Schaffer Oeuvre – Page 4 – Ether Wave Propaganda

Schaffer’s Got Spirit!

The next three pieces in our examination of the works of Simon Schaffer are:

1) “Scientific Discoveries and the End of Natural Philosophy” Social Studies of Science 16 (1986): 387-420.

2) “Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural Philosophy” Science in Context 1 (1987): 55-85.

3) “Priestley and the Politics of Spirit” in Science, Medicine, and Dissent: Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), edited by Anderson and Lawrence, 1987.

Today I’ll be looking at (2) and (3), which continue Schaffer’s studies of natural philosophy, saving (1) for a more general discussion of what it meant for “natural philosophy” to be “replaced” by “science”, which would become a going concern of Schaffer’s; as well as for a look at Schaffer’s changing strategies for presenting his work to the science studies community in the wake of Leviathan and the Air Pump.

A theme prevalent from Schaffer’s earliest work is the inextricability of political and theological issues from the practice of natural philosophy. Theories of the universe adhering to a strictly “mechanistic” portrayal (as Descartes had proposed in the 1640s, and perhaps best imagined as the “billiard ball” vision of the way things work) were philosophically dissatisfying for a number of reasons.

First, strict mechanism was widely derided as atheistic, and most natural philosophers (especially in Britain) actually wanted to maintain a place for God’s actions in the cosmos. In a universe still believed to have been designed and created, a design amenable to God’s moral order was regarded as an essential

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The Historical and Sociological Leviathan

Of all the works we’ll look at by Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (LATAP) is the only one that is a book, and the only one that is co-authored. It was published in 1985 with Steven Shapin, and is by far the most famous work in Schaffer’s oeuvre.

What has become clear to me from reading Schaffer’s other work around the time of LATAP is just how important it is to read the book as the two-authored work that it is. It clearly served two different projects in two different ways: Schaffer’s account of the historical development of natural philosophy, and Shapin’s project to explore the social nature of science. As such, it can be read either as a key sociological case study, or as a reinterpretation of a landmark moment in the history of science.

The majority of citations of the book (I wager) have used it as case study. Its resoundingly bold last line—“Hobbes was right”—declared that scientific knowledge was something created by people inhabiting a world where knowledge had authority because it was proclaimed by people with authority. Thomas Hobbes’ insights into the nature of modern scientific

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Schaffer on Temporal Evolution, Pt. 2

In “The Phoenix of Nature: Fire and Evolutionary Cosmology in Wright and Kant,” (Journal for the History of Astronomy vol. 9, 1978, pp. 180-200), Simon Schaffer continued his study of the development of temporally evolving cosmologies, in this case with the natural philosophical work of the astronomy teacher Thomas Wright and German philosopher Immanuel Kant (well prior to his famous Critiques). As I mentioned in the last post in this series, Schaffer seems to have directed his early work toward the introduction into natural philosophical thought of the idea that past and future states of the universe could be substantially different from the present state of the universe. As he puts it, “the cosmological thought of Kant and Wright can be seen as the basis for the evolutionary systems of the universe developed by Laplace and Herschel later in the century.” (As we have seen, he would turn to Herschel in his next few articles).

In his project, Schaffer tends toward the teleological. Everyone in this piece seems either striving to introduce an evolutionary perspective, or constrained from doing so.

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Schaffer on Temporal Evolution, Pt. 1

Finishing up our look back at some of the earliest works of Simon Schaffer, I’d like to look at the two pre-1980 works I’ve found:

1) Halley’s Atheism and the End of the World, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 32 (1977): 17-40

2) The Phoenix of Nature: Fire and Evolutionary Cosmology in Wright and Kant, Journal for the History of Astronomy 9 (1978): 180-200. (According to this web site, this is one of Schaffer’s personal favorites).

Both articles are revealing that Schaffer’s early work was specifically geared around understanding the emergence of the concept of temporal change in natural philosophical cosmologies. The development of a temporal economy of nature was a key to the development of William Herschel’s cosmology, which Schaffer discussed in a 1980 paper that I looked at back in August. But the idea of a transitory universe was longstanding. Before getting into the details, though, let’s back up and look at why this is an interesting issue in the first place.

