Experiment and Natural Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany

Experiment and Natural Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany AUSTRALASIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE VOLUME 21 General Editor: S. GAUKROGER, University of Sydney Editorial Advisory Board: RACHEL ANKENY, University of Sydney STEVEN FRENCH, University of Leeds DAVID PAPINEAU, King’s College London NICHOLAS RASMUSSEN, University of New South Wales JOHN SCHUSTER, University of New South Wales RICHARD YEO, Griffith University EXPERIMENT AND NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN SEVENTEENTHCENTURY TUSCANY The History of the Accademia del Cimento LUCIANO BOSCHIERO Saggi di naturali esperienze fatte nell’Accademia del Cimento, Frontispiece. Used with permission of the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Biblioteca Digitale A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-4020-6245-2 (HB) ISBN 978-1-4020-6246-9 (e-book) Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © 2007 Springer No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form orby any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ix Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1 PART ONE: GALILEO AND BEYOND 11 Chapter One: 350 Years of coming to grips with the experimental activities of Galileo and his followers 13 Early understandings of Galileo’s and his students’ experimentalism Medici patronage of seventeenth-century natural philosophy Survey of recent historiographies of the experimental life in early modern Courts Seventeenth-century mechanical natural philosophy, physico-mathematics, and experiment Galileo, natural philosophy, and experiment 13 19 Chapter Two: Vincenzio Viviani (1622–1703): Galileo’s last disciple 37 Viviani the student Arcetri: 1638–1641 Torricelli’s arrival in Arcetri How Torricelli’s death brought Viviani’s career into the spotlight of Tuscany’s intellectual community The speed and propagation of sound 1659–1703 Conclusion 37 39 44 Chapter Three: Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679) 59 Borelli in Rome: his education under Castelli and his initiation into the Galilean School 59 v 24 27 33 49 52 55 56 vi TABLE OF CONTENTS 1635–1656: politics, mathematics, and medicine in Borelli’s Sicily Borelli and Viviani Apollonius’ lost books Theoricae mediceorum planetarum ex causis physicis deductae Borelli’s life beyond the Cimento: 1667–1679 De motionibus naturalibus Conclusion: De motu Animalium 61 69 71 76 84 87 89 Chapter Four: What it meant to be a Cimento academician 93 Carlo Rinaldini and Alessandro Marsili: defending scholasticism The contributions of Antonio Uliva, Carlo Dati, Candido del Buono, and Paolo del Buono Francesco Redi and the experimental method The Cimento’s secretaries and the last word on courtly culture and experimental science 94 106 PART TWO: THE ACCADEMIA DEL CIMENTO: 1657–1662 111 Chapter Five: Experiments concerning air pressure and the void and a look at the Accademia’s internal workings 115 Torricelli’s interpretation of his barometric instrument The academicians’ mechanical understanding of the barometer: what the Saggi reveals Finding evidence of the academicians’ natural philosophical interests in the Saggi ‘Experiments pertaining to the natural pressure of the air’: Roberval and the Aristotelian response ‘Experiments pertaining to the natural pressure of the air’: recreating the Puy-de-Dôme experiment Controversy and conflict inside the Accademia del Cimento Marsili’s defence of the plenum Chapter Six: The artificial freezing process of liquids, and the properties and effects of heat and cold Sixteenth-century atomists: freezing and the vacuum Gassendi, Galileo, atoms, and freezing Artificial freezing The force of expansion of freezing water Leopoldo’s experiment measuring the freezing process of water ‘Experiments on a newly observed effect of heat and cold, relating to changes in the internal capacity of metal and glass vessels’ Heat and cold: quality versus substance Rinaldini stands his ground Borelli’s conclusions: the deprivation of heat Conclusion 98 103 120 123 125 127 131 133 137 141 143 145 149 153 156 160 166 169 173 176 TABLE OF CONTENTS vii PART THREE: THE ACCADEMIA DEL CIMENTO: 1662–1667 179 Chapter Seven: The Cimento’s publication process and presentational techniques: formulating a policy of self-censorship 181 Writing and editing the Saggi Leopoldo’s religious concerns and the rest of the Saggi’s editing process 184 191 Chapter Eight: The Saturn problem and the path of comets: an analysis of the academicians’ theoretical and observational astronomy 195 The Saturn problem Huygens versus Fabri and Divini: religion, reputations, and natural philosophical commitments on the line Leopoldo takes control Model experimenting used to resolve the Saturn problem Comets The Accademia del Cimento and the comet of 1664 Borelli versus Adrien Auzout Maintaining Leopoldo’s policy of self-censorship and concluding the academicians’ work in astronomy 196 199 206 208 216 222 225 Conclusion 233 Bibliography 241 