baroque mindset and new science：巴洛克式思维定势与新科学.pdf

Baroque Mind-set and New Science A Dialectic of Seventeenth-Century High Culture Jens Høyrup Sarton Chair Lecture 13 November 2008 Abstract The “New Science” of Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, Descartes, Boyle, Steno, etc., and the Baroque in visual arts and literature, are two conspicuous aspects of seventeenth-century European elite culture. If standard histori- ography of science can be relied upon, the former of the two was not affected by the latter. The lecture asks whether this is a “fact of history” or an artefact of histori- ography. A delimitation of the “Baroque” going beyond the commonplaces of overloading and contortion concentrates on the acceptance of ambiguity and the appurtenance to a “representative public sphere”, contrasting with the quest for clarity and the argument-based public sphere of the new science, suggesting that Baroque and New Science were indeed incompat- ible currents. A close-up looks at Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, who was a major Baroque theoretician but also wrote much on mathematics, finding even within his mathematics love for ambiguity. The way his mathematics is spoken about in the Oldenburg correspondence shows that the main- stream of the New Science saw no interest in this. The watershed Modern science – this is generally agreed upon – was inaugurated in the seventeenth century by characters such as Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Boyle, Hooke, Steno and Newton. There is 47 48 also broad consensus that conspicuous sixteenth-century figures like Copernicus, Tycho, Cardano, Vesalius and Bombelli (not to speak of Dee, della Porta and Paracelsus) opened the way for the breakthrough by carrying the a