Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: The Age of the New
- Part I The New Nature
- Part II Personae and Sites of Natural Knowledge
- Part III Dividing the Study of Nature
- 17 Natural Philosophy
- 18 Medicine
- 19 Natural History
- 20 Cosmography
- 21 From Alchemy to “Chymistry”
- 22 Magic
- 23 Astrology
- 24 Astronomy
- 25 Acoustics and Optics
- 26 Mechanics
- 27 The Mechanical Arts
- 28 Pure Mathematics
- Part IV Cultural Meanings of Natural Knowledge
- Index
- References
26 - Mechanics
from Part III - Dividing the Study of Nature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: The Age of the New
- Part I The New Nature
- Part II Personae and Sites of Natural Knowledge
- Part III Dividing the Study of Nature
- 17 Natural Philosophy
- 18 Medicine
- 19 Natural History
- 20 Cosmography
- 21 From Alchemy to “Chymistry”
- 22 Magic
- 23 Astrology
- 24 Astronomy
- 25 Acoustics and Optics
- 26 Mechanics
- 27 The Mechanical Arts
- 28 Pure Mathematics
- Part IV Cultural Meanings of Natural Knowledge
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter is devoted to mechanics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Following a distinction traceable at least to Hero of Alexandria (first century) and Pappus of Alexandria (third century), mechanics can be divided into rational and practical (or applied). The former is a mathematical science normally proceeding by demonstration, the latter a manual art with practical aims. Here I privilege rational over practical mechanics, which is discussed elsewhere in this volume (see Bennett, Chapter 27).
A major problem with writing a history of mechanics during this period concerns the changing disciplinary boundaries and meaning of the term “mechanics.” Traditionally, mechanics had dealt with the mathematical science of simple machines and the equilibrium of bodies. In the second half of the seventeenth century, however, mechanics became increasingly associated with the science of motion. Therefore, in dealing with an earlier period, it is useful to chart not simply the transformations of mechanics as it was understood before the second half of the seventeenth century but also the relevant transformations in the science of motion that belong more properly to natural philosophy.
Mechanics and natural philosophy differed widely intellectually, institutionally, and socially in the period covered by this chapter. Even rational mechanics retained a practical and engineering component but it was also progressively gaining a higher intellectual status with the editions of major works from antiquity and with a renewed emphasis on its utility; initially its role in the universities was at best marginal, however. By contrast, natural philosophy had been a major academic discipline for centuries and had closer links to theology than to the practical arts.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 632 - 672Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
References
The Vortex Theory of Planetary Motion (New York: American Elsevier, and London: Macdonald, 1972).Google Scholar
Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).Google Scholar
“The Method of Indivisibles: Changing Understanding,” Studia Leibnitiana, Sonderheft 14 (1986).Google Scholar
, ed., >The Quest for Longitude: The Proceedings of the Longitude Symposium, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 4–6, 1993 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
An Introduction to the History of Structural Mechanics, 2 vols. (Berlin: Springer, 1991), vol. 1.Google Scholar
in Encyclopedia of the Scientific Revolution from Copernicus to Newton, ed. (New York: Garland, 2000).Google Scholar
“Etiquette, Interdependence, and Sociability in Seventeenth-Century Science,” Critical Inquiry, 22 (1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“The Social Status of Italian Mathematicians, 1450–1600,” History of Science, 27 (1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
La naissance de la mécanique analytique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992).Google Scholar
“Hero’s Pneumatica: A Study of Its Transmission and Influence,” Isis, 40 (1949).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).Google Scholar
and , “Galileo and Pisan Aristotelianism: Galileo’s De motu antiquiora and the Quaestiones de motu elementorum of the Pisan Professors,” Early Science and Medicine, 5 (2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Archimedes in the Middle Ages, 5 vols. (vol. 1, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964.Google Scholar
Archimedes in the Middle Ages, vols. 2–5, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976–84).Google Scholar
The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959).Google Scholar
A Collection of Papers, which Passed between the Late Learned Mr. Leibnitz and Dr. Clarke in the Years 1715 and 1716 (London: Printed for J. Knapton, 1717).Google Scholar
Archimedis de iis quae vehuntur in aqua libri duo (Bologna: Ex officina A. Benacii, 1565).Google Scholar
“Shooting by the Book: Notes on Niccolò Tartaglia’s Nova Scientia,” History of Science, 35 (1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
In duos Archimedis aequiponderantium libros paraphrasis (Pesaro: Apud Hieronymum Concordiam, 1588).Google Scholar
, , , and , Exploring the Limits of Preclassical Mechanics (New York: Springer, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Baconian Facts, Academic Civility, and the Prehistory of Objectivity,” Annals of Scholarship, 8 (1991).Google Scholar
Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
“Galilei e la fisica del Collegio Romano,” Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana, 71 (1992).Google Scholar
Galileo: For Copernicanism and for the Church, trans. , (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Publications, 1994).Google Scholar