Index 247 228 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Reproduction of diagram used by Galileo in Two New Sciences, to describe the final velocity reached by a body falling along an inclined plane 41 Figure 2: Borelli’s geometrical construction of an ellipse within a scalene cone 82 Figure 3: Torricelli’s barometer; and Roberval’s barometer inside a barometer 116 Figure 4: Galileo’s experiment testing the ‘force of the vacuum’ 118 Figure 5: Torricelli’s barometer testing the size of the vacuous space and the effect on the mercury 121 Figure 6: Cimento’s experiment placing jar over the barometer to test air pressure 129 Figure 7: Marsili’s experiment testing the vacuity of the space in the Torricellian tube 139 Figure 8: Cimento’s experiment testing the expansion of freezing water in a tightly sealed container 151 Figure 9: Cimento’s experiment demonstrating the rarefaction of freezing water 152 Figure 10: Borelli’s experiment measuring the water’s force of expansion during the freezing process 155 Figure 11: Leopoldo’s experiment describing the freezing process 157 Figure 12: Table compiled by the Cimento documenting the freezing process 159 Figure 13: First experiment testing the effects of heat and cold 163 ix x LIST OF FIGURES Figure 14: Second experiment testing the effects of heat and cold 164 Figure 15: Third experiment testing the effects of heat and cold 171 Figure 16: Fourth experiment testing the effects of heat and cold 171 Figure 17: Galileo’s depiction, in The Assayer, of his observation of Saturn 198 Figure 18: Huygens’ diagram of Saturn’s trajectory around the Sun 200 Figure 19: Drawing of the satellites of Saturn according to Fabri and Divini 202 Figure 20: Model constructed by the Accademia del Cimento to test Huygens’ ring hypothesis 209 Figure 21: A drawing of Fabri’s hypothesis with six satellites 213 Figure 22: Galileo’s drawing of the movement of comets in a straight line 220 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Most of the research required for the completion of this book was carried out during my time as a doctorate student. For this reason I am indebted to the support shown to me by my friends and colleagues at the University of New South Wales, all of whom showed an interest in my work. In particular, I am indebted to John Schuster and David Miller for their invaluable advice and guidance over many years. For showing support and providing comments at various stages of this project, thanks are due to my wife, Michelle; my parents, Ana and Marino; Katherine Neal; Stephen Gaukroger; Ivan Crozier; John Henry, Simon Schaffer, and several of my postgraduate colleagues during my time at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney. Thanks especially to Paolo Galluzzi who offered me guidance when researching this topic in the Italian archives. Galluzzi’s support, as well as the assistance of the staff at the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence (IMSS), and at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (BNCF), was invaluable for the preparation of this work. I would also like to acknowledge IMSS Biblioteca Digitale and BNCF for their permission to reproduce the images in this book. The research presented in this book was also generously supported by research grants from the Italian Foreign Ministry, and the Research Management Committee for the Faculty of Arts at the University of New South Wales. xi INTRODUCTION The aim of this book is to explore and understand the activities undertaken by the Florentine Accademia del Cimento, one of Europe’s first scientific societies. The Cimento operated for ten years, between 1657 and 1667, and during that time performed many experiments and observations in physics and astronomy, rivalling the achievements of the Royal Society of London and the Parisian Acadèmie Royale des Sciences. This book will attempt to sift through the available primary evidence, as well as secondary accounts of the Cimento’s activities, in order to examine the intellectual concerns that the individual academicians acquired throughout their careers and that they pursued while carrying out and interpreting their experiments for the Cimento and the Tuscan Court. Those interests will also shed some light on the ways in which the academicians performed and used experiments. Inspired by Galileo’s success with experiments and instruments during the first half of the seventeenth century, the Cimento academicians developed an experimentalist approach to their natural inquiry that attempted to eliminate any dependence on theoretical presuppositions and preconceptions. The group’s purported aim was to rely solely on the senses to accumulate knowledge of nature. This experimental philosophy framed the way in which historians have since viewed the Cimento’s practices. This book will not, however, be an attempt to trace the early modern origins of scientific institutions, or of the experimental philosophy that is believed by many historians to have been the newest form of scientific inquiry prevalent in academies during the