-
39Empiricism without the senses: How the instrument replaced the eyeIn Charles T. Wolfe & Ofer Gal (eds.), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, Springer. pp. 121--147. 2010.
-
171The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science (edited book)Springer. 2010.This volume focuses on the development of empiricism as an interest in the body - as both the object of research and the subject of experience.
-
63Baroque Optics and the Disappearance of the Observer: From Kepler’s Optics to Descartes’ DoubtJournal of the History of Ideas 71 (2): 191-217. 2010.Seventeenth-century optics naturalizes the eye while estranging the mind from objects. A mere screen, on which rests a blurry array of light stains, the eye no longer furnishes the observer with genuine re-presentations of visible objects. The intellect is thus compelled to decipher flat images of no inherent epistemic value, accidental effects of a purely causal process, as vague, reversed reflections of wholly independent objects. Reflecting on and trespassing the boundaries between natural an…Read more
-
19The Archaeology of the Inverse Square Law: (2) The Use and Non-Use of MathematicsHistory of Science 44 (1): 49-67. 2006.The following is the second part of our Archaeology of the Inverse Square Law. Together these papers examine the transformation of the inverse square ratio from its origins in a metaphysical image of medieval thought in Grosseteste and the perspectivist tradition, through a playful magical practice in the Renaissance with Cusanus and Dee, and into a mathematical tool, applicable to the physical world. This last transformation allowed Newton to condense the geometrical image into a celebrated alg…Read more
-
31The Archaeology of the Inverse Square Law: (1) Metaphysical Images and Mathematical PracticesHistory of Science 43 (4): 391-414. 2005.The following paper, together with its sequel ("The use and non-use of mathematics"), is a study in the mathematization of nature. It looks into the history of one of the most emblematic achievements of this fundamental aspect of the making of modem science - the Inverse Square Law of universal gravitation - before its celebrated application by Newton to celestial mechanics. What did it take, we ask, to tum a particular mathematical ratio into a candidate for a law of nature?
-
76Nature’s drawing: problems and resolutions in the mathematization of motionSynthese 185 (3): 429-466. 2012.The mathematical nature of modern science is an outcome of a contingent historical process, whose most critical stages occurred in the seventeenth century. ‘The mathematization of nature’ (Koyré 1957 , From the closed world to the infinite universe , 5) is commonly hailed as the great achievement of the ‘scientific revolution’, but for the agents affecting this development it was not a clear insight into the structure of the universe or into the proper way of studying it. Rather, it was a delibe…Read more
-
3Metaphysical images and mathematical practices: The archaeology of the inverse square law part IHistory of Science 43 (4): 391-414. 2005.
-
11Between Kepler and Newton: Hooke’s ‘principles of congruity and incongruity’ and the naturalization of mathematicsAnnals of Science 76 (3-4): 241-266. 2019.Robert Hooke’s development of the theory of matter-as-vibration provides coherence to a career in natural philosophy which is commonly perceived as scattered and haphazard. It also highlights aspects of his work for which he is rarely credited: besides the creative speculative imagination and practical-instrumental ingenuity for which he is known, it displays lucid and consistent theoretical thought and mathematical skills. Most generally and importantly, however, Hooke’s ‘Principles … of Congru…Read more
-
18Etica barocca. Spinoza e la caduta della ragioneQuaestio 17 517-544. 2017.“Desire is the very essence of man” Spinoza says, inverting a most deeply held conviction: that in our “very essence” we are “mind, reason and judgment”. The ethical implications are difficult: onl...
-
59Tropes and Topics in Scientific Discourse: Galileo's De MotuScience in Context 7 (1): 25-52. 1994.The ArgumentThis paper contains two main sections. In the first I suggest a mechanism of interpretation, based on a distinction between two aspects of meaning, analyzed using two kinds of rhetorical-poetical constructions:tropesto explore the linguistic relations—metaphors, metonyms, synecdoches, etc.—that endow terms with content, andtopicsto account for the structuring function of key expressions, which enables the recognition and adjudication of phrases, arguments, texts, genres, etc. In the …Read more
-
20These are the abstracts of papers for the conference, History Unveiled Science Unfettered: A Conference in Celebration of James E. McGuire University of Pittsburgh, January 19, 2002.
-
13Producing knowledge in the workshop: Hooke's ‘inflection’ from optics to planetary motionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 27 (2): 181-205. 1996.
-
51Constructivism for philosophers (be it a remark on realism)Perspectives on Science 10 (4): 523-549. 2002.: Bereft of the illusion of an epistemic vantage point external to science, what should be our commitment towards the categories, concepts and terms of that very science? Should we, despaired of the possibility to found these concepts on rock bottom, adopt empiricist skepticism? Or perhaps the inexistence of external foundations implies, rather, immunity for scientific ontology from epistemological criticism? Philosophy's "realism debate" died out without providing a satisfactory answer to the d…Read more
-
Producing Knowledge: Robert HookeDissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1996.This work is an argument for the notion of knowledge production. It is an attempt at an epistemological and historiographic position which treats all facets and modes of knowledge as products of human practices, a position developed and demonstrated through a reconstruction of two defining episodes in the scientific career of Robert Hooke : the composition of his Programme for explaining planetary orbits as inertial motion bent by centripetal force, and his development of the spring law in relat…Read more
-
How Modern Science Came into the World: Four Civilizations, One Seventeenth-Century Breakthrough (review)Isis 103 764-766. 2012.
-
10Science Unfettered: A Philosophical Study in Sociohistorical Ontology (review)Isis 93 543-544. 2002.
-
35The ‘absolute existence’ of phlogiston: the losing party's point of viewBritish Journal for the History of Science 44 (3): 317-342. 2011.Long after its alleged demise, phlogiston was still presented, discussed and defended by leading chemists. Even some of the leading proponents of the new chemistry admitted its ‘absolute existence’. We demonstrate that what was defended under the title ‘phlogiston’ was no longer a particular hypothesis about combustion and respiration. Rather, it was a set of ontological and epistemological assumptions and the empirical practices associated with them. Lavoisier's gravimetric reduction, in the ey…Read more
-
14The Invisible World (review)The Leibniz Review 6 144-148. 1996.“The present book,” acknowledges Wilson in her Preface, “owes its origins to a study of the preface to Robert Hooke‘s Micrographia undertaken in a seminar on reappraisals of the scientific revolution under the direction of Robert S. Westman.” It is in that very preface that Hooke proclaims: “my ambition is, that I may serve to the great Philosophers of this Age, as the makers and grinders of my Glasses did to me”, and it seems that for Wilson, the reappraisal of paragraphs like this have served …Read more
-
38New Terms of Accommodation: Benjamin Elman's On Their Own Terms and Early Modern Global Networks of KnowledgeIntellectual History Review 21 (2): 231-239. 2011.No abstract
-
21Hesse and Rorty on Metaphor: Rhetoric in Contemporary PhilosophyJournal of Speculative Philosophy 9 (2). 1995.