The ‘system of the world’ and the scientific culture of early modern France

Abstract

Historians have long debated the origins of modern science in early modern Europe. Recently, however, scholars pointed to our need to understand how the ‘new philosophy’ became a sustained movement, which did not dissipate over the course of a few generations, as had previous scientific renaissances in other civilizations. This article suggests that the mediations of the printed book allowed a broader public to engage with the astronomical ideas at the core of scientific transformations. This article examines the interactions that the world of the book generated between authors at the ‘core’ of early modern science and ‘amateurs’ who were interested in recent cosmological discussion around the notion of the ‘system of the world’. It argues that this concept served simultaneously to discuss mathematico-physical problems, to make claims for authorship and to provide cultural orientation, which made it amenable to appropriation and dialogue across a range of genres. The new social interactions around the ‘system of the world’ allowed a heavily mathematical science to become a viable and sustainable cultural phenomenon, a veritable building-block of a new scientific culture at the heart of European modernity.

Sidereal Messages: Print Letters in Restoration Astronomical Writing

“…The reason for this, Rabinovitch argues, is that the system of the world emblematized the recent changes in natural philosophy in a way that could be grasped even without much technical expertise: it became 'common currency in a wider dialogue that matched specialists at the "core" in constant dialogue with an astronomical "penumbra" of interested amateurs'. 30 In this sense, astronomical letters are a particularly salient field of inquiry because astronomy is paradigmatic of the 'scientific revolution' at large, transforming during the seventeenth century from an abstract, mathematical practice into an empirical, observational science. The former was opaque to non-specialists, but at the same time, it was deemed immediately relevant to travellers, to commerce, medicine, theology, and empire.…”