Schaffer Oeuvre – Page 3 – Ether Wave Propaganda

Schaffer on Language and Proper Conduct

One of the clearest findings in my long-term exploration of the oeuvre of Simon Schaffer, is the centrality of Schaffer’s use of the idea that a thinker’s personal understanding of the arrangement of the cosmos, their process of inquiry, and their ideas about proper social order were often intimately interrelated in philosophical inquiry in the 17th and 18th centuries. This insight provides a powerful tool for investigating different facets of the wide field of “natural philosophy” as it intersected with other realms of intellectual activity.

It is clearly the case that natural philosophy had no defined form nor any clear boundaries with other kinds of literature. In today’s post we step slightly outside the bounds of natural philosophy with two pieces that examine writings at the beginning and the end of natural philosophy’s golden age:

1) “Defoe’s Natural Philosophy and the Worlds of Credit,” in Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700-1900, edited by John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth, 1989.

2) “The History and Geography of the Intellectual World: Whewell’s Politics of Language,” in William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, edited by Menachem Fisch and Schaffer, 1991.

In (1), Schaffer observes the novelty of natural philosophy in Defoe’s time (c.1659-1731) and notes similarities in literary strategies between it and another new form of writing, “the news journal,” both of which “appealed to a new authority relation—that of the circumstantiated report of the novel and unprecedented event…” In (2), at the other end of the time frame, we find a portrait of Whewell (1794-1866) as a critical writer on scientific work,

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Schaffer and Golinski on Enlightenment and Genius

This post looks at two articles by Simon Schaffer:

“States of Mind: Enlightenment and Natural Philosophy,” in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, ed. G. S. Rousseau, 1990, pp. 233-290.

“Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, 1990, pp. 82-98.

It makes comparison with some related points in Jan Golinski’s book Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820, 1992. Unlike the last post integrating Schaffer’s and Golinski’s analysis of eudiometry, this one distinguishes the (complementary) positions of the two authors.

Since his earliest pieces (especially his 1983 piece on natural philosophy and spectacle), Schaffer had been exploring the tensions between natural philosophical inquiry and the forces leading to professionalized specialties. In pieces circa 1990, Schaffer further explored the relationship between enlightenment political ideals—which stressed rational assent as a path away from enthusiasm and despotism toward a proper polity—and natural philosophy and the political pressures it created and to which it was subjected.

In “States of Mind”, in a move not unlike his and Steven Shapin’s analysis of Hobbes’ critique of experimental philosophy, Schaffer stresses objections, particularly that of Edmund Burke (1729-1797) that the politics of rational assent proffered by people like Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) simply cloaked alternative religion-like claims to political authority.

The transformation of politically important elements of cosmology—rather than the elimination of their significance—is once again central to Schaffer’s argument (see also the transformation of comets from omens to source of physical disaster). Here Priestley’s objection to the pneumatic philosophy of souls and spirits (as in Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, 1777) brushes away the idea of mind as guided by spirit to allow the mind to be seen as a material organ with its own relationship

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Simon Schaffer and Jan Golinski on Eudiometry

Landrianis eudiometer, from the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence — Diagram of a eudiometer, from the Museo Galileo in Florence

First off, apologies for slow posting—things have been too bananas recently to indulge blog-related side interests. I’m hoping things clear up soon, but I’m presenting my research on Antarctic research at 4S here in DC at the end of the month, so things may remain at a trickle until November. However, before it got too desolate around here, I did want to parachute in and do a quick write-up on eudiometry. Our article is: Simon Schaffer, “Measuring Virtue: Eudiometry, Enlightenment, and Pneumatic Medicine” in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, Andrew Cunningham and Roger French, eds., 1990, pp. 281-318. A close companion work is Jan Golinski’s Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820, Cambridge UP, 1992, esp. pp. 117-128. I won’t try and distinguish the two treatments here.

The technology of the eudiometer is based on Joseph Priestley’s “nitrous air test”, devised in 1772. A good explanation of the nitrous air test as well as a computer animation of how eudiometers worked are available from the Museo Galileo in Florence (for modern scientific explanation, see the animation here). The basic idea is that manufactured nitrous air (nitrogen oxide) is mixed with a sample of ambient air. Part of the mixture dissolves into water leading to a decreased volume of now-unrespirable air in the chamber, which can be measured. Priestley (1733-1804), understanding the respirability of air to be reflective of its virtue, and understanding respiration to transfer phlogiston from the body to the air, understood the remaining air to be phlogisticated by the test, and the test to be a measure of the “goodness” of the common air used.

Italian experimenters, beginning with Felice Fontana and Marsilio Landriani replicated the test, embodying it in an instrument that Landriani called a eudiometer, which taken from Greek literally means a measuring instrument of the goodness of the air. Through the

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Schaffer on the Priestley Lit

Getting back to the series on Simon Schaffer, we’re going to be looking at a series of articles on Enlightenment chemistry, which will hopefully give us the opportunity to discuss Jan Golinski’s book Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820, which expressly owes a lot to Schaffer’s work, and covers a lot of the same ground. First, though, I want to backtrack to jot down a few notes about the 1984 piece, “Priestley’s Questions: An Historiographic Survey,” History of Science 22: 151-183.

