Verwandte Artikel zu The Spatial Reformation: Euclid Between Man, Cosmos,...

The Spatial Reformation: Euclid Between Man, Cosmos, and God (Intellectual History of the Modern Age) - Hardcover

Buch 10 von 19: Intellectual History of the Modern Age

Sauter, Michael J.

 
9780812250664: The Spatial Reformation: Euclid Between Man, Cosmos, and God (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812250664 ISBN 13: 9780812250664
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

In The Spatial Reformation, Michael J. Sauter offers a sweeping history of the way Europeans conceived of three-dimensional space, including the relationship between Earth and the heavens, between 1350 and 1850. He argues that this "spatial reformation" provoked a reorganization of knowledge in the West that was arguably as important as the religious Reformation. Notably, it had its own sacred text, which proved as central and was as ubiquitously embraced: Euclid's Elements. Aside from the Bible, no other work was so frequently reproduced in the early modern era. According to Sauter, its penetration and suffusion throughout European thought and experience call for a deliberate reconsideration not only of what constitutes the intellectual foundation of the early modern era but also of its temporal range.

The Spatial Reformation contends that space is a human construct: that is, it is a concept that arises from the human imagination and gets expressed physically in texts and material objects. Sauter begins his examination by demonstrating how Euclidean geometry, when it was applied fully to the cosmos, estranged God from man, enabling the breakthrough to heliocentrism and, by extension, the discovery of the New World. Subsequent chapters provide detailed analyses of the construction of celestial and terrestrial globes, Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia, the secularization of the natural history of the earth and man, and Hobbes's rejection of Euclid's sense of space and its effect on his political theory. Sauter's exploration culminates in the formation of a new anthropology in the eighteenth century that situated humanity in reference to spaces and places that human eyes had not actually seen. The Spatial Reformation illustrates how these disparate advancements can be viewed as resulting expressly from early modernity's embrace of Euclidean geometry.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael J. Sauter is Profesor-Investigador in the Division de Historia at the Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas, A.C. in Mexico City.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Preface

This book took too long to complete and was supposed to be a study of public clocks and time discipline in the late eighteenth century. These two things are related. Initially, I was interested in how, at the eighteenth century's end, people across Europe yielded the right to define local time to astronomers, an exclusive group whose knowledge and skills were expressly not local, but were tethered to a far-flung community of specialists. My work on this matter appeared in 2007 as a journal article, in which I detailed eighteenth-century Berlin's experience with modern time regimes. At that moment, I intended to write a book on Europe's elaboration of a system of uniform public time. This work would have concentrated on Geneva, London, Berlin, and Paris, since these cities installed the first citywide master clocks. Everything went awry, from there.

In order to pursue the formation of what I understood to be modern time sense, I undertook to study the history of astronomy. (I believe, now, that I was wrong about time discipline's "modernity." This discipline was, in fact, early modern—for reasons that will become clear.) Thus, when I first expanded my inquiry, I was interested in how astronomy's maturation into a continental discipline sustained multiple takeovers of local time regimes. In short, I wanted to explore how time ceased to be a form of "local" knowledge, in the sense that Clifford Geertz has used the term, and became a "scientific" form of knowledge that was incorporated rapidly into the European state's burgeoning disciplinary apparatus.

As I tumbled backward into the history of astronomy, however, I detected similarities in early modern astronomical textbooks with philosophical works that I had previously studied. I recalled, for instance, that the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder had deployed in their writings the same astronomical knowledge that I was encountering within eighteenth-century astronomical works. Herder, for instance, dedicated the entire first book of his anthropological work Ideas on the History of Humanity (1788-1791) to a description of the cosmos, imagining for his readers terrestrial and extraterrestrial realms that he had never seen, before analyzing a humanity that he could not have fully known. Thus, the great unseen cosmos—to which Herder had access through books, scientific instruments, and the university lectures that he heard in Prussian Königsberg—was an essential (and essentially imagined) frame of reference for his anthropology. When I noticed that the initial volume of Herder's work appeared one year after Berlin, Prussia's capital city, had installed its first master clock, it appeared that astronomy was behind a much broader change.

