Abstract
Peter Dear has traced a shift in the source of reliable empirical premises for demonstrations in early modern natural philosophy. Prior to the seventeenth century, such premises were drawn from common experience — from the shared knowledge, attested in authoritative texts, of what happens always or for the most part in the ordinary course of nature. But in the first half of the seventeenth century, empirical premises began to be drawn with increasing frequency from particular experience — that is, from knowledge of what happened on particular occasions. This shift occurred in part because of rising skepticism with respect to the reliability of authoritative texts, but also because of the increasing reliance of natural philosophers upon observations made with rare and expensive instruments which were outside the experience of all but an elite few, such as the telescope and the vacuum pump.1 This shift also created an urgent problem of inference for seventeenth-century natural philosophy: how to reconstitute a commonly accepted, shared experience of natural effects and objects. More particularly, the problem was how to move from a finite number of individual observation reports, which often did not agree with each other and which appeared to contain errors and accretions even when they did agree, to a commonly accepted experience or account of that object or natural effect, which could be justified as an accurate reflection of what actually happens in nature.
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Notes
See Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 1–92. See especially pp. 6, 11–14, 20–25.
See Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–121. For Harrison’s introduction of the notion of ‘integrated hermeneutical practice’, see p. 3.
William B. Ashworth, ‘Catholicism and Early Modern Science’, in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (eds), God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 154–55.
A biography of Mersenne was published within a year of his death: Hilarion de Coste, La vie du R. P. Marin Mersenne, théologien, philosophe et mathématicien de l’Ordre des Pères Minimes (Paris: Sebastien Cramoisy et Gabriel Cramoisy, 1649). The point of departure for modern accounts of Mersenne’s life, works, and character is Robert Lenoble, Mersenne ou la naissance du mécanisme (Paris: J. Vrin, 1943; reprint, 1971), pp. 15–167.
See also Armand Beaulieu, Mersenne: le grand Minime (Bruxelles: Fondation Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, 1995); Pierre Costabel, ‘Le Père Marin Mersenne (1588–1648)’, in Pierre Costabel and Monette Martinet (eds), Quelques savants et amateurs de science au XVII siècle: sept notices biobibliographiques caractéristiques (Paris: Société d’histoire des sciences et des techniques, 1986); Jean-Pierre Maury, A l’origine de la recherche scientifique: Mersenne, ed. Sylvie Taussig (Paris: Vuibert, 2003).
On the Minims, see Patrick J. S. Whitmore, The Order of Minims in Seventeenth Century France (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967).
On Mersenne and mitigated skepticism see Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, revised and expanded ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 112–27. On Mersenne in relation to Gassendi, Descartes, and Galileo, see, for example, Beaulieu, Mersenne; Alistair Cameron Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition: The History of Argument and Explanation Especially in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and Arts, 3 vols. (London: Duckworth, 1994), vol. 2, pp. 865–94; Lenoble, Mersenne; Maury, A l’origine de la recherche.
Data concerning Mersenne’s publications can be found in David A. Duncan, ‘An International and Interdisciplinary Bibliography in Celebration of the 400th Anniversary of the Birth of Marin Mersenne’, Bolletino di storia della filosofia dell’Universita degli studi di Lecce 9 (1986–89); Lenoble, Mersenne, p. xii–xl. For Mersenne’s published correspondence see Paul Tannery, Cornelis de Waard, Bernard Rochot, and René Pintard (eds), Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne, religieux minime, 17 vols. (Paris: P.U.F and C.N.R.S., 1933–88). Pierre Duhem was the first to draw attention to the importance of Mersenne’s correspondence; see Pierre Duhem, The Origins of Statics, trans. Grant F. Leneaux, Victor N. Vagliente, and Guy H. Wagener, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1991), vol. 123, p. 215.
