2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
science had challenged the primacy of common experience in favor of
recondite, expert, and even counter-intuitive knowledge increasingly mediated
by specialized instruments. Meanwhile modern philosophy had also
problematized the perceptions of common experience—in the case of Hume
this included our perception of causality itself, a fundamental precondition of
scientific endeavor. I argue that these challenges to the traditional foundations
of the scientific enterprise, along with the rise of “middling” classes and a
modern public sphere, the concurrent rise of public science, and the belief that
scientific knowledge was crucial to social advancement and development, lay
behind Reid’s reintegration of scientific knowledge and common experience,
albeit now explicitly and in “scientific” terms. The paper draws on recent
work by historians and sociologists of science (including among others Peter
Dear, Lorraine Daston, Steven Shapin, Larry Stewart, Jan Golinski, and Mary
Poovey), as well as on the literature of the modern public sphere stimulated
by Habermas. It is grounded in a close reading of Reid’s published texts and
in extensive archival research in Reid’s personal papers, and in the primary
and secondary literature of the Scottish Enlightenment.
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Eileen Reeves Princeton University
Galileo and the Reflecting Telescope: Some Speculation
The particulars of Galileo Galilei’s several and conflicting accounts of his
development of the Dutch telescope have often been treated with skepticism:
the timing of the events of spring 1609, his optical expertise, the technical
information relayed to the scientist by Jacques Badovere, and the degree of
unacknowledged collaboration have all been subject to special scrutiny. What
has been left unexamined, however, is the proposition that what Galileo and
his informant Paolo Sarpi first understood by the earliest reports of a spyglass
developed in The Hague actually bore great resemblance to the Dutch or
refracting telescope. This paper will argue that Galileo was, like Sarpi, aware
of news of the spyglass from late 1608, that their original impression of the
instrument may have been something much closer to a primitive reflecting
telescope, and that what Galileo portrayed as his relatively tardy acquaintance
with the rumor from The Hague is better explained as a brief period in which
he worked fruitlessly to refine the wrong technology. There are several reasons
to suppose that Galileo and Sarpi would have associated telescopic properties
with mirrors, or mirrors and glass lenses, rather than with glass lenses alone.
Both men had done some research in catoptrics in the prior decades, the
importance of which has recently been demonstrated by Sven Dupre. Moreover,
in the same month in which he encountered the report of the Dutch telescope,
Sarpi also read an account of a mirror with telescopic properties in the
possession of Henri IV significantly, its alleged developer was in close contact
with Jacques Badovere. Finally, because the motif of a telescopic mirror upon