“La meccanica ‘allargata’,” in La scienza ellenistica, ed. and ([Naples]: Bibliopolis, 1984).Google Scholar
“Between ars and philosophia naturalis: Reflections on the Historiography of Early Modern Mechanics,” in Renaissance and Revolution, ed. and (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
“Force and Inertia in Seventeenth-Century Dynamics,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2 (1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Descartes’s Physics and Descartes’s Mechanics: Chicken and Egg?” in Essays on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
, “Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy: A Treatise on ‘Mechanics’?” in The Investigation of Difficult Things, ed. and . (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
On Motion and on Mechanics, translated with introductions by and (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).Google Scholar
“Gassendi and l’Affaire Galilée on the Laws of Motion,” in Galileo in Context, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
“Leibniz: Physics and Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), especially chap. 6.Google Scholar
and , “The Hydrostatic Paradox and the Origins of Cartesian Dynamics,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 33 (2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Mechanics and the Royal Society, 1668–1670,” British Journal for the History of Science, 3 (1966).Google Scholar
“Butter for Parsnips: Authorship, Audience, and the Incomprehensibility of the Principia,” in Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science, ed. and (London: Routledge, 2003).Google Scholar
“Galileo and the Problem of Accidents,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 38 (1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
are: “An experiment in measurement,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 97 (1953).Google Scholar
“A Documentary History of the Problem of Fall from Kepler to Newton,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 45 pt. 4 (1955).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
See, for example, his From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957).Google Scholar
, “Patronage of Mechanics and Theories of Impact in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” in Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology, and Medicine at the European Court, 1500–1750, ed. (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 1991).Google Scholar
The Unfinished Mechanics of Giuseppe Moletti (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Merton Tradition and Kinematics in Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century Italy (Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1980).Google Scholar
Le speculazioni giovanili “de motu” di Giovanni Battista Benedetti (Pisa: Domus Galilaeana, 1967).Google Scholar
“Huygens and the Pendulum: From Device to Mathematical Relation,” in The Growth of Mathematical Knowledge, ed. and (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000).Google Scholar
Harmonie universelle contenant la théorie et la pratique de la musique (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1986).Google Scholar
and , eds., The Medieval Science of Weights (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960).Google Scholar
“Galileo and Avempace: The Dynamics of the Leaning Tower Experiment,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 12 (1951).Google Scholar
and , “The Science of Motion,” in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).Google Scholar
The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. , and , 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–77).Google Scholar
In quatuor libros Meteorologicorum Aristotelis commentaria (Rome: Typis heredum Francisci Corbelletti, 1646).Google Scholar
Reading the ‘Principia’: The Debates on Newton’s Mathematical Methods for Natural Philosophy from 1687 to 1736 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
, Mathematicae colletiones, translated by as La collection mathématique (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1933).Google Scholar
Almagestum novum (Bologna: Ex Typographia Haeredis Victorij Benatij, 1651), pt. I and pt. II.Google Scholar
and “The pseudo-Aristotelian Questions of Mechanics in Renaissance Culture,” Studies in the Renaissance, 18 (1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“A Fresh Look at Mechanics in 16th-Century Italy,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 1 (1970).Google Scholar
“Experience and Experiment: A Comparison of Zabarella’s views with Galileo’s in De motu,” Studies in the Renaissance, 16 (1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Galileo and the Seventeenth-Century Text-book Tradition,” in Novità celesti e crisi del sapere, ed. (Florence: Giunti Barbera, 1984).Google Scholar
“The Methodology of the Principia,” in The Cambridge Companion to Newton, ed. and (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
“Galileo and the Oxford Calculatores: Analytical Languages and the Mean-Speed Theorem for Accelerated Motion,” in Reinterpreting Galileo, ed. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Leibniz & Clarke: A Study of Their Correspondence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
“Floods along the Bisenzio: Science and Technology in the Age of Galileo,” Technology and Culture, 30 (1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ed., The Preliminary Manuscripts for Isaac Newton’s ‘Principia’, 1684–1686 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
“The Prehistory of the Principia from 1664 to 1686,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 45 (1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 7
- Cited by