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What Was the Relation of Baroque Culture to the Trajectory of Early Modern Natural Philosophy?

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Book cover Science in the Age of Baroque

Abstract

This paper attempts to answer the question posed in its title, by focusing attention on the institution and contested field of discourse of natural philosophy, and its processes of change in the early and mid Seventeenth century. Following the seminal work of José Antonio Maravall, Baroque culture is taken as a set of concerted responses to a wide religio-political crisis. The paper then argues that this period saw a veritable ‘crisis within a crisis’ occurring in natural philosophy and its cognate and subordinate disciplines, with recruitment of ‘Baroque’ aims, styles and rules of contestation into natural philosophy by competing players. It is also suggested that some of these Baroque ‘cultural genes’ survived in the subsequent history of natural philosophy, and thence, following its disintegration, into the social dynamics of the emergent modern sciences, shaping their agonistic natures.

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  1. Campion College and University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    John A. Schuster

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Correspondence to John A. Schuster .

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  1. , Unit for History & Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, 2006, New South Wales, Australia

    Ofer Gal

  2. , Unit for Interdisciplinary Studies, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 52900, Israel

    Raz Chen-Morris

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Schuster, J.A. (2012). What Was the Relation of Baroque Culture to the Trajectory of Early Modern Natural Philosophy?. In: Gal, O., Chen-Morris, R. (eds) Science in the Age of Baroque. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 208. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4807-1_2

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