At the beginning of the seventeenth century, most university courses in natural philosophy (the ancestor of today’s natural sciences) were centred around Aristotle’s works. By the end of the eighteenth century, this was no longer the case. Newton became the new leading authority, and not only took the place of Aristotle, but also marginalized the alternatives that other authors advanced. What counted as a standard conceptual framework or a normal set of practices in natural philosophy underwent a series of dramatic transformations during the early modern period. Since this evolution was shaped by the ways in which historical actors reacted to a number of rival views, it raises the urgent but still unanswered question: what did it take for certain authors to become authorities and establish new standard approaches in natural philosophy? The main contention of my ERC project is that early modern teaching practices had a decisive ‘normalising’ impact on the progressive dissemination, adaptation and selection of rival conceptions of natural philosophy.
Today, public debate is still very much informed by references to the eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’, as the period in which modern rationality came to the fore of European culture, and by the idea of the seventeenth-century ‘Scientific Revolution’ that established a new way of understanding the natural world. This project challenges several presuppositions that underpin these popular views. One of these presuppositions is that such achievements were accomplished by relatively few individual geniuses, like Isaac Newton. By studying the collective effort of hundreds of early modern authors, we can better understand how progress results from the constant interplay between conservative and innovative drives. This broader picture also offers a more integrated view of early modern European science, balancing national and geographically localized trends, with broader cross-national scientific movements. This yield a new picture of the way in which the identity of European science emerged during the early modern period.
The project has five main objectives: 1) to recover and make available a large corpus that can be representative of early modern natural philosophy; 2) to reconstruct the networks of authors and sources that were involved in the debate on early modern natural philosophy and its evolution over time; 3) to reconstruct the networks of concepts of natural philosophy, their linguistic context and vocabulary and study how they changed over time; 4) to explain why certain concepts and approaches in certain contexts become accepted as standards, and which elements determined this output; 5) to attract the attention of a large interdisciplinary public and stimulate the debate on the development and perspectives of a computational history of early modern philosophy and science.
