questions and, in fact, it has always been at the center of much political-epistemological skirmish. This chapter first recounts the main motives and features of early twentieth-century social accounts of science. Further, it deals with the issue of how the need for a non-reductionist treatment of intellectual history (neither economicist nor monocausal) calls for an integration of the economic context and the political element for a more appropriate understanding of scientific development.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 119.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    See Porter (1990) and Young (1990). Also see Long (2011).

  2. 2.

    See Omodeo (2016b).

  3. 3.

    I discuss this issue with Roger Cooter in Omodeo (2015).

  4. 4.

    The reference work that is mostly mentioned as a watershed in the history of science is Schaffer and Shapin (1985). See their “Introduction to the 2011 Edition: Up for Air: Leviathan and the Air-Pump a Generation On,” in Schaffer and Shapin (2011, xi–l).

  5. 5.

    Cf. Stachel (1994).

  6. 6.

    Here all misgiving must thy mind reject./ Here cowardice must die and be no more.

  7. 7.

    On the oscillating assessment of the relationship between structure and superstructure and its relevance in cultural studies, see Hall (1980). The problem of consciousness is typically Lukácsian, whereas that of ideology and science is generally connected to the Frankfurter Schule. See for instance Habermas (1969). More recently, the Foucauldian strand has pointed out the biopolitical dimension of science, which goes beyond the “mental” emphasized by the concept of ideology. For an insightful discussion and case study, see Bruskell-Evans (2015).

  8. 8.

    Hessen’s essay first appeared in Science at the Cross Roads (London: Kniga, 1931), reprinted in 1971 (London: Frank). I will cite from the most recent edition in Freudenthal and McLaughlin (2009).

  9. 9.

    A similar idea, that ideology only accounts for the shortcomings of science, has been defended by the influential exponent of the French épistémologie historique George Canguilhem (2009).

  10. 10.

    For the intellectual context of Hessen’s work, see Winkler (2013). At his death, Hessen had an anthology of sources of early modern science ready for print. I am very thankful to Rose Luise Winkler and Peter McLaughlin for making it available at: http://www.philosophie.uni-hd.de/md/philsem/personal/hessen_textbook.pdf (accessed September 2, 2016). Cf. Winkler (2007).

  11. 11.

    Merton (1938, b). Merton openly acknowledged his intellectual debt toward Hessen but limited this to the issue of technology. See 501–502.

  12. 12.

    Cf. Schäfer (2012). On the split of rationality, Spaltung der Rationalität, resulting from the violent interruption of a virtuous synergy of natural science and philosophy from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1930s, see Engler and Renn (2010).

  13. 13.

    See Renn and Damerow (2007). See Chap. 1 of this volume.

  14. 14.

    Cf. Koyré (1943). This essay can be seen as the author’s manifesto of a disembodied history of science, as developed in his major works. The most important for the history of mechanics are Études galiléennes (Paris, 1939) and Newtonian Studies (Cambridge, Mass., 1965). In “Galileo Engineer” Lefèvre criticized Koyré’s speculative attitude and his neglect of the social context of early mechanics.

  15. 15.

    Cf. Renn and Damerow (2007).

  16. 16.

    See Omodeo (2014).

  17. 17.

    Cf. Grossman in Freudenthal and McLaughlin (2009, 141).

  18. 18.

    On statics, cf. Renn and Damerow (2012). On turning objects, cf. Büttner (2008). On Ballistics, cf. Valleriani (2013). For studies in the history of mechanics making use of the concept of “challenging object,” see Renn (2001) and Bertoloni Meli (2006).

  19. 19.

    For a recent treatment of this trajectory, see Renn and Damerow (2010).

  20. 20.

    Gramsci (2007a, 890). The title of this section is inspired by one of the most updated introductions to Gramsci, Thomas (2009).

  21. 21.

    Gramsci (1975, 1492) (author’s translation): “La questione della ‘obiettività’ della conoscenza secondo la filosofia della prassi può essere elaborata partendo dalla proposizione (contenuta nella prefazione alla Critica dell’economia politica) che ‘gli uomini diventano consapevoli (del conflitto tra le forze materiali di produzione) nel terreno ideologico’ delle forme giuridiche, politiche, religiose, artistiche, filosofiche.”

  22. 22.

    For an insightful treatment of diverging perspectives on structure and superstructure and their interconnection in Marxist thought, see Williams (1973).

  23. 23.

