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  • Thinking with Objects: The Transformation of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century
  • Jürgen Renn
Domenico Bertoloni Meli. Thinking with Objects: The Transformation of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. xiv + 390 pp. index. illus. bibl. $70 (cl), $29.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0–8018–8426–8 (cl), 0–8018–8427–6 (pbk).

Thinking with Objects: The Transformation of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century, by Domenico Bertoloni Meli, covers a crucial aspect of the Scientific Revolution of the early modern period. Mechanics was very much at the center of this revolution, undergoing a profound conceptual transformation and serving, for a long time, as a paradigm for other sciences. This book offers the most comprehensive survey of this critical historical episode presently available. It is based on a wealth of recent research that is also well documented in the text and the footnotes. The very readable text is accompanied by figures with long, detailed captions supplying technical details. In this way, the book serves both as an excellent introduction for students and as an up-to-date review for experts. The quantity of historical material it covers as well as the scrutiny and sophistication with which it is treated make this book an extraordinary achievement.

But Meli’s work is intended to be more than a survey. It departs programmatically from a traditional history of ideas in the sense of Alexandre Koyré’s seminal Galileo Studies, focusing instead on the role of material objects providing the ground on which the transformation of mechanics unfolds. The conclusive section of the book offers a map showing the main objects of seventeenth-century mechanics representing transformations between them in the sense of a reduction of one to the other such as Galileo’s reduction of the inclined plane to the lever or the identification of profound similarities between different objects such as oscillations being characteristic of pendulums, strings, as well as of springs. Accordingly, the book follows the history of the treatments of these objects in early modern mechanical theories, starting with Guidobaldo del Monte, who revived Heron’s and Pappus’s program of reducing all machines to a number of simple machines, up to Newton’s Principia documenting the beginning of a new era in which an object-centered approach gave way to a principle-centered approach.

In spite of this ambitious program and in spite of the comprehensive coverage of the literature, both primary and secondary, Meli’s account remains more descriptive than explanatory. Hardly any theoretical dimension of recent discussions [End Page 642] in history and philosophy of science is seriously taken up so that the title of the work, alluding to historical thinking and transformation processes, turns out to be somewhat misleading as no deeper epistemological analysis of such processes is offered. The transformation of mechanics is, after all, just treated as a chapter in a differently focused history of ideas, while, for instance, no systematic treatment is offered of the relation between practical and theoretical knowledge, which is crucial when it comes to objects.

To be sure, all relevant themes are discussed at one place or the other: the social and cultural contexts of the protagonists, the technological background of some of the crucial objects of mechanics, the main conceptual breakthroughs, the role of experience and experiment, the venues of publication, the role of visualization, and the philosophical prerequisites and consequences of scientific arguments. And Meli’s narrative is lucid throughout, well informed and at the height of present historical research. But in the end, his account fails to offer more than an excellent review; instead of offering a new interpretative framework it adds yet another dimension — the material objects of inquiry — to an often told story. Accordingly, Meli’s insistence on the theme of establishing relations among different objects raises more problems than it solves. What is the epistemological role played, for instance, by the approach of reducing one object to another and how does it evolve in the course of history? Why and how is the same approach applied by different authors to different objects? And how exactly does the principle-oriented approach emerge from the object-centered one?

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