Lo, Melissa Ming-Hwei (Author)
Park, Katharine
Naginski, Erika
Harvard University
Blair, Ann M.
Naginski, Erika
Blair, Ann M.
Edition Details: Advisor: Park, Katharine; Committee Members: Blair, Ann M., Naginski, Erika.
Physical Details: 359 pp.
Language: English
Between Figure and Line: Visual Transformations of Cartesian Physics, 1620-1690 is the first sustained examination of the diagrams and illustrations that constituted the seventeenth century's new physics. When René Descartes introduced natural philosophy to the graphic techniques of geometry, mixed mathematics, cartography, and master engravers, subsequent interpreters of the new science were encouraged to respond in kind. But none of their pictures - neither the outlines of barometric tubes employed by Parisian salon impresario Jacques Rohault, nor the still lifes and landscapes into which Leiden university professor Wolferd Senguerd etched Cartesian matter, and certainly not the copies of Descartes's figures with which Jesuit priest Gabriel Daniel refuted the new philosophy - agreed on a single visual idiom for revealing nature's laws. Such pictorial diversity, I argue, marked the natural philosophical figure as a critical, and contested, apparatus for grasping at truth amidst the slow disintegration of Aristotelian certainty. Previous studies - which are few in number - have rightly attributed the necessity of Descartes's images to new habits of mathematizing, mechanizing, and imagining the visible world. This dissertation follows Cartesians, anti-Cartesians, and the philosopher himself as they exceeded the boundaries of those tasks, appropriating visual strategies from domains not usually associated with scientia and its closest knowledge-making neighbors. The satirical broadsheet as much as the painted description of everyday life, the royal birth print as much as the map charting a fictional dystopia - all these shaped the relations between early modern civic cultures and the new physics. They also pushed natural philosophers to engage with the problem of representation through the varying degrees of theological, political, and epistemological pressure that text and image exacted upon one another. In considering the illustrations for Descartes's Essais (1637) and Principia (1644) alongside their progeny, I insist that, as natural philosophers inherited and contributed to the complex visual matrices of 17th -century Leiden and Paris, their activities not only gave the new science a set of explanatory forms. They reordered the conventions through which nature could be understood.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 75/10(E), Apr 2015. Proquest Document ID: 1551773424.
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