The emergence of deep time in the 18th century was an important development in geology and the development of evolutionary concepts in the history of life (exemplified in the work of Darwin, but discussed in European thought for a century prior to Origin of Species). While, in some sense, a deep time evolutionary approach was demanded by the

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Schaffer busts out the hickory

Before heading on to Leviathan and the Air-Pump, I’m heading back to some earlier Schaffer articles that I missed in my initial run-through. This includes a couple of pieces from the late-’70s, as well as what should be required methodological reading: “Natural Philosophy” in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science (1980), edited by G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (one of the more disciplined and useful edited volumes I’ve seen).

What fun! Schaffer takes out a baseball bat and goes ape on the then-extant historiography of natural philosophy, moving from specific to general critiques of it, before moving on to confirm my prior guess that he saw himself as expanding upon Foucault’s “archaeological” examination of the sciences.

Schaffer places an emphasis on the need for intellectual (indeed, epistemological) conflict to resolve historiographical flaws:

…there is an important need for alternative attitudes to natural philosophy as an historical category, not merely revisions of one or other of the unifying assertions which contemporary historiography has made. This necessarily involves a genuine confrontation with the philosophical debates on the discursive place of history of science which, significantly enough, in the work of Bachelard, Kuhn, and Foucault, have all drawn on natural philosophy in the eighteenth century for much of their evidence. Such a confrontation is overdue.

It is far more overdue today. I’ll explain why….

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Schaffer on Spectacle, Pt. 2

Having gone over Schaffer’s specific argument about the relationship between public spectacle and the need to police natural philosophy in the late-18th-century, I want to talk a little more about how I perceive his historiographical project at this point in his oeuvre. Basically, he says, he wants to “experiment” on the utility of three “fashionable themes”. These are (1) scientific production as performance, (2) the relationship between natural philosophy and natural history “(with its effect on a possible taxonomy of eighteenth century sciences)”, and (3) the shift from entrepreneurial deployment to political control of natural philosophy.

I discussed (1) and (3) last time, and Schaffer barely deals with (2), but, at the same time, I get the sense that (2) is a project Schaffer got started on but never really finished. It relates to what looks like a fairly small historiography relating to “what Geoffrey Cantor calls ‘the eighteenth century problem’—the search for a convincing description of the variety of sciences at this period.” I think this taxonomical project was important to Schaffer because it was essential to his accounting for important transitions in some

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Schaffer on Spectacle, Pt. 1

Continuing our first career overview series on the works of Simon Schaffer, we turn to “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century” from History of Science 21 (1983): 1-43. The topic of science and “performance” is now pretty well-worn. In ’83 (a quarter of a century ago now), Schaffer referred to it as “fashionable”. But rather than jump right into the argument, I’d first like to discuss the paper’s sense of historiographical purpose.

One gets the sense that there’s a definite project at work here, as Schaffer begins by drawing on a methodological distinction that the 18th-century natural philosopher Joseph Priestley drew between “true history” and “fiction”. According to Priestley, “fiction” is illustrative of principles, where “true history” is interrogative and experimental in the same manner as science. Here Schaffer allies himself explicitly with John Heilbron against the “physicist-historians who were more concerned with progress rather than process.” This is written at a time when historians of science, inspired by sociological theory, were seeking to understand history as it happened, rather than to single out accomplishments based on a post-hoc

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Schaffer on Herschel’s Cosmology

William Herschel's 40 ft. telescope at Slough. Credit: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Brittle Books Collection

In thinking about why I enjoy working in the history of science so much, the answer I increasingly come up with is that it gives us a sort of understanding of why arguments are structured in the way that they are, and, crucially, why they make sense to those who make them. Others seem to like to study science as a repository of accepted knowledge, or as a tool for technological development or for structuring society, or simply as a subset of museological reconstruction. But, in my mind, work like, say, Peter Dear’s, which regularly traces not just the connection between scientific work and its time and place, but the reason why arguments make sense in different times and places, is the most exciting. Looking at science in this vein, it is possible to see it as more than just “knowledge functioning in society” but as a social institution dedicated to the construction of highly sophisticated methods of arriving at “knowledge one can rely on”.

