In Baroque Science Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris present a radically new perspective on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Instead of celebrating the triumph of reason and rationality, they study the paradoxes and anxieties that stemmed from the New Science and the intellectual compromises that shaped it and enabled its spectacular success. Gal and Chen-Morris show how the protagonists of the new mathematical natural philosophy grasped at the very far and very small by entrusting observation to the mediation of artificial instruments, and how they justified this mediation by naturalizing and denigrating the human senses. They show how the physical-mathematical ordering of heavens and earth demanded obscure and spurious mathematical procedures, replacing the divine harmonies of the late Renaissance with an assemblage of isolated, contingent laws and approximated constants. Finally, they show how the new savants, forced to contend that reason is hopelessly estranged from its surrounding world and that nature is irreducibly complex, turned to the passions to provide an alternative, naturalized foundation for their epistemology and ethics. The New Science, Gal and Chen-Morris reveal, is a Baroque phenomenon: deeply entrenched in and crucially formative of the culture of its time.

About the Author
Ofer Gal is associate professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney. Raz Chen-Morris is a senior lecturer in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Bar-Ilan University.

Reviews
"This important work will provide scholars with new questions and offer opportunities to reconsider timeless questions about the nature of humanity and knowledge. Highly recommended." (Choice)"



Book Information
ISBN 9780226212982
Author Ofer Gal
Format Paperback
Page Count 352
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 510g
Dimensions(mm) 23mm * 17mm * 2mm