Lotte Mulligan

Robert Hooke's ‘Memoranda’: Memory and natural history

Summary The organ of the memory was of crucial importance for Robert Hooke in his aim to improve natural history and the study of nature in general. As a mechanist he was careful to avoid the confident analogizing of his contemporaries, and he described his model in hypothetical form. However, he saw it as amenable to improvement—just as mechanically as the senses were augmented by the use of instruments. The close connection he made between a better memory mechanism and the task of ‘perfecting’ the study of natural philosophy can be seen in a whole range of his activities. These included his discussion of the memory as an epistemological tool, his frequent use of devices such as lists and schemata for ordering aspects of nature and his personal memoranda. His diary, by acting as a stimulant to memory, should be seen as an integral part of his attempt to become a better natural philosopher. Both the act of daily inscription and the ordering of occurrences for effective later recall would improve his memor...

Winstanley: A Case for the Man as He Said He Was

The publication of Christopher Hills Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and Other Writings was an exciting event for students of mid-seventeenth-century England. It provides a readily available edition of Winstanleys most important writings. To these Hill offers a compelling introduction which has much to stimulate and interest, but in his interpretation of Winstanley there are also invitations to misunderstanding. Ultimately, Hills interest in Winstanley arises from his perception of the seventeenth-century writer as ‘modern’ and, if another recent article is any guide, this continues to be the common factor for studies of Winstanley. It is the purpose of this article to argue that this ‘modern’ view of Winstanley misconstrues his intellectual sources and historical significance by minimising the part theology played in his theories of social and moral change. The result of such a view is to misrepresent Winstanleys meaning, and his relationship to his contemporary world.

INTENTIONS AND CONVENTIONS: A CRITIQUE OF QUENTIN SKINNER'S METHOD FOR THE STUDY OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

This paper plays critic to Quentin Skinners much tougher role as methodological innovator in the practice of the history of ideas. It argues that the continuing centrality of intentions in Skinners proposals as illustrated in his historical examples results in descriptions which are too often unproven or unproveable or unenlightening or wrong. Serious doubts are raised about the theoretical propriety of Skinners doctrine of intentions as a key to the proper understanding of historical texts, and the legitimacy of the explanatory power Skinner attributes to his imputed intentions is disputed.

Self-Scrutiny and the Study of Nature: Robert Hooke's Diary as Natural History

Robert Hookes intellectual life was steadfastly dedicated to the pursuit of natural philosophy and the formulation of an appropriate method for studying nature, His daily life, however, was seemingly fragmented—an energetic rush in and around the city of London, with him acting now as curator (and later secretary) of the Royal Society, now as Cutlerian Lecturer in the History of Nature and Art, now as Geometry Professor at Gresham College, now as architect and surveyor of postfire London, and forever as a member of a number of intersecting social, intellectual, and professional circles that made up Londons coffeehouse culture. Such a range of activities was perhaps wider than that of many of his contemporaries, though other diarists, most notably Samuel Pepys, recorded similarly crammed lives. Yet despite the apparently unsystematic nature of his daily round he was, also like Pepys, a methodical man who hated to waste time, and for long periods he kept a diary that helped him account for how he spent it. I argue here that his diary keeping was an integral part of his scientific vision reflecting the epistemological and methodological practices that guided him as a student of nature. The diary should be read, I propose, not as an “after-hours” incidental activity removed from his professional and intellectual life; both its form and its content suggest that he chose to record a self that was as subject to scientific scrutiny as the rest of nature and that he thought that such a record could be applied to producing, in the end, a fully objective “history” with himself as the datum.

A “Radical” Problem: The Poor and the English Reformers in the Mid-Seventeenth Century

Debates about poverty in mid-seventeenth-century England have, for some years, been a staple of historical studies. In our own time, where the numbers of the dispossessed continue to challenge the success of current modes of social and economic organization, such an interest is understandable and to be welcomed. But the relevance of studies of past problems and solutions and their applicability to present purposes is more complex than is usually recognized. The immediate benefit of studying discussions for change in mid-seventeenth-century England is that they provide an unusual insight into how members of that society conceived of it. In particular, their observations about the problems of poverty and the role of the poor offer us an understanding of the perceived social structure, the ethical bases for social differentiation, and the degree to which the future could be envisioned as differing from the past or present. Such understandings of proposed social change are invaluable for historians wishing to grasp the underlying assumptions on which past thought and action was predicated. Past proposals for social reform, however, have also been the focus of a significantly different enquiry by historians. In order to render those past programs more comprehensible (and more directly “relevant”) to modern readers, they are often placed on a “conservative” versus “radical” continuum, one end of which has sometimes been marked “extreme left wing.” This article argues that any such classification inevitably leads to misunderstandings of the authors and of their programs and, consequently, misrepresents both to the present.

Robert Boyle, 'The Christian Virtuoso' and the Rhetoric of 'Reason'

Until recently historians have characterised the seventeenth century as a time of transformation in epistemology, not only in natural philosophy, but in all areas of intellectual endeavour. By the end of the century, it is claimed, vast changes had occurred in methods of argument, in what counted as evidence and in the degree of certainty which it was possible to achieve for natural knowledge. Robert Hoopes, Barbara Shapiro and Christopher Hill, arguing from different stand points, all emphasize that ‘reason’ by the end of the century came to be used for the unaided operations of the mind to make logical connections in all fields of knowledge. The triumph of ‘science’ meant the victory of mechanical reasoning to the exclusion of other forms.2