So, what does an article about theories of things like sunspots being holes in the solar atmosphere leading down to a temperate layer where intelligent beings live have to do with “knowledge one can rely on”? As I explored a little bit in my prior post on “cosmology and the problem of the problem”, the ability to connect knowledge into a coherent world system has long been a crucial method of argumentation. It is misleading to look at the scientific revolution and assume one of its major products was an argumentative restraint that refused to intuit knowledge where no reliable knowledge could be found (case-in-point, Newton’s celebrated “hypotheses non fingo”). This is because, first, speculation is always necessary to the development of new knowledge, and, second, it is incredibly problematic to determine when one does or

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Schaffer on Herschel, Pt. 1

One of the things this blog tries to do is to put history scholarship back in the context of its creation. One of the continuing themes I’ve been harping on is the need to uncover the historical reasons for the prevalence of narrow, disconnected case studies in our literature. What did they initially demonstrate, and are they doing as much work for us as they (presumably) used to do? Another thing I want to do in reconstructing the history of our writing style is to look at individual scholars’ bodies of work to try and reconstruct their approach. As in most fields, scholars who are just starting out have only a fragmentary knowledge of the field’s figures and their works, and no real sense of how they build on their prior works over the course of a career. With this in mind, I thought I’d start a continuing feature looking at the evolution of scholars’ works and interests. Since most people are at least aware of Simon Schaffer, and since his reputation is pretty rock solid, I thought I’d start with him. Here, by the way, is a fairly recent video of him from YouTube:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsmEHr05dV8]

Are we high-tech around here, now, or what? So, the earliest publications of his that I can find come from the early 1980s, and deal with the work of the amateur astronomer William Herschel:

1) “‘The Great Laboratories of the Universe’: William Herschel on Matter Theory and Planetary Life” Journal for the History of Astronomy 11 (1980): 81-111

2) “Herschel in Bedlam: Natural History and Stellar Astronomy” British Journal for the History of Science 13 (1980): 211-239.

3) “Uranus and the Establishment of Herschel’s Astronomy” Journal for the History of Astronomy 12 (1981): 11-26.

Today I’d like to concentrate on (2), which I enjoyed a great deal. One of the reasons I like it so well is

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Cosmology and the Problem of the Problem

My plate is full of writing at the moment, but I really am more in a mood for research. Fortunately, the batteries on my laptop have been burned out for a couple of years now, so my recent transatlantic plane rides prevented me from doing much productive writing, but afforded me the opportunity to do some work on reading over the Schaffer oeuvre.

I should have done this years ago. I’ll post more when I come to the issue formally; for now suffice it to say that Schaffer’s pre-Leviathan work deals a lot with the reconstruction of natural philosophical cosmologies. I get the sense a lot of this early work is aimed at demonstrating that the term “natural philosophy” was more than just an antique word for “science”. We got into this a bit in my class last spring when we had the students read Leibniz’s Monadology and tried to explain what the deal with it was, but I’m beginning to see the topic for all its richness.

Basically, natural philosophy, unlike a modern scientific speciality, demanded fairly comprehensive views of the universe, meaning that conjecture relating to the natural world had to be consistent with an understanding of pretty much everything else: problems of God, mind, soul, life, comets, nebulae, the age of the universe, the origins of the earth, the nature of forces, the nature of light, etc…. By making a conjecture about any one thing, it created “problems” everywhere else, and a true philosophical mind had to reconcile their explanations with all these various problems. So, you end up creating or contributing to a cosmology.

The need to create elaborate cosmologies seems to taper off in the 19th century as specialization and professionalization start to be on the rise. After this point, you still have problem-oriented science, but these problems tend to be more practical, or at least more pointed, than the big “OK,if you believe that, then how do you explain X?” problems of the natural philosophy era. This is more of a multi-disciplinary sort of thing where it’s important to develop specific explanations that are consistent with more general principles in a variety of fields. I’ve been doing some work on the study of Antarctic ice flow and climatology recently, and the “problem of Antarctic ice” has a lot to do with jibing paleoclimatological evidence, physical principles, and field research.

The ability to reconcile various points-of-view points to a standard of robust explanation that I was trying to discuss earlier. What is interesting is a shifting standard of robustness from consistency with a possible cosmology to a robustness as measured from multiple expert perspectives. Interestingly, the ability to cleave off problems and to address them from a limited set of perspectives seems to have coincided with the rise of new physical laws leading to more satisfactorily reductive world pictures, but that’s not a connection I’m prepared to explore.