Article ID: CBB342643342

The Reader as Authorial Figure in Scientific Debate (2016)

unapi

In 1651, Alexander Ross published an attack on Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Bacon's Natural History and William Harvey's De generatione. Ross's work, Arcana Microcosmi, defended Aristotelian natural philosophy against the ‘new philosophy’ that figures like Bacon, Harvey and Browne represented. Though Ross's attacks on these authors make up no more than half of the treatise’s contents, the book’s paratextual materials emphasise scientific debate. While Ross's authorial approach advocates reading exclusively ancient authorities for the sake of glossing and transmitting their knowledge to a wider public, in order to argue against the new philosophy Ross must engage with its textual production. Furthermore, his works advertise their focus on Bacon, Harvey and Browne, which would have attracted a readership drawn to new scientific approaches to knowledge formation. Ross's polemic represents an effort to model his devotion to ancient authority while also generating a reading public that would resist the new approach to reading that the new philosophy proposed.

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Authors & Contributors
Feingold, Mordechai
Attie, Katherine Bootle
O'Connell, Caryn Maureen
Robinson, Benedict
Lee, Daniel D.
Vries, Lyke de
Concepts
Natural philosophy
Controversies and disputes
Experiments and experimentation
Science and literature
Communication of scientific ideas
Empiricism
Time Periods
17th century
16th century
Early modern
18th century
Renaissance
Places
England
Great Britain
Germany
British Isles
Institutions
Royal Society of London
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