At the end of last year, we discussed Schaffer’s 1987 piece, “Priestley and the Politics of Spirit”. To recap, Schaffer was calling attention to the connections some 18th-century natural philosophers made between pneumatic and electrical phenomena and the actions of spirit, and Priestley’s desire to dissociate theological from natural philosophy. In the earlier piece, Schaffer was reviewing problems identified in the analysis of Priestley’s life and identifying historiographical strategies used to address those problems—a service that should be a much more common feature of our journals (and one also at work in his criticism of the Newton literature).

Priestley (1733-1804) was a dynamic figure of particular historiographical interest for a couple of reasons: first, he was an innovative chemical experimenter, making significant contributions to the chemistry of air that began to develop in the latter half of the 18th century, but also remaining a staunch proponent of the phlogiston theory even after most chemists accepted Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier’s chemistry of oxygen. Second, Priestley was a proponent of the Enlightenment project linking political authority to reasoned assent—a radical position at that time. Schaffer pointed out that the historiography of

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Schaffer on Cometography, Pt. 2: Hermeneutics and Historiography

A hermeneutical conundrum — Hermeneutical conundrum

I. After reading Simon Schaffer’s “Comets and Idols”, I find myself using the word “hermeneutics” a lot more than I used to. In general, you can get your point across just fine talking about “interpretation”. However, when it comes to Isaac Newton, and writing the history of his ideas, the history of how he presented his ideas and himself, the history of how others drew on his ideas, and the history of how others presented how they were drawing upon his ideas—not to mention the act of writing the history of all this—the pithy phrase “Newtonian hermeneutics” (p. 209) acquires a certain appeal.

Drawing on his writing on Newton’s understanding of cometography as part of a project to restore a long-debauched Chaldean natural philosophy, in “Comets and Idols” Schaffer takes the opportunity to reflect on the role of “sacred texts” and their interpretation in history. If natural philosophy was a chaotic mess of competing systems filled with different arrangements of matter and forces, then the sacred text serves as a rare fixed point of unalterable truth. And for some time, no text was more sacred to many natural philosophers than Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (but see also Adam Smith). Unfortunately, the interpretation of sacred texts is never straightforward, and it is by offering one’s own interpretation of the meaning of the sacred text—by uncovering what stands unspoken behind it, whether motivation, intended emphasis, methodology, hidden knowledge, or concrete ideas—and by discounting others’ “misunderstanding” or “distortion” of it that one draws upon its authority.

As Schaffer had observed before (especially with the construction of historic scientific discoveries, and with psychology’s claiming the personal equation as its own), the appropriation of history within the program one is trying to advance is an important, perhaps inevitable, tactic in building authority.

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Schaffer on Cometography, Pt. 1

Cometary transits have always displayed the troubled relationship between astronomers, theologians, natural philosophers, and their public.

Simon Schaffer, 1987

Drawing by Honoré Daumier, 1857. From the Art Institute of Chicago

Between 1987 and 1993, Simon Schaffer published five papers on the history of cometography, meditating on some of his favorite themes concerning the links between cosmology, scientific methodology, scientific identity, epistemology, theology, politics, authority, social order, and the hermeneutics of history:

(1) “Newton’s Comets and the Transformation of Astrology” in Astrology, Science and Society: Historical Essays (1987), edited by Patrick Curry.

(2) “Authorized Prophets: Comets and Astronomers after 1759,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 17 (1987): 45-74.

(3) “Halley, Delisle, and the Making of the Comet” in Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Longer View of Newton and Halley (1990), edited by N. Thrower.

(4) “Comets and the World’s End” in Predicting the Future (1993), edited by L. Howe and A. Wain.

(5) “Comets & Idols: Newton’s Cosmology and Political Theology” in Action and Reaction (1993), edited by Paul Theerman and Adele Seeff.

From his earliest publications, comets had played a role in Schaffer’s thinking about seventeenth and eighteenth-century cosmology and philosophical inquiry: they were frequently called upon to fill various cosmological roles as agents of destruction, transportation, and restoration. In these five pieces, Schaffer provided further evidence for the centrality of comets in natural philosophical problematics, and clarified the staggering variety of implications cometography could have within and beyond them. In this post, I outline a few of the features of his decidedly complex set of arguments. In its sequel, I will look at Schaffer’s historiographical thinking in (4) and (5).

Although Schaffer’s examination of cometography stretches from Tycho

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Schaffer Turns to Practice

The two articles we are looking at today are among the best-known works of Simon Schaffer:

(1) “Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation,” Science in Context 2 (1988): 115-145.

