Logistics

Today our session will focus on the reading "The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science" by Londa Schiebinger (1989) and is our second installment devoted to science in the seventeenth century.

Our class for Monday, April 26th begins a series of two sessions devoted to Reason, Revolution and Romanticism. In this session our discussion will be based on the text The Literary Underground of the Old Regime by Robert Darnton (1982).

Please remember that the second essay due date is coming up on Wednesday April 28th. Send me a note if I may assist with your topic.

Gender and Science

In the introduction to this book, the author reminds us of women’s special gender role as ”the sex” and writes of those who believed that for women “exercising the brain shrivels the ovaries.”

This author is interested in the role of women in the evolution of science and presents four areas of interest (1) institutions (2) biographies (3) scientific definitions of female nature, and (4) cultural meanings of gender. Female scientists in the 1600s were produced by both (a) the aristocracy and (b) the crafts. “Craft production prompts scientific involvement”. The early biological sciences misread sex and gender in women’s bodies. There were also “cosmological assumptions behind definitions of sex and gender”.The author considers that “femininity represents a set of values that has been excluded from science” (page 8). There has been at once a purging of “the feminine from the public world of science” and a “persistent effort to distance science from the feminine (page 9).

Scholarly Style

To some extent the gender controversy is carried out over approaches to style and the idea of the “elaborate feminine allegory”. The feminine represents (a) a style (b) a set of values and (c) a way of knowing (page 121). In Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1618), a Renaissance bible of iconography, the female was a personification giving human attributes to the universe (page 122).

The frontispiece of Galileo’s Il Saggiatore pictures the Muse Urania, and, the author further provides a list of imagery (page 132).

Language

In a deeper and more fundamental sense, the author asks regarding “the unexplained historical origins of grammatical gender” (page 132). What are the origins of gender usage in language? The soul was feminine, for Plato. Thus the scientist was a supplicant who bowed to the muse.

Francis Bacon led the cause of upending this relationship, seeking to create a masculine philosophy (page 137) and critiqued the “effeminate” intellectual culture of the French in the Paris salon.

In time science ceased to have a persona and the allegorical emblems were lost. The choice became (1) allegorical richness or (2) modern precision (page 151). This divide was quite real in the sense that celibacy was required at Oxford and Cambridge for faculty into the nineteenth century.

Image

Thalia. Oil on canvas. Jean-Marc Nattier. 1739. In Greek mythology, Thalia or Thaleia ("good cheer") was the muse of comedy and pastoral poetry. She was a rural goddess with the attributes of a comic mask and a shepherd's crook. Wikipedia.org

Comments and Discussion

I most wonder about what we have lost in terms of interpretation with the adoption of “modern precision”. What can’t we see? What are we missing? What does the allegorical provide that we could gain from?

Please create three posts on this topic. Comment on (a) my discussion above, (b) on someone else's post or (c) on material from this text or another reading. I will comment on comments as appropriate.

Galileo

Logistics

Our class for Monday, April 19th begins a series of two sessions devoted to science in the seventeenth century. In this session our discussion will be based on the text "Galileo: Decisive Innovator" by Michael Sharratt (1994).

Our next session on Wednesday the 21st will based on the study "The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science" by L. Schiebinger (1989).

Please remember that the second essay due date is coming up on Wednesday April 28th. Send me a note if I may assist with your topic.

Galileo

For me the heart of the story of Galileo Galilei is about the social challenge presented by his publications. His Sidereal Message of 1610 and his Dialogue of 1632 had the effect of popularizing "his views in understandable language." Also, the fact that the small telescopes that he produced showed four moons rotating around the planet jupiter overturned the idea of the earth as the center of the cosmos.

Galileo was condemned by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for his comparison of the geocentric (earth-centered) approach of Ptolemy with the heliocentric (sun-centered) system of Copernicus of 1543. So it is important to note that Galileo was not so much a discoverer as a popularizer of ideas. Galileo wrote that "human vision had gained its first increase in power since the creation of the world." He challenged the idea that the earth was unique and that there was a split between heaven and earth.

I like how the author writes about the understanding of "the novel idea" and thus picturing Galileo as a "novelist." The instruments that he made could magnify eight or nine times. The telescope had important military applications in the sense that ships could be viewed two hours before the unaided eye could see them. He may have made up to one hundred of the instruments during his life time of which ten could see jupiter's moons.

Our author here in the reading moves towards a presentation of the condemnation of Galileo's writings and of Copernicanism. Galileo's friend Castelli is asked by the Church not to teach the motions of the earth in his position as chair of mathematics at Pisa. The Dominican priest Caccini who is called to the inquisition in Rome calls mathematics a diabolical art. The author writes regarding "the use of theology and the authority of the church to oust Copernicanism."

I have noted that as much of the issue of Galileo was the implications of his approach as the knowledge itself. For example the author also describes "the freedom of sensory observation" (page 107).

The image above is a view of the University of Padua where Galileo taught. Note the cathedral in the central area of the image and the wall and moat surrounding the city.

Within the context of our course, we might consider the force of media (in this case publications) and how media instigates or initiates ideas outside of, or beyond, those who possess the media or, here, who can even read or write. Can you think of similar instances, relevant to science as our theme, where technical or scientific knowledge has been censored? What is the relationship between media that "broadcasts" knowledge, images or information, and the message itself? What do think about the idea of freedom of experience versus the regulation of the "sensory?" Please too consider the realm of social access that is suggested by the image of Padua. Who is inside the wall and who is not?

Comments and Discussion

Please create three posts on this topic. Comment on (a) my discussion above, (b) on someone else's post or (c) on material from this text or other reading. I know that some of you have an interest in this topic so feel free to write. I will comment on comments as appropriate.