NDLI: Nature’s drawing: problems and resolutions in the mathematization of motion

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Gal, Ofer Chen Morris, Raz
Copyright Year	2011
Abstract	The mathematical nature of modern science is an outcome of a contingent historical process, whose most critical stages occurred in the seventeenth century. ‘The mathematization of nature’ (Koyré 1957, From the closed world to the infinite universe, 5) is commonly hailed as the great achievement of the ‘scientific revolution’, but for the agents affecting this development it was not a clear insight into the structure of the universe or into the proper way of studying it. Rather, it was a deliberate project of great intellectual promise, but fraught with excruciating technical challenges and unsettling epistemological conundrums. These required a radical change in the relations between mathematics, order and physical phenomena and the development of new practices of tracing and analyzing motion. This essay presents a series of discrete moments in this process. For mediaeval and Renaissance philosophers, mathematicians and painters, physical motion was the paradigm of change, hence of disorder, and ipso facto available to mathematical analysis only as idealized abstraction. Kepler and Galileo boldly reverted the traditional presumptions: for them, mathematical harmonies were embedded in creation; motion was the carrier of order; and the objects of mathematics were mathematical curves drawn by nature itself. Mathematics could thus be assigned an explanatory role in natural philosophy, capturing a new metaphysical entity: pure motion. Successive generations of natural philosophers from Descartes to Huygens and Hooke gradually relegated the need to legitimize the application of mathematics to natural phenomena and the blurring of natural and artificial this application relied on. Newton finally erased the distinction between nature’s and artificial mathematics altogether, equating all of geometry with mechanical practice.
Starting Page	429
Ending Page	466
Page Count	38
File Format	PDF
ISSN	00397857
Journal	Synthese
Volume Number	185
Issue Number	3
e-ISSN	15730964
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2011-11-22
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Alberti, Leon Batista Curves da Vinci, Leonardo Descartes, René Galilei, Galileo Geometry Geometrical machines Hooke, Robert Huygens, Christiaan Indivisibles Kepler, Johannes Light Mathematical diagrams Mechanics Motion Local Pure Newton, Isaac Optics Order Pendulum Perspectiva Physica Rota Aristotelis Spring Tartaglia, Niccolo Trajectories Traces Vacuum Logic Epistemology Metaphysics Philosophy of Language Philosophy of Science
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Philosophy Social Sciences

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