mid to late seventeenth century. Many historians have already examined these topics in great detail and have devised varying theories about the foundations and workings of the early Royal Society of London, the Parisian Acadèmie Royale des Sciences and the Cimento. The Accademia del Cimento formally began on 19 June 1657, when Prince Leopoldo de’ Medici (1617–1675) invited nine of his courtiers and experts in natural philosophy to the Pitti Palace in Florence. This group included: Giovanni Borelli (1608–1679), Vincenzio Viviani (1622–1703), Carlo Rinaldini (1615–1698), Alessandro Marsili (1601–1670), Francesco Redi (1626–1697), Carlo Dati (1619–1676), Alessandro Segni (1633–1697), Candido del Buono (1618–1676), and Antonio Uliva (d. 1668). Under the patronage of the Medici 1 L. Boschiero (ed.), Experiment and Natural Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany: The History of the Accademia del Cimento, 1–9. © 2007 Springer. 2 INTRODUCTION Court, these men reportedly committed themselves to making experiments and observations. The academicians’ dedication to experimentalism, it would seem, is typified in their motto, ‘Provando e Riprovando’, referring to the rigorous ‘testing and retesting’ of their own experiments as well as those performed previously by other natural philosophers of the period.1 Yet the best testimony to the Accademia del Cimento’s supposedly strict experimentalist approach to researching nature was the publication of their work in 1667, titled Saggi di naturali esperienze. This text was devoted to the narration of the experiments performed in the Accademia del Cimento during its first few years in operation and stated the academicians’ intentions never to stray into speculative arguments, but simply to report the experiments they performed. Indeed, the author, and the Accademia’s secretary after 1660, Lorenzo Magalotti (1637–1712), expresses this aim clearly in the Preface to the Saggi: ... if sometimes in passing from one experiment to another, or for any other reason whatever, some slight hint of speculation is given, this is always to be taken as the opinion or private sentiment of the academicians, never that of the Academy, whose only task is to make experiments and to tell about them.2 The reason Magalotti gave for this experimentalist and non-speculative approach to producing natural knowledge, was that experiments were believed to provide the only true descriptions of nature. For too long, claims Magalotti, natural philosophers had been relying on the authority of past writers and had been reaching false conclusions about the causes of nature’s structure and movement.3 Therefore, Magalotti asserts in the Preface, although geometry provided some possibility for arriving at the truth, the only way of completely avoiding theoretical speculation about causes of natural phenomena was through the use of experiments: ‘[T]here is nothing better to turn to than our faith in experiment.’4 It must be made clear that Magalotti did not suggest that the academicians completely abandoned any intentions to search for causes. On the contrary, as philosophers of nature, they were still determined to find causal descriptions of natural phenomena. The point is simply this: that experiments were purported to be the only way of properly ‘fitting effects to causes and causes to effects’.5 Magalotti created the impression for his readers that the members of the Accademia del Cimento never engaged in theoretical and speculative discussions, and that instead they were accumulating factual knowledge regarding the causes 1 This phrase is mentioned in the Preface to the Accademia’s publication written by their secretary, Lorenzo Magalotti. Saggi di naturali esperienze fatte nell’Accademia del Cimento sotto la protezione del serenissimo principe Leopoldo di Toscana, Florence, 1667, 84. All references to the Saggi, and pages given, are from its publication in G. Abetti and P. Pagnini (eds.), Le opere dei discepoli di Galileo Galilei. Edizione Nazionale. I. L’Accademia del Cimento. Parte Prima, Florence, 1942. 2 ‘... se talora per far passaggio da una ad un’altra esperienza, o per qualunque altro rispetto, si sarà dato qualche minimo cenno di cosa specolativa, ciò si pigli pur sempre come concetto o senso particolare di accademici, ma non mai dell’Accademia; della quale unico istituto si è di sperimentare e narrare’. Magalotti, idem., 86–87. All translations of passages from the Saggi are from W.E.K. Middleton, The Experimenters: a study of the Accademia del Cimento, Baltimore, 1971. 3 Magalotti, idem., 84. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. INTRODUCTION 3 of natural phenomena using only experiments. In fact, as we shall see later, Magalotti intentionally excluded the academicians’ debates about theory in order to create this appearance of a non-speculative and uncontroversial academy, adding greater credibility and authority to the Cimento’s work, and therefore helping to boost the status and reputation of the academicians, as well as their princely patrons. Soon after the Cimento was founded, other European institutions began to produce the same type of reports of experimental knowledge-making. The bestknown early modern institutions to have used a similar experimental rhetoric were of course the Royal Society of London and the Acadèmie Royale des Sciences in Paris. The statutes drawn up for these institutions upon their foundations, declared their intentions only to report experiments without offering any theoretical interpretations.6 So the statement from the Saggi, quoted above, is an example of the experimentalist rhetoric that appears to have been sweeping across Europe during the latter half of the seventeenth century. With regard to the Accademia del Cimento, the story is particularly powerful, since the Cimento appears to have been the first academy in Europe to be founded on this philosophy. More specifically, it is supposed that the Florentine academicians were the first group of thinkers in the seventeenth century to adopt an organised form of knowledge-making based on an inductivist method of experimentation.7 Such a method may be termed ‘atheoretical’ since it was claimed that no theoretical suppositions entered the procedure and that only this procedure could provide sound theory, or causal explanation.8 For this reason, the activities inside the Accademia del Cimento have been a focal point for these traditional historiographies of Italian science that attempt to trace the origins of modern science.9 In fact, as we shall see in Chapter One, early accounts of seventeenthcentury Italian science, beginning with those written immediately after Galileo’s 6 In 1663, Robert Hooke drew up the statutes for the Royal Society, and laid down the following rules for the reporting of experiments. ‘In all reports of experiments to be brought to the society, the matter of fact shall be barely stated without any prefaces, apologies, and rhetorical flourishes; and entered so in the register book by order of the society’. C.R. Weld, A History of the Royal Society, 2 vols., New York, 1975, ii, 527. In the case of the Parisian Academy, one of its leading members, Christian Huygens, wrote the following words in a memorandum to his fellow academicians in 1666. ‘The principal aim and most useful occupation of this Assembly should be, in my view, to work on a natural history more or less according to the plan of Bacon .... One must distinguish chapters in this history and amass to it all observations and experiences which pertain to each particular’. C. Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes, 22 vols., The Hague, 1888–1950, vi, 95–96. As cited by R. Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803, Los Angeles, 1971, 25. 7 Such a universally applicable experimental method has often been seen as the essence of modern science. See J.A. Schuster and R.R. Yeo, ‘Introduction’, in The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method (eds. idem.), Dordrecht, 1986, x. 8 This supposed detachment of theory from fact, was also discussed by Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, London, 1975. 9 As we shall see in Chapter One, with regard to the Accademia del Cimento, these historians include Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, Giovanni Batista Clemente Nelli, Raffaello Caverni, and Antonio Favaro. In more recent times, authors such as Martha Ornstein, Eugenio Garin, Rupert Hall, and Roger Emerson, have also discussed the rise of an experimental method amongst the members of the Tuscan, English, and French Courts. 4 INTRODUCTION death in 1642, have been written almost purely with this theme in mind. These historiographies have considered the early seventeenth-century reports about Galileo’s experimental exploits, especially Viviani’s account of his teacher’s work, and have reshaped those reports into stories about the rise of a modern experimental science. They have claimed that Galileo came up with a loosely articulated experimental method that was exploited and perfected by his students and followers to the point of providing a standard of research recognisable as ‘modern science’. These historiographies will be referred to here as ‘traditional’, since it is a story that has been adopted time and again and has remained virtually unchanged even until the end of the twentieth century. More recently, ‘cultural’ historians have focused on the social and political circumstances which contributed to the foundation of the Accademia in midseventeenth-century Florence, and the reasons for the academicians’ purported devotion to the new experimental philosophy. Thanks to the work of such erudite scholars as Jay Tribby, Mario Biagioli, Paula Findlen, and Marco Beretta, we now have a thorough understanding of the proclaimed experimental programme adopted by Tuscany’s early modern thinkers and sponsored by the Medici Court.10 In fact, these authors have argued that the Cimento’s experimental philosophy, much like the experimental science that Shapin and Schaffer describe in their writings regarding the early Royal Society of London, was aimed at producing