Adrian Johns

Miscellaneous methods: authors, societies and journals in early modern England

Historians of science have long acknowledged the important role that journals play in the scientific enterprise. They both secure the shared values of a scientific community and certify what that community takes to be licensed knowledge. The advent of the first learned periodicals in the mid-seventeenth century was therefore a major event. But why did this event happen when it did, and how was the permanence of the learned journal secured? This paper reveals some of the answers. It examines the shifting fortunes of one of the earliest of natural-philosophical periodicals, the Philosophical Transactions , launched in London in 1665 by Henry Oldenburg. The paper shows how fraught the enterprise of journal publishing was in the Europe of that period, and, not least, it draws attention to a number of publications that arose out of the commercial realm of the Restoration to rival (or parody) Oldenburgs now famous creation. By doing so it helps restore to view the hard work that underpinned the republic of letters. And as for natural philosophy, is it not removed from Oxford and Cambridge to Gresham College in London, and to be learned out of their gazettes? Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth (written c . 1668).

The birth of scientific reading.

The social structures of science were invented to cope with an explosion of printed information.

Arts of Transmission: An Introduction

The essays collected in this issue of Critical Inquiry range widely in both approach and subject. Some mount theoretical arguments about how best to conceive of the role ofmedia in shaping humanhistory.Others delve into the practices devoted to the creation, distribution, and preservation of knowledge, from the singing of songs in archaic Greece to the production of secrets by today’s U.S. government. All, however, address what we call arts of transmission. That odd but resonant phrase derives fromFrancis Bacon, yet its descent to us from the seventeenth century is peculiarly indirect. As John Guillory notes below, Bacon’s original Latin expression is perhaps closer to “arts of tradition” or handing down to posterity. The specific phrasingwe chose for our title is a Victorian translation of Bacon’s “ars tradendi.” Not exactly original nor yet quite an imposition, the phrase nicely exemplifies a point that Bacon himself was making in coining it: that what we know depends on the practices of communication by which the knowledge comes to us. The point of this issue is to explore how, historically and theoretically, that conjunction has operated in the past and continues to operate today. This is a subject that eludes disciplinary definition. Bacon’s own “arts” ranged from apparently basic activities like speaking and listening to the complexmodalities of logic and dialectic. They also includedwhatwe think of as modes of communication or media—orality, writing, and printing— though we would nowadays add digital systems to the list; nevertheless, all of Bacon’s arts remain pertinent. They embrace now, as they did then, the principal ways of organizing, arguing for, and expressing new claims. The phrase is useful because it indicates that we may do well to consider these practices collectively: in a spirit of Baconian experimentation, as it were, to

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND THE NATURE OF SCIENCE

The debate about the patenting of research is perhaps the most passionate now taking place about science and scientific culture. It is widely maintained that the expansion of patenting since about 1980 betrays a scientific tradition to which norms of universalism and common ownership of knowledge were central. This paper goes back to mid-twentieth century debates about science and intellectual property (IP) to argue that many of the norms we take as so central to science were themselves first articulated to critique patenting practices. In particular, it looks at how an economist (Arnold Plant), a scientist/philosopher (Michael Polanyi), and an information theorist (Norbert Wiener) responded to such practices. It especially focuses on the role of intellectual-property concerns in the making of Polanyis philosophy of science, which it excavates through a reading of his unpublished papers. This reveals that the modern field of ‘science studies’ is indebted for some of its key concepts to an earlier generation of patent wars – an inheritance that exemplifies some of the strange ways in which the sociopolitical meanings of ideas can change from generation to generation. The point is not that present-day critics of scientific patenting are wrong, but that the very terms of the debate are more deeply-seated in the development of scientific culture than any of us has realized.

London and the early modern book

For the first two centuries of its existence, the printed book in England was overwhelmingly an artifact of London. With a few relatively specialised exceptions, the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge being the most important, before 1695 printing was restricted by law to the capital city. While the letter of the law was not always decisive - the Marprelate Tracts, for example, came from clandestine operators who moved about the country, and Charles Is army trundled along a royalist press operated by Leonard Lichfield as it marched - for the most part the production of books was a practice in and of the metropolis. In consequence, as the city grew into a great European capital and as print developed into a central element of its everyday life, the character of the one substantially shaped the character of the other. Markets, modes of publishing, genres, audiences, literary sensibilities, reading practices - all these and more came into being as aspects of London life, and in turn London life was transformed by them.

The Uses of Print in the History of Science

pbsa 107:4 (2013): 393–420 Adrian Johns (Department of History, University of Chicago, 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637) is Allan Grant Maclear Professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998), Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (2009), and Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (2010), as well as numerous papers on the history of science and the history of the book. He is currently working on the policing of information from the Renaissance to the present. The Uses of Print in the History of Science

When authorship met authenticity

As counterfeit drugs abound, Adrian Johns recalls how medical patenting was created in the seventeenth century to secure trust across growing international trade networks by quashing fakes.