A Centaur in London: Observation and Reading in the Early Modern Study of Nature
A talk by Fabian Kramer (University of Munich)
4:00 pm – 6:00 pm in room 4116 (student lounge)
Historians of science have grown increasingly critical of the notion that a »Scientific Revolution« occurred in Early Modern Europe. The paper contributes to this discussion by arguing that the rise of different empiricisms in Early Modern »science« did not happen at the expense of book learning. Based on the award-winning book Ein Zentaur in London, the paper urges us to avoid simple narratives of the victory of empiricism over book learning and pay attention instead to the different forms that empiricism and scholarly reading practices took among early modern naturalists. They never stopped reading – even though their rhetoric sometimes suggests otherwise. What is more, not only their »empirical« practices changed, that is, the ways in which they observed or devises experiments. Their reading practices, too, underwent significant and consequential transformations.
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