atheoretical matters of fact: this is, experiments with no natural philosophical arguments attached, thus keeping clear of intellectual conflicts.11 Therefore, as we are told by Tribby, Biagioli, Findlen, and Beretta, the members of the Accademia del Cimento and their Medici patrons maintained courtly etiquette and gentlemanly decorum, as well as a social standard for gaining legitimacy, both for the individual thinkers amongst their scientific colleagues and for the Medici Court amongst the wider European community of royal courts. In short, some authors identify this type of rhetoric as the beginnings of a loosely articulated, theory-neutral method for accumulating matters of fact. Such an experimentalist-courtly culture supposedly replaced natural philosophical concerns and conflicts, establishing the factual and gentlemanly origins of experimental science. These types of historiographies will be referred to here as ‘cultural’ studies since they have certainly helped us to understand some of the court culture and political circumstances surrounding the foundation of the Accademia del Cimento. The focus of this literature on issues of courtly patronage, etiquette, and 10 J. Tribby, ‘Dante’s Restaurant: The cultural work of experiment in early modern Tuscany’, in The Consumption of Culture. 1600–1800 (ed. A Bermingham and J. Brewer), London, 1991, 321; M. Biagioli, ‘Scientific revolution, social bricolage, and etiquette’, in The Scientific Revolution in National Context (ed. R. Porter and M. Teich), New York, 1992, 11–54; P. Findlen, ‘Controlling the experiment: rhetoric, court patronage and the experimental method of Francesco Redi’, History of Science (1993), xxxi, 39–40; M. Beretta, ‘At the source of western science: the organisation of experimentalism at the Accademia del Cimento (1657–1667)’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London (2000), 54 (2), 131–151. 11 Shapin’s and Schaffer’s best-known works on this topic include: S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, New Jersey, 1985; S.Shapin, ‘The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England’, Isis (1988), 79, 373–404. Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century England, Chicago, 1994. INTRODUCTION 5 social legitimation is particularly valuable for our understanding of the academicians’ aims and interests, and the negotiation of the plausibility of some of their claims. However, although the focus has shifted in the recent literature towards the wider social and political circumstances that contributed to the Cimento’s foundation and workings, there still seems to be an implicit acceptance of the traditional historiography discussing the birth of modern experimental science. In both ‘traditional’ and ‘cultural’ historiographies, the implications behind the use of the term ‘experimental science’, or ‘experimental method’, in association with these institutions, are that Aristotelian natural philosophy had been replaced in the seventeenth century by the birth of an organised, atheoretical, inductivist method of the type purportedly used by the Accademia del Cimento. Chapter One will explore in detail what terms such as ‘experimental science’ or ‘experimental method’ imply in the ‘traditional’ and ‘cultural’ historiographies. I will attempt to discard the notion that the foundation of institutions such as the Cimento established the origins of a modern science by first rejecting the pursuit of natural philosophy and by second substituting an ‘experimental method’. In place of these historiographies I will formulate a new model for understanding the activities of these so-called experimentalists. I will begin by challenging the notion that it was indeed an ‘experimental method’ that Galileo and his successors in Tuscany had developed and refined. Galileo and his students did use different types of experiments to validate their work against Aristotelianism, but they did not adopt an experimental method in their knowledge-making of the type that various historians believe originated in the Cimento and in their allegiance to Galileo. In fact, considering the theory with which experiments are laden, according to philosophical and sociological analysts of scientific knowledge, it is difficult to imagine that any such method even existed.12 So it will be argued here that if we focus solely on such method rhetoric in the presentational techniques of the academicians, it will distract us from the broader intellectual aims and interests that were being pursued inside the Tuscan Court. Accordingly, we shall find through a careful analysis of the works by Galileo, Evangelista Torricelli, Viviani, Borelli, as well as the other members of the Cimento, that experiments played a subsidiary role in their work. As historians Naylor, Clavelin, Segre, Drake, and Settle have established, experiments were used as a tool of persuasion for the wider-reaching natural philosophical skills, commitments, and agendas of Galileo and his students.13 In other words, rather than 12 Philosophers of science, including W.V. Quine and Pierre Duhem, have been making this argument since the early twentieth century. Sociological analysts of scientific knowledge who have borrowed from the philosophical works on this subject include Trevor Pinch, Harry Collins, Barry Barnes, and the earlier works of Steven Shapin. 