Science In The Age Of Baroque

This volume examines the New Science of the 17th century in the context of Baroque culture, analysing its emergence as an integral part of the high culture of the period. The collected essays explore themes common to the new practices of knowledge production and the rapidly changing culture surrounding them, as well as the obsessions, anxieties and aspirations they share, such as the foundations of order, the power and peril of mediation and the conflation of the natural and the artificial. The essays also take on the historiographical issues involved: the characterization of culture in general and culture of knowledge in particular; the use of generalizations like ‘Baroque’ and the status of such categories; and the role of these in untangling the historical complexities of the tumultuous 17th century. The canonical protagonists of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ are considered, and so are some obscure and suppressed figures: Galileo side by side with Scheiner;Torricelli together with Kircher; Newton as well as Scilla. The coupling of Baroque and Science defies both the still-triumphalist historiographies of the Scientific Revolution and the slight embarrassment that the Baroque represents for most cultural-national histories of Western Europe. It signals a methodological interest in tensions and dilemmas rather than self-affirming narratives of success and failure, and provides an opportunity for reflective critique of our historical categories which is valuable in its own right. ​

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.

Presents a perspective on the study of early modern science. This title examines science in the context of the baroque, analyzes the tensions, paradoxes, and compromises that shaped the New Science of the seventeenth century and enabled its spectacular success.

The age of the baroque -- a time of great strides in science and mathematics -- also saw the construction of some of the world's most magnificent buildings. In this book, George L. Hersey explores the interrelations of the two developments, explaining how the advancements of geometry and the abstractions of mathematicians were made concrete in the architecture of the day. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

A collection of essays exploring the relations between music and the scientific culture of Galileo's time. It takes a broad historical approach towards understanding such topics as the role of music in Galileo's experiments and in the scientific revolution

Francis Willughby transformed the study of natural history in the mid-1600s. Using previously unexplored archives and new discoveries we show that Willughby was a polymath, a true virtuoso, who made original contributions to many different fields of endeavor.

Reclaiming the humanistic role of architecture in the age of technology: an examination of architecture's indispensable role as a cultural force throughout history.