Drebbel's Living Instruments, Hartmann's Microcosm, and Libavius's Thelesmos: Epistemic Machines before Descartes

Abstract

Historians of science long ago ousted a once-assumed mechanization of the world picture from its privileged place as an abrupt shift in the Scientific Revolution. On the one hand, Simon Schaffer has pointed out the continuation of non-mechanical entities in the Royal Society, and on the other, Daniel Garber has pointed out how Cartesian mechanics was not incommensurable with its predecessors. If there was no sudden flicking of a ‘gestalt switch’ between vital and mechanized worlds, then the trading zone between them, if any existed, ought to become a key area of research. As it happens, in the early seventeenth century there was extreme excitement surrounding the area intervening precisely between vitalism and mechanism — vital machines — and in particular the inventions and related natural philosophy of the alchemist, inventor, and machine-based but non-mechanical philosopher Cornelis Drebbel (1572–1633). Drebbel’s natural philosophy has never been fully analysed by a modern historian despite its impressive early modern reception. His texts appeared in twenty-seven early modern editions in Dutch, German, Latin, and French, and were read, taught, cited, and plagiarized across Europe. This is the story of Drebbel and his readers. It is also the story of how a paradigm shift did not come about suddenly through incommensurability, but was constructed gradually through purposeful re-interpretation. This shift says as much about what was known as who was allowed to know. Daniel Garber has argued that the ‘arational’ argumentation observed during moments of Kuhnian shifts are not due to incommensurability but are “a kind of proxy for a deeper social struggle”. I would like to suggest that the social struggle here is not only between such classic opponents as academic Aristotelians and the heterodox Descartes, but between Descartes and his competing heterodox artisanal philosophers. Threats faced mechanical philosophers not only from mechanicks, who had privileged knowledge of the machines now seen as the basic components of the universe, but from chemical philosophers, who had never distinguished between artificial and natural objects, and who had long prized the role of art and technology in philosophy. The recent introduction of alchemy to the academy had elevated the authority of chemical knowledge for a wide philosophical audience. Although the alchemical work of practising alchemists such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton has now received attention, alchemy still often appears irrelevant to the historiography of non-alchemical concerns such as mechanics and the mechanical philosophy. Such irrelevance is an artifact of a purposeful re-interpretation, which was every

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.