13 R.H. Naylor, ‘Galileo’s experimental discourse’, in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in Natural Science (ed. D. Gooding, T. Pinch and S. Schaffer), London, 1990, 117–134; M. Clavelin, The Natural Philosophy of Galileo: Essay on the Origins and Formation of Classical Mechanics (tr. A.J. Pomerans), Cambridge, 1974; M. Segre, ‘The Role of Experiment in Galileo’s Physics’, Archive for History of Exact Sciences (1980), 23, 227–252; S. Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography, Chicago, 1978; T.B. Settle, ‘Galileo’s Use of Experiment as a Tool of Investigation’, in Galileo: Man of Science (ed. E. McMullin), New York, 1967, 315–337. 6 INTRODUCTION finding merely traces of an ‘experimental method’, this book will reveal that the Cimento academicians were still far more committed to verifying and propagating their respective natural philosophical beliefs. The lives of most of the academicians included educations grounded in natural philosophical practices of an anti-scholastic tenor, with strong commitments to the linking of natural philosophy to findings and techniques of mathematics and mechanics. This came about as a result of the lessons passed on to Galileo’s school of students and followers, including the members of the Accademia del Cimento. Most of the academicians were devoted to the mathematical arts, or mixed mathematics as it was also known to Aristotelians, but with the additional aim of addressing wider natural philosophical concerns. This indicates that these so-called experimental scientists were actually interested in the much broader field of natural philosophy and within it preferred an approach which, following some contemporaries and some modern historians, may be termed ‘physico-mathematics’.14 This is part of the culture of natural philosophising that dominated seventeenth-century Italian thought and that will be examined in Part One by grasping the type of natural philosophising that Galileo pursued, and the aims and interests that each of the academicians attempted to fulfil throughout their careers. The reason why so much time and effort will be afforded to the analysis of these individuals’ natural philosophical commitments before they entered the Accademia, is to show exactly what intellectual skills and agendas they took to the tasks of constructing and interpreting the group’s experiments. More specifically, Part One will demonstrate that the debates inside the Cimento were not based on clashes of egos or attempts to grab the Prince’s attention, or even mere opinions about how an experiment should be carried out. Instead, we will be seeing that each academician was educated and trained according to the natural philosophical debates that pervaded the colleges, universities, and courts of seventeenth-century Europe. At this time, scholastics, that is, university scholars who were teaching and practicing recently refurbished versions of Aristotelian natural philosophy, were defending the efficacy of their beliefs against the new and varying ontological and cosmological views of Neoplatonists and mechanists. Therefore, rather than study only the courtly setting of the Accademia del Cimento, or simply their rhetorical use of experiments, my aim is to show that the group’s activities were situated within the wider culture of natural philosophising.15 14 Peter Dear defines the term ‘physico-mathematics’ as an expression coined in the seventeenth century to denote the use of mathematics in the study of physics, including the natural philoopshical search for physical causes. Recently, Gaukroger, Schuster, and Sutton have also identified the use of the term by René Descartes in his attempts to find mathematical expressions of physical causes. It is with this definition in mind that I use the term at various times throughout this book, especially with regard to the rise of the mechanical philosophy in Chapter One. P. Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution, Chicago, 1995; P. Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions, 1500–1700, Basingstoke, 2001, 199; S. Gaukroger, J. Schuster, and J. Sutton, ‘Introduction’, in Descartes’ Natural Philosophy (eds. idem.), London, 2000. 