Mihnea Dobre

The glass drop is a tear-shaped object with many curious properties. Although having a fragile tail, its main body is hard to break. On the other hand, breaking such a drop produces a loud noise and many very small particles of glass. In the seventeenth century, these objects became the focus of both experimental and natural philosophical investigation. In this article, I examine the ways in which various natural philosophers have dealt with glass-drops. This is neither a complete enumeration of the countless attempts to explain the object and its associated phenomena, nor a search for its origins. Rather, this study offers a glimpse into what was at stake in the inclusion of the glass drop—a new scientific object—into natural philosophy. I shall argue that a full description of the drop and of its properties required both experiment and speculation.

This introduction opens a discussion about what we call here “Cartesian Empiricisms.” Under this label we place some of the complex transformations of Descartes’ ideas in the second half of the seventeenth century. Our aim is to highlight the use of experiment within the Cartesian framework, which—with the exception of a few scattered studies on seventeenth-century Cartesians—was largely neglected in the literature. In this introduction, we provide an overview of Cartesian scholarship and the use of the rationalist-empiricist distinction in both the history of philosophy and the history of science; we show that the rationalist-empiricist narrative is in crisis and contend that examining figures who do not neatly fit the dichotomy is a useful approach to a re-evaluation of the period. We end with a summary of the chapters, which cover a number of Cartesians strongly committed to the importance of experimental natural philosophy and further our understanding of how Cartesians in the second half of the seventeenth century understood and utilized knowledge from observation, experience, and experiment.