(2) “Glass Works: Newton’s Prisms and the Uses of Experiment,” in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (1989), edited by David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer.

The articles stand at an important turning point in Schaffer’s oeuvre, and their style should be very familiar to history of science professionals working in the last 20 years, because both depart from Schaffer’s early concern with the construction of systems of ideas, and both put a specific epistemic practice under the microscope, in this case: striving for precision in observation, and replicating experimental results. At the time, though, these kinds of studies were reasonably novel. The Uses of Experiment volume, in particular, was an

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Schaffer on the Politics of Inquiry

One of the ongoing themes in Schaffer’s work—perhaps the primary theme—is his commitment to the detailed investigation of the relationship between political ideology and natural philosophical inquiry from the 17th to the 19th centuries. It was at the center of Leviathan and the Air Pump, was central to his work on Priestley in the Enlightenment era, and his concern with the relationship between the natural philosophy of pneumatics and spirits (same post as Priestley).

Schaffer took pains to discuss politics as not simply something that interferes with inquiry, or as something that motivates inquiry, or something for which inquiry has implications. For Schaffer, both the subject and manner of inquiry were understood as being political themselves, linked intimately with principles of good governance. Politics not only defined what arguments one could make without incurring charges such as atheism, but, because these convictions were also held by natural philosophers, politics went so far as to define what kinds of questions and manners of inquiry made sense.

Today I’d like to do some sweeping up on this subject from Schaffer’s 1980s writings:

(1) “Occultism and Reason in the Seventeenth Century,” in Philosophy: Its History and Historiography (1985), edited by A. J. Holland. (Schaffer’s entry is available in full through Google Books.)

(2) “Wallification: Thomas Hobbes on School Divinity and Experimental Pneumatics,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science (1988): 275-298.

(3) “The Glorious Revolution and Medicine in Britain and the Netherlands,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 43 (1989): 167-190.

There is also one article I do not have easy access to that looks relevant:

(*) “The Political Theology of Seventeeth-Century Natural Science,” Ideas & Production 1 (1983): 1-43.

What must be the most interesting thing about being a historian of seventeenth-century natural philosophy is the sheer number of epistemological flavors deployed to address the same problems. In the 1980s, conscientious historians took it upon themselves to sort out different epistemological commitments, rather than to rely on wholly

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Schaffer on the Nebular Hypothesis

We’re going to be skipping around in the Schaffer bibliography a little bit now in the hopes of approaching his articles in a way that makes the most sense to me. Today I want to look at “The Nebular Hypothesis and the Science of Progress” from History, Humanity, and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, edited by James R. Moore (1989). This work is fascinating to me for a few reasons.

1850 sketch of the Orion Nebula — 1850 illustration of the Orion Nebula by Lord Rosse

First and foremost, it represents Schaffer’s attempt to translate his methodology for studying natural philosophical cosmologies into the era of disciplined science. Natural philosophical cosmology was not a tightly restrained genre. While we might say that there were identifiable sub-genres of cosmology that adhered to fairly specific methodologies and cosmological possibilities, the boundaries between these were very porous, and ideas transplanted themselves fairly easily between them.

Schaffer liked to use the term “resource” to describe these ideas. Certain kinds of philosophical argument became “possible” (though, of course, not

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Schaffer and the End of Natural Philosophy

As we’ve moved along in our Simon Schaffer project, an underlying set of general historical concerns has emerged from reading his articles (plus Leviathan and the Air-Pump) together, which is the way arguments work and develop in natural philosophy. Although the various subgenres of natural philosophy had varying sets of rules permitting cosmologies of varying stability, the history of natural philosophy could be told in a very organic way by examining the progression of ideas within cosmologies. Some ideas could be specific, such as the restorative role of comets, or very general, such as the idea that fundamental aspects of the universe could evolve with time. Religious views were a part of, rather than connected to or constraining natural philosophy.

Schaffer’s arguments helped make over a century worth of history make more sense, because they elucidated why natural philosophers’ arguments made sense to them. In pursuing this project, he was a part of a break with prior historiography, which had ignored or sought to explain away the ideas and practices in the past that didn’t make sense. What had motivated this new break was the epistemic insight that the inquiries of prior eras, both “good” and “bad”, made sense on account of their connectedness—not their disconnectedness—from their surrounding culture. This insight has now become so mainstream in the history of science community, its manifestation so much a part of why we write, that it is actually Schaffer’s long-time-scale historiographical sensibilities (which were actually part of his more classical training) that seem remarkable and exciting to me.

Not so to Schaffer:

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EppQw9JHD8″]

(He gets to the most relevant bit right away, but the whole 37 minutes is worthwhile. Also, plenty more of the four hour interview at YouTube, or Alan Macfarlane’s web site.)

I’ve mentioned that writing around the epistemic imperative has a museological quality designed to ornament and advertise the profession’s

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