See Jean-Barthélemy Hauréau, Histoire littéraire du Maine, 10 vols. (Paris: Dumoulin, 1870–77; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine reprints, 1969), vol. 8, p. 177. For more on Mersenne’s emphasis on scientific communication and collaboration, see, for example, Jean-Robert Armogathe, ‘Le groupe de Mersenne et la vie académique parisienne’, XVII e siècle 44, no. 2 (1992); Beaulieu, Mersenne, pp. 173–85, 293–311; Lenoble, Mersenne, pp. 581–603; Bernard Rochot, ‘Le P. Mersenne et les relations intellectuelles dans l’Europe du XVIIe siècle’, Cahiers d’histoire mondiale 10, no. 1 (1966); Pierre Sergescu, ‘Mersenne l’animateur (8 septembre 1588–1er septembre 1648)’, Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications 2 (1948);
René Taton, ‘Le P. Marin Mersenne et la communauté scientifique parisienne au XVIIe siècle’, in Jean-Marie Constant and Anne Fillon (eds), 1588–1988, Quatrième centenaire de la naissance de Marin Mersenne: colloque scientifique international et célébrafion nationale (Le Mans: Faculté des lettres, Universitaire du Maine, 1994).
See, for example, Vincent Carraud, ‘Mathématique et métaphysique: les sciences du possible’, Les études philosophiques, nos. 1–2 (1994), 145; Albert Cohen, ‘Marin Mersenne’, in Stanley Sadie and George Grove (eds), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, Washington, DC: Macmillan Publishers, Grove’s Dictionaries of Music, 1980), p. 189;
Brian P. Copenhaver, ‘The Occultist Tradition and its Critics’, in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 468–69; Costabel, ‘Le Père Mersenne’, p. 13;
Alistair Cameron Crombie, ‘Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) and the 17th-Century Problem of Scientific Acceptability’, Physis: Rivista internazionale di storia della scienza 17, nos. 3–4 (1975), 196;
René Dugas, Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century, from the Scholastic Antecedents to Classical Thought, trans. Freda Jacquot (Neuchatel, Switzerland, New York: Éditions du Griffon, Central Book Co., 1958), pp. 90–114; Lenoble, Mersenne, p. 4; Sergescu, ‘Mersenne l’animateur’, 9.
See Lenoble, Mersenne, pp. 83–167; Brian Vickers, ‘Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580–1680’, in Brian Vickers (ed.), Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
See John F. D’Amico, Theory and Practice in Renaissance Textual Criticism: Beatus Rhenanus Between Conjecture and History (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of Califormia Press, 1988), p. 8;
Leighton D. Reynolds and Nigel G. Wilson, Scribes & Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek & Latin Literature, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 120–23, 157–58.
See ibid., p. 33; Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 27.
See Anthony Grafton, ‘Joseph Scaliger’s Edition of Catullus (1577) and the Traditions of Textual Criticism in the Renaissance’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 38 (1975), 162, 170–71; Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes & Scholars, p. 158. For more on the emergence of textual criticism as a science of patterns of copyist error,
see Edward J. Kenney, The Classical Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 21–46.
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 332. In a note, Dear refers his readers to pp. 49–55.
According to Robert Lenoble, Mersenne’s mathematical science of appearances grew out of an apologetic concern that neo-Aristotelian Renaissance naturalism was undermining belief in miracles; see Lenoble, Mersenne, pp. 83–167. For William Hine, Mersenne’s mathematical science of appearances was developed as a middle ground between the false sciences of neo-Aristotelian Renaissance naturalism and Neoplatonic Renaissance magic; see William L. Hine, ‘Marin Mersenne: Renaissance Naturalism and Renaissance Magic’, in Vickers (ed.), Occult and Scientific Mentalities, p. 174. According to Richard Popkin, Mersenne’s epistemological stance should be understood as a ‘mitigated skepticism’ or ‘constructive skepticism’, representing a middle ground between the epistemological extremes of dogmatism and Pyrrhonian skepticism; see Popkin, History of Scepticism, pp. 112–27. Peter Dear argues that Mersenne’s mitigated skepticism should be seen not as a ‘watered down Pyrrhonism’, but rather as a ‘modified Ciceronian probabilism’. See Peter Dear, Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools, ed. L. Pearce Williams, Cornell History of Science Series (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 19–20, 29–31, 41.
For Mersenne, sound is nothing other than a kind of motion; see, for example, Proposition 1 of ‘De la nature et des proprietez du son’, in Marin Mersenne, Harmonie universelle, contenant la théorie et la pratique de la musique, ed. François Lesure, 3 vols. (Paris: C.N.R.S, 1963), vol. 1, p. 1.
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Mueller, P.R. (2007). Textual Criticism and Early Modern Natural Philosophy: The Case of Marin Mersenne (1588–1648). In: Killeen, K., Forshaw, P.J. (eds) The Word and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230206472_5
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