Mechanism. A visual, lexical and conceptual history

Abstract

Domenico Bertoloni Meli’sMechanism. A Visual, Lexical and Conceptual History began as the A. W. Mellon Distinguished Lectures in the History of Science presented at the University of Pittsburgh in 2006. It is focused on the emergence, development, and systematization of the notion of mechanism in the seventeenth century, particularly in anatomy, medicine and the life sciences. The first chapter is devoted to defining mechanism by comparison with allied notions – e.g. machines or artificial devices – and by contrast with others – e.g. faculties of the soul, vital properties or teleological explanations – but also to underlining the ambivalence of ferments, active principles, seminal principles and plastic virtues, all of which could refer to something immaterial yet also be ‘mechanized’. An excursus on Galen opposes mechanisms to the immaterial faculties of the soul, and some of the tensions involved in the search for mechanisms are revealed – the tension between the notions that intervene in the explanations of macroscopic phenomena and the ambition to reduce these phenomena to the motions of microscopic corpuscles endowed with merely quantitative properties, but also the tension between imperfect machines made by us and the perfect machines of nature made by God. The second chapter explores the affinity between visual representations and mechanisms, which consist of spatial arrangements of moving parts: after a nuanced view of the historiographical controversy between David Edgerton and Michael Mahoney about the effect new forms of representation might have had on the transformation of knowledge during the Scientific Revolution, the bulk of this chapter analyses anatomical representations in the long century between Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) and Robert Hooke (1635–1703). The third chapter studies the emergence of the term ‘mechanism’ at the beginnings of the Royal Society, whether it intervened in the explanations of specific natural phenomena or in discussions of philosophical and theological issues; two theses, quite correct in my opinion, are defended: first, the thesis that what is mechanical is defined by contrast with what is not mechanical, and, second, the thesis that what is not mechanical has varied in history. The main figure of the fourth and last chapter is Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694), to whom Bertoloni Meli had already devoted two books; the present chapter focuses on the generation of animals, which brings together different threads previously encountered. This brief book (142 pages, including a number of black and white illustrations, plus notes, bibliography and index) is very rich in detailed analyses. It is sure to impress even the most critical of readers in the history of science and medicine. More generally, it is also incisive and thought-provoking because of some of its methodological commitments, which were already present in Bertoloni Meli’s previous books. First, as in Thinking with Objects, the reader is invited to focus, not on the few general statements that form the programmatic horizon of the sciences, but on small problems that keep scientists busy in their day-to-day intellectual life. One of the seminal points in Thinking with Objects was that, to reconstruct seventeenth-century mechanics, one should consider not only a few fundamental laws of motion, but also small objects like