“Lots of Understanding and Communication? Practices of Collaboration and Collective Knowledge in Early Modern Natural Philosophy”. Colloque organisé par Mogens Laerke et Sophie Roux
General Presentation:
“Even if particular men have merit and that good intentions can afford us very beautiful and useful things, it is nonetheless true that they would do infinitely better, more, and quicker if there were lots of understanding and communication among them … A thousand things can be done by two or several people who understand each other which would never be done, or done well, if they work without communicating.” According to Leibniz’s 1692 Mémoire pour des personnes éclairées, communication, collaboration, and mutual understanding were essential requirements for a better advancement of scientific knowledge. This conference is concerned with the ways in which early modern scientific culture responded to that challenge. It focuses on the collective organisation of natural philosophy and a number of related disciplines, such as pure and mixed mathematics, anatomy, physiology and medicine, and natural history. It aims at understanding the collaborative practices and normative doctrines of collective knowledge acquisition underpinning the emerging networks and corporate structures of these disciplines.
In doing this, it addresses a curious schism between the history of philosophy and the history of science of the early modern period. The beginnings of modern philosophy are routinely depicted as a break with tradition when the individual mind took charge of its own powers, shedding itself of idols and scholastic prejudices, adopting new criteria of truth either proper to the mind or based on observations and experiments. Canonical thinkers, from Bacon, Gassendi and Descartes to Boyle and Locke sometimes acknowledged something inherently collective about natural philosophical method, but they universally and consistently disparaged knowledge claims based on common consent as mere prejudice. At the same time, classic orientations in the history and sociology of science have sought out the foundations of early modern scientific collaboration, not so much in the natural philosophers’ explicit theories of knowledge, but mostly in their commonly shared cultural, social, and institutional practices. Studies of the Royal Society are emblematic in this regard. Philosophy in the seventeenth century has thus been seen by historians of philosophy as inseparable from norms and doctrines staunchly adverse to social epistemology, while natural science in the seventeenth century has been studied by historians of science as cultures and practices largely unrelated to social epistemology.
Yet the emergence of collaborative science in the seventeenth century, the massive increase in correspondence between groups and individuals, the creation of scientific societies and academies, the increasingly public character of natural investigations, all these general features of an emerging scientific culture cried out for social epistemologies very different from the crude individualism still today often associated with early modern doctrines of knowledge. By enquiring about the epistemological implications of these new collaborative and collective contexts of investigation, the conference aims at taking a fresh look at the relations between the principles, norms, methods and practices of early modern natural philosophy. More precisely, we would like to address the following questions:
First, what epistemological benefits were expected from collaborations in natural philosophy and related disciplines? Were these benefits to be gained in terms of reliability, because criticising and correcting each other meant a better chance of avoiding errors, or even of building a consensus? Or in terms of efficiency and speed, because the work to be accomplished was divided between several people? Or in terms of an extension of knowledge, for example by providing access to rare resources or to data coming from distant locations?
Second, what were the epistemological forms of collaboration in natural philosophy and related disciplines? Is it epistemologically relevant to distinguish amical from controversial forms of collaboration? To distinguish collaborations between peers, masters and disciples, masters and servants, scholars and craftsmen? Did the nature and function of collaborations differ from one discipline to another? Collaborations in the early modern period are often reduced to experimental practices in the physical sciences, but what about logic and mathematics?
Third, what epistemological norms were at play in the material, intellectual, and social techniques that made collaboration possible in natural philosophy and related disciplines? We are thinking here of humanist techniques such as note taking, common placing and commenting, but also of the social techniques at work in the development of correspondence networks and the emergence of specialized learned societies. Our aim is not to study these historical phenomena in and for themselves, but to enquire about the epistemological norms underlying their development and, on the contrary, the intellectual vices preventing it. This includes, among other things, enquiry into the epistemological virtues taught in the education of prospective scientists and, more generally, in the training of potential collaborators.
Program
Wednesday, 12 March (IEA, Antichambre)
The event is open to the public, but registration is mandatory. Register here.
10:15-10:30 Sophie Roux and Mogens Lærke. Welcome
10:30-11:30 Catherine Goldstein (CNRS, IMJ-PRG), “Historicising Social Epistemology: Marin Mersenne’s Mathematical Environment Revisited.”
11:30-12:00 Coffee break
12:00-13:00 Louis Rouquayrol (CNRS, IHRIM), “Mersenne, the Scientific Community, and the Laws of Friendship.”
13h00-14h00 Lunch
14:00-15:00 Evan Ragland (University of Notre Dame), “Experimenters Disputing Even About Tastes: Pedagogy and the Productively Disputatious Culture of Early Modern Experimentalist Medicine.”
15:00-16:00 Raphaële Andrault (CNRS, IHRIM) “Our Mutual Friend: Building and Circulation of Common Knowledge through Hippocrates’ Aphorisms.”
16:00-16:30 Coffee
19:00. Conference Dinner, Bouillon Racine
Thursday, 13 March (IEA, Antichambre)
The event is open to the public, but registration is mandatory. Register here.
9:30-10:30 Niall Dilucia (CNRS, MFO), “Agricultural Knowledge and Collaborative Epistemology in the Early Royal Society.”
10:30-11:00 Coffee break.
11:00-12:00 Helena Taylor (University of Exeter), “Natural Philosophy in French Periodicals: Communication, Form, Principles.”
12:00-13:00 Sophie Roux (ENS-PSL), “Consensus, Collaboration and Communication: Scientific Societies in Early Modern France.”
13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:00 Pietro Daniel Omodeo (Ca’ Foscari University, Venice), “The Communicative Construction of Science at the ‘Beijing Royal Academy of Astronomy’: Considerations on the Political Epistemology of Ferdinand Verbiest’s Astronomia Europaea (1687).”
15:00-16:00 Eric Jorink Leiden University/KNAW, Amsterdam), “Leibniz, Leeuwenhoek and the Ideal of an International Academy of Mighty Microscopists (1715).”
16:00-16:30 Coffee break.
Friday, 14 March (ENS, 45 rue d’Ulm, 1er étage, salle des Actes)
The event is open to the public.No registration
9:30-10:30 Isabelle Pantin (ENS-PSL), “Correspondence as a Testing Ground for New Astronomical Practices in the Early Modern Period.”
10:30-11:00 Coffee break.
11:00-12:00 Daniel Garber (Princeton University), “Writing Philosophy in the Age of the Learned Journal: Leibniz and the Invention of the Journal Article.”
12:00-13:00 Mogens Lærke, “Conceivability, Communication, Collaboration. Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus on the Collective Practice of Knowledge.”
13:00-15:00. Lunch, Le Paradis des amis.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
alexisannebraun (11 février 2025). “Lots of Understanding and Communication? Practices of Collaboration and Collective Knowledge in Early Modern Natural Philosophy”. Colloque organisé par Mogens Laerke et Sophie Roux. Mathesis. Consulté le 13 mai 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13ao3