15 The natural philosophical culture in early modern Europe has been the subject of John Schuster’s recent treatment of the Scientific Revolution, with which my own thesis concurs. See J.A. Schuster, ‘L’Aristotelismo e le sue Alternative’ in D. Garber (ed.), La Rivoluzione Scientifica, Rome, 2002, 337–357. INTRODUCTION 7 In Part Two we will be turning to the case studies. Most of the Cimento’s irregularly scheduled meetings during its first five years of existence were centred on the resolution of questions regarding the pressure of air, the creation of a vacuum, the freezing process of liquids, and the properties and effects of heat and cold. In each of these fields, almost all of the academicians made contributions. But these were not simply suggestions for new experiments that could provide ‘matters of fact’. Instead they were experiments that had been specifically suggested and contrived either to support or negate important natural philosophical claims. The Saggi’s author never made any references to any of the academicians, but letters and manuscripts reveal that there existed a culture of debate within the Cimento based on theoretical disputes that were framed according to the competing natural philosophies of Aristotelians and corpuscularian mechanists within the group. Once the academicians decided to embark on studies of these various fields of experimental inquiry, they wished to incorporate the beliefs and intellectual concerns that had dominated each of their careers up until that point, including their work in the disciplines that they were pursuing inside the Cimento. In fact, despite Magalotti’s efforts in the style and rhetoric of the Saggi to provide the greatest possible reputation for the Accademia’s members and patrons as reliable producers of natural knowledge, the text still contains traces of the natural philosophical contestation entangled in each of their experiments. To begin with, as we shall see in Chapter Five, the academicians investigated the pressure of air and the creation of vacuous spaces through the barometer that Torricelli constructed in 1643. But rather than this being a demonstration of the Italians’ dedication to innocent play with instruments and experimentalism, leading to atheoretical ‘matters of fact’, the construction of the barometer and its various uses throughout Europe during the 1640s and 1650s, indicate the presence of wider-reaching issues. Torricelli constructed an instrument for measuring the weight of air, so that he could apply his knowledge of mathematics to the physical world, and just as importantly, so that he could also refute the theories offered in previous decades regarding the question of whether air has any weight, and whether it is possible to create a vacuous space. The question was an important one for scholastics who vigorously argued that nature abhorred the production of a void. This was a cornerstone of their natural philosophical beliefs, since it upheld the cosmology of five elements that moved according to their natural tendencies. Atomists challenged this view in the sixteenth century, but an antischolastic position did not become a significant part of the natural philosophical landscape until the wider incorporation of mathematical and physical demonstrations. That is, various advocates of a range of Neoplatonic and mechanical views weighed into the discussion of air pressure and the void, leading to Torricelli’s barometric contribution, and the physico-mathematical concerns that ran through the issue as it was discussed first in Paris and then Florence. So, by the time the Cimento decided to study pneumatics, physico-mathematical and mechanistic natural philosophical concerns had already been well established in that discipline. A similar story underlies the Accademia’s experiments on the freezing process of water, and the properties and effects of heat and cold. Once again, there are 8 INTRODUCTION very few indications in the Saggi that there was any theorising occurring during these experiments, or indeed that any of the academicians pushed for certain natural philosophical interpretations. Yet a closer look at their work in this field will reveal, first, that corpuscularian beliefs were incorporated into the construction of the experiments, and that members, such as Borelli and Viviani, were intent on finding shortcomings in the scholastic opinions on the topics. Second, we shall see that the interpretations of the experiments made by some academicians involved the use of mixed mathematical skills derived from statics and the accumulation of quantified data that they believed represented the dynamical force of the expansion of freezing water, a typically physico-mathematical concern with deriving natural philosophical results. Finally, it will be revealed that even Leopoldo was participating in the construction and interpretation of experiments that supported the mechanistic world view. Freezing appeared to be Leopoldo’s favourite topic and his heavy involvement in the creation of natural philosophical theories during the construction and interpretation of these experiments indicates that he was not enforcing a theory-free experimental method on his academicians during their first five years in operation, before they embarked on the publication of their work. After establishing the natural philosophical issues that the academicians contested inside the Cimento during their first five years in existence, our attention in Part Three will turn to the subsequent presentation of their works. This is where we come to appreciate the political circumstances behind the rhetorical framing of the Saggi. When Leopoldo