    Gramsci (2007, 1457): “Si può dire, tuttavia, che nello studio delle superstrutture la scienza occupi un posto privilegiato, per il fatto che la sua relazione sulla struttura ha un carattere particolare, di maggiore estensione e continuità di sviluppo [...].”

  24. 24.

    Marx (1987, 100) “[...] daß aber die Anatomie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft in der politischen Ökonomie zu suchen sei.”

  25. 25.

    Notebook X, 41. See Gramsci (2007, 1321) (author’s translation): “Tra struttura e superstruttura esiste un nesso necessario e vitale. [...] Nel corpo umano non si può certo dire che la pelle (e anche il tipo di bellezza fisica storicamente prevalente) siano mere illusioni e che lo scheletro e l’anatomia siano la sola realtà, tuttavia per molto tempo si è detto qualcosa di simile. Mettendo in valore l’anatomia e la funzione dello scheletro nessuno ha voluto affermare che l’uomo (e tanto meno la donna) possano vivere senza di essa.” Also, see Notebook X, pt. 1, 12, note 5: vol. 2, 1237–1238.

  26. 26.

    Gramsci (2007, vol. 2, 1211).

  27. 27.

    Cf. Omodeo (2011, 41–48).

  28. 28.

    Cf. Garin (1958, 1). “Gramsci risente di tutto un clima culturale […] nella limitata attenzione rivolta […] agli “scienziati.” Also, see Geymonat, (1958, 148).

  29. 29.

    It was only men in the period considered by Zilsel.

  30. 30.

    Both expressions stem from Zilsel. See Zilsel [1942] (2000).

  31. 31.

    On artisanal knowledge and its codification see Smith (2004) and Long (2001). On practical knowledge, see Valleriani (2017). On art and science in the Renaissance, one can look at, among others, Bredekamp (2001).

  32. 32.

    Ursula Klein has made this point most forcefully in Klein (2015).

  33. 33.

    The figure of the “scientist engineer” was widely discussed in the history of science by Renn (2001), particularly in the contributions by Lefèvre (2001) and by Renn et al. (2001). Valleriani discusses it in detail in Galileo Engineer (2010, Chap. 6).

  34. 34.

    For an assessment of the relevance of university history for the study of knowledge transfer, see my introductory chapter to Omodeo with Friedrich (2016, 3–21).

  35. 35.

    See Schmitt (1981). Regarding Descartes’s views on the heartbeat see, among others, Grene (2005). As an insightful case study about the connection between mechanics and medicine in the seventeenth century via mechanicism, see Bertoloni Meli (2011).

  36. 36.

    See, among many publications on the subject, Westman (1975).

  37. 37.

    The classic reference is Rose (1975), although the emphasis on humanism shows clear bias toward idealistic history and Eurocentrism.

  38. 38.

    See, among others, d’Alessandro and Napolitani (2013).

  39. 39.

    The best study on Peurbach and Regiomontanus is Zinner (1968), Engl. transl., Regiomontanus: His Life and Work (1990). On the wider humanistic context, also see Omodeo and Pasini (2014).

  40. 40.

    On Copernicus’ humanism, see Hallyn (2000), on Vespucci, Vogel (2006).

  41. 41.

    Koyré (1961); Kuhn (1959); cf. Omodeo (2016b).

  42. 42.

    Ernst Cassirer’s understanding of the interconnection of astronomy and general worldviews in the Renaissance was led by a very different cultural agenda; his treatment was informed by the idea that the modern outlook coincided with a secularization of philosophy and of nature. See Cassirer (2002).

  43. 43.

    As an instance of culturalist revision (and revisionism) of earlier views about early modern science that emphasizes constituents such as religion, see Osler (2000).

  44. 44.

    See for instance Steven Harris’s treatment of “Jesuit spirituality” as a science-driving ideology in the context of early modern Jesuit engagement with scientific research and teaching, along a line of inquiry that has been opened up by Rivka Feldhay: Harris (1989).

  45. 45.

    Let me stress the relevance of the philosophical discussions at the beginning of the twentieth century, ranging from neo-Kantianism and empiriocriticism to historical materialism, phenomenology and the philosophy of symbolic forms, as an extremely rich repository of perspectives and unfulfilled potentialities. On the divorce between science and philosophy in the turn of the 1930s, see Engler and Renn (2010). Moreover, for a critical assessment of the epistemological limitations of Cold-War philosophy of science, see Reisch (2005).

  46. 46.

