Raz Chen-Morris

In Measuring Shadows, Raz Chen-Morris demonstrates that a close study of Kepler’s Optics is essential to understanding his astronomical work and his scientific epistemology. He explores Kepler’s radical break from scientific and epistemological traditions and shows how the seventeenth-century astronomer posited new ways to view scientific truth and knowledge. Chen-Morris reveals how Kepler’s ideas about the formation of images on the retina and the geometrics of the camera obscura, as well as his astronomical observations, advanced the argument that physical reality could only be described through artificially produced shadows, reflections, and refractions. Breaking from medieval and Renaissance traditions that insisted upon direct sensory perception, Kepler advocated for instruments as mediators between the eye and physical reality, and for mathematical language to describe motion. It was only through this kind of knowledge, he argued, that observation could produce certainty about the heavens. Not only was this conception of visibility crucial to advancing the early modern understanding of vision and the retina, but it affected how people during that period approached and understood the world around them.

Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility

Measuring Shadows

Ofer Gal

This volume examines the New Science of the 17th century in the context of Baroque culture, analysing its emergence as an integral part of the high culture of the period. The collected essays explore themes common to the new practices of knowledge production and the rapidly changing culture surrounding them, as well as the obsessions, anxieties and aspirations they share, such as the foundations of order, the power and peril of mediation and the conflation of the natural and the artificial. The essays also take on the historiographical issues involved: the characterization of culture in general and culture of knowledge in particular; the use of generalizations like ‘Baroque’ and the status of such categories; and the role of these in untangling the historical complexities of the tumultuous 17th century. The canonical protagonists of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ are considered, and so are some obscure and suppressed figures: Galileo side by side with Scheiner;Torricelli together with Kircher; Newton as well as Scilla. The coupling of Baroque and Science defies both the still-triumphalist historiographies of the Scientific Revolution and the slight embarrassment that the Baroque represents for most cultural-national histories of Western Europe. It signals a methodological interest in tensions and dilemmas rather than self-affirming narratives of success and failure, and provides an opportunity for reflective critique of our historical categories which is valuable in its own right. ​

Raz Chen-Morris

Books

Your next favorite book is out there