Overview

In Baroque Science, Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris present a radically new perspective on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Instead of celebrating the triumph of reason and rationality, they study the paradoxes and anxieties that stemmed from the New Science and the intellectual compromises that shaped it and enabled its spectacular success. Gal and Chen-Morris show how the protagonists of the new mathematical natural philosophy grasped at the very far and very small by entrusting observation to the mediation of artificial instruments, and how they justified this mediation by naturalizing and denigrating the human senses. They show how the physical-mathematical ordering of heavens and earth demanded obscure and spurious mathematical procedures, replacing the divine harmonies of the late Renaissance with an assemblage of isolated, contingent laws and approximated constants. Finally, they show how the new savants, forced to contend that reason is hopelessly estranged from its surrounding world and that nature is irreducibly complex, turned to the passions to provide an alternative, naturalized foundation for their epistemology and ethics. Enforcing order in the face of threatening chaos, blurring the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, and mobilizing the passions in the service of objective knowledge, the New Science, Gal and Chen-Morris reveal, is a Baroque phenomenon: deeply entrenched in and crucially formative of the culture of its time.

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In one sense Gal and Chen-Morris have given us a traditional intellectual history of the development of seventeenth-century science. They concentrate on showing us how the giants of the period moved mathematics, astronomy, optics, and physics forward. But they have developed an interesting twist. Their view of the science of this period as Baroque shows us that that science did not develop linearly, nor was it inevitable. Gal and Chen-Morris effectively describe the strangeness, the paradoxes, and the leaps of imagination that played crucial roles. --Sheila J. Rabin, Saint Peter's University Renaissance Quarterly

"""This important work will provide scholars with new questions and offer opportunities to reconsider timeless questions about the nature of humanity and knowledge. Highly recommended."" (Choice)"""

A new grand narrative of the mathematical Scientific Revolution, Baroque Science binds together the early modern challenges of finding epistemic order, of creating new artifices for knowledge, and of profiting from the imagination in a lucid gem of a book both technically sophisticated and accessible. Through its deft readings of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Hooke, and Newton, and challenging retellings of the development of optics and the inverse square law of gravitation, Baroque Science forces us anew to attend the cultural and philosophical shifts that made different mathematicizations of the world possible, compelling--as well as limiting. Passionate in subject matter and form, the book will enliven and inspire many a seminar and many a scholar. --Matthew L. Jones, Columbia University

This important work will provide scholars with new questions and offer opportunities to reconsider timeless questions about the nature of humanity and knowledge. Highly recommended. (Choice)

Author Information

Ofer Gal is associate professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney. Raz Chen-Morris is a senior lecturer in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Bar-Ilan University.

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