    Among the assessments on the vitality of Gramsci’s thought today, especially see Anderson (2016). The presence and absence of Gramsci in science studies, in particular the concept of hegemony, is discussed in Nieto-Galan (2011), and Omodeo (2016a and 2016c). Nieto-Galan has particularly shown the usefulness of this appropriation for issues such as popularization and the circulation of knowledge in the public sphere: Nieto-Galan (2016). The theoretical reassessment of the Gramscian perspective, aimed at by this essay, is at the basis of the volume project edited by Badino and Omodeo (2019).

  47. 47.

    In this respect, I deem post-structuralist readings of Gramsci, such as those of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, to sterilize rather than reinforce a crucial category such as that of hegemony by reducing it to identity-constitutive discursive struggles (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). By contrast, I would emphasize the fruitfulness of an approach to socio-cultural phenomena looking at the interrelation and tension between position and identity, as has been wonderfully done in the framework of Subaltern Studies. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for one, has defined subalternity along a Gramscian line as “a position without identity” thus appropriating for subaltern studies a crucial issue of Marxist thought, traditionally addressed as the problem of the relation between class and consciousness. Cf. Spivak (2005, 476).

References

  • Anderson, Perry. 2016. The heirs of Gramsci. New Left Review 100: 71–97.

    Google Scholar 

  • Badino, Massimiliano, and Pietro D. Omodeo, eds. 2019. Cultural hegemony in a scientific world: Gramscian concepts for the history of science. Leiden: Brill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bertoloni Meli, Domenico. 2006. Thinking with objects: The transformation of mechanics in the seventeenth century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2011. Mechanism, experiment , Disease: Marcello Malpighi and seventeenth-century anatomy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bredekamp, Horst. 2001. Gazing hands and blind spots: Galileo as a draftman. In Galileo in context, ed. Jürgen Renn, 153–192. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bruskell-Evans, Heather. 2015. The hegemony of psychology. In Gramsci and Foucault: A reassessment, ed. David Kreps. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bukharin, Nikolai. [1921] 1934. Historical materialism: A system of sociology. New York: International Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Büttner, Jochen. 2008. Big wheel keep on turning. Galilaeana 5: 33–62.

    Google Scholar 

  • Canguilhem, George. 2009. Qu’est-ce qu’une idéologie scientifique? In Canguilhem. Idéologie et rationalité dans l’histoire des sciences de la vie, 39–55. Paris: Vrin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cassirer, Ernst. [1927] 2002. Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.

    Google Scholar 

  • D’Alessandro, Paolo, and Pier Daniele Napolitani. 2013. Archimedes in the 12th and 16th centuries. In Archimedes: The art and science of invention, ed. Giovanni Di Pasquale, 138–143. Florence: Giunti.

    Google Scholar 

  • Damerow, Peter, Gideon Freudenthal, Peter McLaughlin, and Jürgen Renn. 2004. Exploring the limits of preclassical mechanics: A study of conceptual development in early modern science: Free fall and compounded motion in the work of Descartes, Galileo and Beeckman. 2nd ed. New York: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Engler, Fynn Ole and Jürgen Renn. 2010. Wissenschaftliche Philosophie, moderne Wissenschaft und historische Epistemologie. Albert Einstein, Ludwik Fleck und Moritz Schlick im Ringen um die wissenschaftliche Rationalität. Preprint 400. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Preprints/P400.PDF.

  • Feingold, Mordechai. 1984. The mathematicians’ apprenticeship: Science, universities and society in England 1560–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Freudenthal, Gideon, and Peter McLaughlin. 2009. The social and economic roots of the Scientific Revolution. Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann. Dordrecht: Springer.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Garin, Eugenio. 1958. Antonio Gramsci nella cultura italiana. In Studi gramsciani: Atti del convegno tenuto a Roma nei giorni 11–12 gennaio 1958, 3–14. Rome: Editori Riuniti.