Further research in the history of anthropological thought revealed that Herder was not alone in projecting an unseen cosmos as the essential backdrop for a proper study of humanity. The same phenomenon appeared in other fundamental eighteenth-century works of anthropology, including Natural History (1749-1804) by the Comte de Buffon, "Essay on Man" (1734) by Alexander Pope, and Reasonable Thoughts on the Workings of Nature (1725) by Christian Wolff. Moreover, as I examined seventeenth-century anthropology and, in turn, looked to its sixteenth-century predecessor, I observed that an imagined cosmos usually framed the attending anthropological study. Against this backdrop, it immediately became important that eighteenth-century cosmology was expressly heliocentrist, while its sixteenth-century predecessor remained geocentrist. In this respect, the shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism indicated that changes in cosmology might have wrought changes in anthropology. My pursuit of the potential interconnections between the two disciplines became, in the end, Chapter 6, "Strangers to the World," in which I explore the background to (and significance of) anthropology's embrace of heliocentrism.

This project's conceptual starting point thus forms the resulting monograph's final chapter. I note this fact in order to elucidate how an investigation into the rise of public clocks metastasized into a history of spatial thought. This book was researched and written backward. The various astronomical texts that I read pulled me back nolens volens to earlier times and into other disciplinary fields. It turned out, for example, that eighteenth-century and seventeenth-century textbooks in astronomy linked the discipline to geography, often claiming cheekily that geographers would be lost were astronomers not around to tell them where they were. Nor did geographers dispute the point. Subsequent research into the terrestrial discipline, beginning with the eighteenth century and moving back into the seventeenth, then led me into yet more branches of learning, including sixteenth-century cosmography and fifteenth-century globe making. Thus, I began to see how astronomers, geographers, cosmographers, and globe makers produced collectively what Europeans could not see. Not coincidentally, I became lost in space.

While pursuing what struck me as interrelated traditions of imagining unseen realms, I noticed that texts from the varied disciplines paid homage to geometry. More significantly, perhaps, the works in question often recommended that readers study early modern geometry's cornerstone, Euclid's Elements. That the exhortations were made so easily and so regularly suggested, in turn, that ancient geometry had already become fundamental to early modern thought, before the astronomical issues that I was pursuing rose to prominence. Thus, I began to formulate—fitfully and amid frequent bouts of swearing—a "geometric" reading of European intellectual history that produced (in reverse order) Chapter 5, "Modest Ravings," Chapter 4, "Eden's End," Chapter 3, "Divine Melancholy," and Chapter 2, "The Renaissance and the Round Ball." In each chapter I explore how Euclidean geometric space's reception not only changed the discipline in question, but also wrought a broad consensus: that geometry undergirded all forms of natural knowledge.

The unraveling of my project on public clocks did not, however, end there. Further research on Euclid's early modern career revealed just how widely his Elements had diffused, as I discovered that no important early modern figure, from Leonardo da Vinci to G. W. F. Hegel, failed to read ancient geometry's jewel. Nevertheless, although I had a sense for geometry's significance, I had no explanation for why its rise would have wrought such profound changes. In order to address this problem, I initiated the research that culminated in Chapter 1, "From Sacred Text to Secular Space." In this chapter I trace how Euclid's Elements diffused and why its cultivation of nothing clashed with the anthropological, cosmological, and theological traditions that long suffused medieval thought. I concluded, thus, that geometry's history suggested a profoundly different take on European intellectual history's scope and development.

The final break with my original project came with the realization that Euclid's career identified both the beginning and the end of a deeper transformation. Additional investigations revealed that prior to 1350, Euclid's Elements was read quite differently than it was after 1350. Medieval students of geometry absorbed a relatively narrow view of space from the Elements, because they usually concentrated on the initial six books, which cover plane geometry alone. Early modern readers, in contrast, delved increasingly into books seven through thirteen, which cover the continuity of number and explicate the foundations of spherical geometry. Concomitantly, as I incorporated this discovery into my narrative, I came to appreciate more fully the significance...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812250664
ISBN 13 
9780812250664
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
327
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar