TY - CHAP
T1 - Peering Horizontally Through the Microscope
T2 - Stephen Gaukroger Explains the Middling World
AU - Eriksen, Christoffer Basse
PY - 2024
Y1 - 2024
N2 - Early-modern microscopy has long been associated with the ambition to go down to nature’s least level and make observations of the most fundamental parts, the particles, atoms, or corpuscles. In Stephen Gaukroger’s words, early-modern microscopy developed along the lines of a vertical model of explanation. Yet, as Gaukroger has shown us, during the early modern and Enlightenment periods, this model was put under pressure by horizontal models of explanations, which sought to explain natural phenomena in terms of relations between cause and effect taking place on the same level. In this essay, I explore Gaukroger’s analysis further as I show the benefits of revisiting early-modern microscopy in terms of horizontality rather than verticality. This allows to see how the leading microscopists subverted the notion of magnification as a descension to a more foundational level through the stabilization of the sub-visible world as a space in its own right.
AB - Early-modern microscopy has long been associated with the ambition to go down to nature’s least level and make observations of the most fundamental parts, the particles, atoms, or corpuscles. In Stephen Gaukroger’s words, early-modern microscopy developed along the lines of a vertical model of explanation. Yet, as Gaukroger has shown us, during the early modern and Enlightenment periods, this model was put under pressure by horizontal models of explanations, which sought to explain natural phenomena in terms of relations between cause and effect taking place on the same level. In this essay, I explore Gaukroger’s analysis further as I show the benefits of revisiting early-modern microscopy in terms of horizontality rather than verticality. This allows to see how the leading microscopists subverted the notion of magnification as a descension to a more foundational level through the stabilization of the sub-visible world as a space in its own right.
KW - Atomism
KW - Experimental philosophy
KW - Microscopy
KW - Natural history
KW - Scientific explanation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85217096462&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-76037-2_12
DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-76037-2_12
M3 - Book chapter
SN - 978-3-031-76036-5
T3 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
SP - 113
EP - 121
BT - Science and the Shaping of Modernity
A2 - Wolfe, Charles
A2 - Waldow, Anik
PB - Springer
CY - Cham
ER -