    Google Scholar 

  • Geymonat, Ludovico. 1958. Per un intervento al convegno di studi gramsciani. In Studi gramsciani: Atti del convegno tenuto a Roma nei giorni 11–12 gennaio 1958, 147–148. Rome: Editori Riuniti.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gramsci. [1975] 2007a. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, ed. V. Gerratana. Turin: Einaudi.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2007b. In Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni di traduzioni (1929–1932), ed. Giuseppe Cospito. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grene, Marjorie. 2005. Descartes and the heart beat: A conservative innovation. In Wrong for the right reason, ed. Jed Z. Buchwald and Allan Franklin. Dordrecht: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grossman, Henryk. 2009. The social foundation of mechanistic philosophy and manufacture. In The social and economic roots of the Scientific Revolution. Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann, ed. Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin. Dordrecht: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Habermas, Jürgen. 1969. Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hall, Stuart. 1980. Cultural studies: Two paradigms. Media, Culture and Society 2 (1): 57–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hallyn, Fernand. 2000. Copernic et Erasme. Humanistica Lovaniensia: Journal of Neo-Latin Studies 49: 89–100.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harris, Steven J. 1989. Transposing the Merton thesis: Apostolic spirituality and the establishment of the Jesuit scientific tradition. Science in Context 3 (1): 29–65.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Henry, John. 2001. Animism and empiricism: Copernican physics and the origins of William Gilbert’s experimental method. Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (1): 99–119.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Klein, Ursula. 2015. Humboldts Preußen: Wissenschaft und Technik im Aufbruch. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

    Google Scholar 

  • Koch, Ludwig. 1934. Jesuiten-Lexikon: Die Gesellschaft Jesu einst und jetzt. Paderborn: Bonifacius Druckerei.

    Google Scholar 

  • Koyré, Alexandre. 1943. Galileo and Plato. Journal of the History of Ideas 4: 400–428.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1961. La révolution astronomique: Copernic, Kepler, Borelli. Paris: Hermann.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kuhn, Thomas S. 1959. The Copernican revolution: Planetary astronomy in the development of western thought. New York: Random House.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Le Bachelet, Xavier-Marie. 1932. Bellarmin. In Dictionnaire de théologie catholique. Paris: Letouzey.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lefèvre, Wolfgang. 2001. Galileo engineer: Art and modern science. In Galileo in context, ed. Jürgen Renn, 11–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Long, Pamela O. 2001. Artisan/practitioners and the rise of the new science, 1400–1600. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marx, Karl. 1987. A contribution to the critique of political economy. In Collected works, ed. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, vol. 29. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

    Google Scholar 

  • Merton, Robert K. [1938] 1970. Science, technology and society in seventeenth-century England. New York/Evanston/London: HarperTorchbooks

    Google Scholar 

  • Nieto-Galan, Augustí. 2011. Antonio Gramsci revisited: Historians of science, intellectuals, and the struggle for hegemony. History of Science 49: 453–478.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2016. Science in the public sphere: A history of lay knowledge and expertise. London/New York: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Omodeo, Pietro D. 2011. Roberto Bellarmino: il grande inquisitore. In Il nostro Gramsci: Antonio Gramsci a colloquio con i protagonisti della storia d’Italia, ed. Angelo d’Orsi. Rome: Viella.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2014. Copernicus in the cultural debates of the Renaissance: Reception, legacy, transformation. Leiden: Brill.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2015. Review-interview with Roger Cooter: The critical intellectual in the age of Neoliberal hegemony. Journal for the Interdisciplinary History of Ideas 4 (7): 5:1–5:20.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2016a. After Nikolai Bukharin: History of science and cultural hegemony at the threshold of the cold war era. History of the Human Sciences 29 (4–5): 13–34.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2016b. Copernicus as Kuhn’s paradigm of paradigms: The epistemological dimension of The Copernican Revolution. In Shifting paradigms: Thomas S. Kuhn and the history of science, ed. Alexander Blum, Kostas Gavroglu, Christian Joas, and Jürgen Renn, 61–86. Berlin: Edition Open Access. http://edition-open-access.de/proceedings/8/7/index.html.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2016c. Egemonia e scienza: Temi gramsciani in epistemologia e storia della scienza. Gramsciana: Rivista internazionale di studi su Antonio Gramsci 2: 57–84.

    Google Scholar 

  • Omodeo, Pietro D., and Enrico Pasini. 2014. Erasmian science: the influence of Erasmus of Rotterdam on early modern science. Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas 6 (2): 2:1–2:19.

    Google Scholar 

  • Omodeo, Pietro D., and Karin Friedrich, eds. 2016. Duncan Liddel (1561–1613), Networks of Polymathy and the Northern European Renaissance. Leiden: Brill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Osler, Margaret J., ed. 2000. Rethinking the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Porter, Roy. 1990. The history of science and the history of society. In Companion to the history of modern science, ed. R.C. Olby et al. London/-New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reisch, George A. 2005. How the cold war transformed philosophy of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Renn, Jürgen, ed. 2001. Galileo in context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Renn, Jürgen, and Peter Damerow. 2007. Mentale Modelle als cognitive Instrumente der Transformation von technischem Wissen. In Übersetzung und Transformation, ed. Hartmut Böhme, Christoph Rapp, and Wolfgang Rösler, 311–331. Berlin: de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2010. The transformation of ancient mechanics into a mechanistic world view. In Transformationen antiker Wissenschaften, ed. Georg Toepfer and Hartmut Böhme, 243–268. Berlin: de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2012. The equilibrium controversy: Guidobaldo del Monte’s critical notes on the mechanics of Jordanus and Benedetti and their historical and conceptual background. Berlin: Edition Open Access. http://www.edition-open-sources.org/sources/2/index.html.