decided to publish a collection of the Cimento’s experiments, he had to decide what such a publication should set out to achieve. Leopoldo and the Grand Duke of Tuscany Ferdinando II, clearly desired to revive the glory of patronising outstanding natural philosophical work that they had experienced with Galileo, but it would seem that on this occasion, they preferred to keep clear of any controversial claims. Such a strategy would protect the academicians from any religious confrontations and would also provide them with the image of non-speculative and non-theoretical experimentalists. This would not only explain the rigorous editing and censoring process behind the Saggi, but it also gives us an indication of why they preferred not to publish their vast amount of work regarding the controversial field of astronomy. So the Medici were looking to capitalise on their association with the Galilean school, and improve their status amongst the other European Courts. Furthermore, as we shall also see in Chapter Seven, as well as in the case study regarding astronomy in Chapter Eight, this ‘geo-political’ pressure deflected the personal political ambitions of the academicians. Undoubtedly, they would have preferred to publicise their individual contributions to the knowledge produced by the Cimento. But since they were not able to do this, they each were still trying to position themselves for favouritism inside the Court. They did this by maintaining their natural philosophical contributions to the knowledge produced inside the Tuscan Court, and by hoping that they would be justly credited for it. Therefore, the theoretical significance of the experiments discussed in Parts One and Two reflects the disciplinary and natural philosophical concerns of the academicians. That is to say, the Cimento’s members constructed knowledge INTRODUCTION 9 claims in disciplines that were part of a natural philosophical domain that was, furthermore, recognised and pursued all over seventeenth-century Europe. Additionally, how these concerns were used and presented inside the Tuscan Court to the royal family, and by the Court to the rest of Europe, reflects the issues of courtly status and reputation discussed by the ‘cultural’ historians mentioned earlier. Behind the convenient rhetoric of experimental ‘matters of fact’ was a deep concern with natural philosophical inquiry. In summary, this book will be aimed at gaining an understanding of the natural philosophical skills and commitments that were a part of the careers of each of the academicians and the disciplines they studied. Meanwhile, we shall find that experimental science, in the way it has been presented by many historians as the pure, factual, and inductivist practice of an experimental method in the controlled environments of royal courts such as in Tuscany, did not, in fact, play a role in the Cimento’s knowledge-making process, their construction and interpretation of claims. This is not to say, however, that experiments or courtly culture were not an important part of the landscape of natural philosophising in the mid- to late-seventeenth-century Tuscan Court. In fact, throughout this analysis, we shall see evidence of the persuasive and authoritative role of experiments for practical knowledge-making, and for maintaining the relationship between natural philosophers and their patrons. The rigorous use of experiments, or the published devotion to an experimental programme of some sort, strengthened public perception that one was appealing to an approach to making natural knowledge that was detached from theoretical convictions or presuppositions. This meant that an individual’s or an institution’s credibility depended on the perception from fellow natural philosophers and thinkers across Europe, that some type of experimental method was being used. This is precisely why experimental rhetoric was so valuable to the presentation of claims. This is to suggest that there was a distinct difference between what the Cimento academicians presented in their publication, and what they were actually discussing in their meetings between 1657 and 1662, before they decided to publicise their work. But this does not mean that a non-rhetorical realm existed before they embarked on the publication process, or that I am attempting to read the minds of the academicians to find out what they were thinking during the first five years of the Cimento’s existence. Rather, the aim here is to show that for political and presentational reasons, the natural philosophical concerns the academicians actually pursued when constructing their experiments had to be suppressed from public consumption. Fortunately, those concerns were preserved in the academicians’ manuscripts and letters. Therefore, an understanding of the political concerns of the Medici Grand Duke and Prince Leopoldo, along with the intellectual concerns and conflicts amongst the Cimento’s members, will assist us greatly in coming to terms with the actions and the pursuits of this small group of thinkers and how the Saggi were compiled.