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

Keller, Vera

doi:10.1177/007327531004800102

Cited by 17 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…The convergence between social, political, scientific, and technical processes are also well reflected in laboratory studies (Galison, 1997b; Knorr-Cetina, 1995; Latour & Woolgar, 1986) and history of science accounts of instruments (Keller, 2010; Ratcliff, 2007; Schaffer, 1987) discussed later in this article. What is missing in all these accounts is the attention to making and designing instruments, which is central to Zilsel’s thesis and our proposal for artisanal science.…”

Section: Artisanal Science Reviving Zilsel’s Thesis and Arendt’s Critmentioning

confidence: 75%

“…This complex history of political, artistic, economic, and other (mis)uses of scientific instruments is well documented in the famous studies of Robert Boyle’s air pump (Schaffer, 1987; Shapin & Schaffer, 2011), Samuel Morland’s calculating machines (Ratcliff, 2007), Rene Descartes’s garden machinery and automata fountain (Werrett, 2001), Cornelius Debbel’s incubators and thermostates (Keller, 2010, 2013), and various aesthetic, metaphysical, poetic, and other uses of instruments in alchemy and mechanical arts (Keller, 2013; Newman, 2005; Nummedal, 2011).…”

Section: Osh As Living Instruments Cosmoscopes Epistemic Machines mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Drebbel’s incubators served as models of the universe along very practical uses, such as hatching of eggs or gaining financial support by impressing emperors. They were described as “living instrument” or “single, living machine that could encapsulate, prove, and effortlessly convey universal knowledge of nature” (Keller, 2010). These incubators and later attempts for a perpetuum mobile performed Drebbel’s superior artisanal knowledge along his insight into the universe asa moving microcosm or compendium of all natural knowledge to be observed in a glance .…”

Section: Osh As Living Instruments Cosmoscopes Epistemic Machines mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This model entailed a close association between the body of the artisan and the content of his own natural philosophy encapsulated within his single, personal device. (Keller, 2010)…”

Section: Osh As Living Instruments Cosmoscopes Epistemic Machines mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Science Artisans and Open Science Hardware

Kera

2017

Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society

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Open science hardware (OSH) are prototypes of laboratory instruments that use open source hardware to extend the purely epistemic (improving knowledge about nature) and normative (improving society) ideals of science and emphasize the importance of technology. They remind us of Zilsel’s 1942 thesis about the artisanal origins of science and instrument making that bridged disciplinary and social barriers in the 16th century. The emphasis on making, tinkering, and design transcends research, reproducibility, and corroboration in science and pushes to the forefront educational, emancipatory, and aesthetic and exploratory uses. I will use two recent projects, OpenDrop electrowetting platform and Open Source Estrogen that make but also reflect OSH’s playful, expressive, and performative strategies and define the present practices as “artisanal science.” These hybrid and ambiguous practices bridge divides between present disciplines and skills but they also define science as an everyday activity directly connected to the private and public interests of the citizens. To describe this epistemic and normative ambiguity of artisanal science, I employ Hannah Arendt’s 1958 critique of homo laborans and homo faber and claim that science artisans (citizen scientists, geeks, makers, and hackers) offer an alternative to professionalization of science as practiced in the university and R&D laboratories. Science artisans design and build instruments to engage in civic “vita activa” over instruments but also leisurely “otium” outside of the work and science labor. OSH in this sense empowers individuals and communities to explore new connections between scientific practices, public actions, and private interests (leisure). The science artisans strive for and explore sovereignty, dignity, and freedom in an age immersed in science and technology controversies by bridging the divides between art, science, engineering, and humanities.

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Section: Artisanal Science Reviving Zilsel’s Thesis and Arendt’s Critmentioning

confidence: 75%

Section: Osh As Living Instruments Cosmoscopes Epistemic Machines mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Osh As Living Instruments Cosmoscopes Epistemic Machines mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This model entailed a close association between the body of the artisan and the content of his own natural philosophy encapsulated within his single, personal device. (Keller, 2010)…”

Section: Osh As Living Instruments Cosmoscopes Epistemic Machines mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Science Artisans and Open Science Hardware

Kera

2017

Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society

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“…In her argument, the Scientific Revolution offers an apt explanation for the emergence of a mechanized worldview altogether with a rationalized understanding of nature, that can be explored, exploited and conquered. However, historians of science have dethroned the Scientific Revolution; the sharp distinction between vitalism and mechanism that structured the grand narrative of the emergence of new science and the process of industrialization has long been criticized for obscuring the various interconnections of vitalist and mechanist thinking and philosophy in the early modern period (Schaffer 1987;Garber 2001;Newman 2006;Keller 2010). Furthermore, there is a distinction between nature and technology, or between organistic and mechanistic worldviews, that prevents comprehension of how past actors thought about the complex economies of natural resource production.…”

Section: Mining and The Death Of Nature?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Spirited Metals and the Oeconomy of Resources in Early Modern European Mining

Asmussen

2020

Earth Sciences History

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This article examines the perception and valuation of mineral resources in sixteenth and seventeenth-century European mining regions. It aims to critically review the utilitarian and anthropocentric view of mining and mineral resource production, circulation and consumption that is shaped by a long tradition of economic history and history of technology. To understand human relation to the underground and its resources only in terms of innovation and rationalization means to ignore the many different layers by which resource landscapes affected the miner’s perception of nature and mineral matter. The literary, material and visual culture of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century central European mining sites proves to be fruitful ground for historicizing the interplay between manual labor, mechanical arts, natural resources and religion in mining landscapes. This paper aims to connect the material and immaterial or the physical and symbolic dimensions of human-nature entanglement in early modern mining and suggests a way to locate human and geological agency within the context of a divine oeconomy.

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Expanded Mechanism and/or Structural Vitalism: Further Thoughts on the Animal Economy

Wolfe

2022

International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives Internationales d'Histoire Des Idées

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The opposition between mechanism and vitalism is an old and venerable one. It seems to be particularly active in the hands of historians of biology, particularly late nineteenth and early twentieth-century biology (Hein 1972, Allen 2005. Broadly speaking, histories of biology and medicine endlessly and ceaselessly oppose mechanism and vitalism, usually focusing on the most dogmatic pronouncements of both such perspectives (iatromechanistic rhetoric and immaterial vital forces). Thereby they neglect the fertility and diversity of types of early modern mechanism (a diversity noted in Des Chene 2001; see also Hutchins 2015, Wolfe 2014), including as attempts to do justice to the ontological status of Life itself, and conversely, the mechanism-friendly dimensions of core moments of vitalist theorization, notably in the notions of 'organisation' and 'animal economy' in Montpellier vitalism (Wolfe and Terada 2008, Wolfe 2017a, 2019a. Furthermore, the opposition between mechanism and vitalism effectively obscures the singularity and the importance of specifically structural concepts, which are neither restrictively mechanistic (bottom-up reductionism) nor wholly organismic (top-down holism). What kind of history of vitalism results from this new emphasis on the interrelation between mechanism and vitalism? I suggest that vitalism, at least when it is not caricaturally positing immaterial vital forces, is concerned with vital materiality overall, and particularly with 'the living machine', to borrow a phrase from Claude Bernard (Bernard 1865).

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

Cited by 17 publications

References 16 publications

Science Artisans and Open Science Hardware

Science Artisans and Open Science Hardware

Spirited Metals and the Oeconomy of Resources in Early Modern European Mining

Expanded Mechanism and/or Structural Vitalism: Further Thoughts on the Animal Economy

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