    Google Scholar 

  • Renn, Jürgen, Peter Damerow, and Simone Rieger. 2001. Hunting the white elephant: When and how did Galileo discover the law of fall? In Galileo in context, ed. Jürgen Renn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Romano, Antonella. 1999. La contre-réforme mathématique: Constitution et diffusion d’une culure mathématique jésuite à la Renaissance. Rome: École Française de Rome.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rose, Paul L. 1975. The Italian renaissance of mathematics: Studies on humanists and mathematicians from Petrarch to Galileo. Geneva: Librairie Droz.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schäfer, Lothar. 2012. Einleitung. In Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache: Einführung in the Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv, ed. Ludwik Fleck. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schaffer, Simon, and Steven Shapin. [1985] 2011. Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle and experimental life. Princeton: Princeton University Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Schemmel, Matthias. 2008. The English Galileo: Thomas Harriot’s work on motion as an example of preclassical mechanics. Dodrecht: Springer.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Schmitt, Charles B. 1981. Towards a reassessment of renaissance Aristotelianism. In Studies in renaissance philosophy and science, ed. Charles B. Schmitt. London: Variorum Reprints.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Pamela. 2004. The body of the artisan: Art and experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Spivak, Gayari C. 2005. Scattered speculations of the subaltern and the popular. Subaltern Studies 8 (4): 475–486.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stachel, John. 1994. Marx’s critical concept of science. Preprint 10. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thomas, Peter. 2009. The Gramscian moment: Philosophy, hegemony and Marxism. Leiden/Boston: Brill.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Valleriani, Matteo. 2010. Galileo engineer. Dordrecht: Springer.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2013. Metallurgy, ballistics and epistemic instruments: The Nova scientia of Nicolò Tartaglia. Berlin: Edition Open Access. http://www.edition-open-sources.org/sources/6/index.html.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———, ed. 2017. The structures of practical knowledge. Cham: Springer Nature.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vogel, Klaus. 2006. Cosmography. In The Cambridge history of science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Westman, Robert S. 1975. The Melanchthon circle, Rheticus and the Wittenberg interpretation of the Copernican theory. Isis 66: 163–193.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, Raymond. 1973. Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory. New Left Review 82: 3–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Winkler, Rose-Luise. 2007. Ein unveröffentlichtes Manuskript von Boris M. Hessen: ‘Materialien und Dokumente zur Geschichte der Physik’. Sitzungsberichte der Leibniz-Sozietät 92: 133–152.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2013. An den Urspüngen wissenschaftssoziologischen Denkens. Erstes Drittel des XX. Jahrhunderts. Russland/Sowjetunion. Berlin: trafo Wissenschaftsverlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Young, Robert M. 1990. Marxism and the history of science. In Companion to the history of modern science, ed. R.C. Olby et al., 23–31. London/New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zilsel, Edgar. 1941. The origins of William Gilbert’s scientific method. Journal for the History of Ideas 2 (1): 1–32.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zilsel, E. [1942] 2000. The sociological roots of science. Reprinted in Social Studies of Science 30/6: 935–939.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zinner, Ernst. [1968] 1990. Leben und Wirken des Joh. Müller von Königsberg genannt Regiomontanus. English trans: Regiomontanus: His life and work. Amsterdam: North-Holland.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, ERC EarlyModernCosmology, Venice, Italy

    Pietro D. Omodeo

Authors
  1. Pietro D. Omodeo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pietro D. Omodeo .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas & Minerva Humanities Center, University of Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

    Rivka Feldhay

  2. Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany

    Jürgen Renn

  3. Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany

    Matthias Schemmel

  4. Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany

    Matteo Valleriani

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Omodeo, P.D. (2018). Socio-Political Coordinates of Early-Modern Mechanics: A Preliminary Discussion. In: Feldhay, R., Renn, J., Schemmel, M., Valleriani, M. (eds) Emergence and Expansion of Preclassical Mechanics. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 270. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90345-3_3

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90345-3_3

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90343-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-90345-3

  • eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation