Common Culture in Early-Modern Natural Philosophy

Time: 4:30pm

Place: 211 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University

What did philosophers argue about in early-modern Europe, and in what terms did they do it? Prominent epistemic themes of the period ran through many different modalities of philosophical representation. Sorting out topical registers for a distant historical culture is, of course, far from straightforward. Quentin Skinner spoke of recognizing particular "activities" in the history of European political thought at widely different periods as a sin qua non for his own historical specialty. While there are good grounds for saying that early-modern speculative natural philosophy certainly was not the same activity as modern science (itself not a single activity), a genetic, or genealogical, link surely exists between important elements of the game of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century and elements of our modern games of science. Understanding the various uses of epistemic themes in different periods involves drawing links between many different categories of activity, not treating them as necessarily alienated from one another. This paper considers the specific themes of "reason" and "matter," and looks particularly at how Robert Hooke combined the two in some of his speculations on the workings of the human brain.