Le forme della comunicazione scientifica (review)

Massimo Galuzzi, Gianni Micheli, and Maria Teresa Monti, eds. Le forme della comunicazione scientifica. Filosofia e scienza nel Cinquecento e nel Seicento. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1998. 438 pp. L 57,000.00 (paperbound).

This collection of twenty articles on the forms of scientific communication comprises the Atti resulting from three days of meetings in Milan in 1997, sponsored by the Centro di Studi del Pensiero Filosofica in Milan and the Departments of Philosophy and Mathematics at the University of Milan. The collection is divided into three parts: a chronological section ranging from antiquity to the fourteenth century; a second section on the physical/mathematical sciences; and a third on the life sciences.

The topic of forms of communication seems to have encouraged in many of the essays a useful focus on the immediate contexts of investigative practices and textual production. Thus in his fine essay on Aristotle, Mario Vegetti emphasizes the originality and significance of Aristotle's organization of knowledge into disciplinary divisions, such as physics, meteorology, and zoology. Ferruccio Franco Repellini analyzes the structure of Ptolemy's Almagest, which sheds light on Ptolemy's aims in writing the treatise and on his prospective readership. Ivan Garofalo investigates the differences between Galen's anatomical writings and the Galenist writings of some of his successors, particularly in the Islamic world. Chiara Crisciani contributes a characteristically lucid and substantive essay on the interrelationships of experience, writing, and modes of occultism in the alchemy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Taken together, these and the other essays of this section display a notable diversity of topics and forms of communication, rendering somewhat problematic the use of the anachronistic term "scientific" in the title.

The essays on the physical/mathematical sciences center on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also explicate highly diverse forms of communication as they illustrate the usefulness of paying serious attention to such forms. Anna De Pace's important study of the philosophical dialogue before Galileo makes a significant contribution to understanding Galileo's use of the dialogue to make truth claims about the natural world. Gianfranco Mormino's study of Christiaan Huygens contrasts Huygens's extensive contacts with natural and experimental philosophers all over Europe during his lifetime with his relatively few published writings and relative obscurity after his death. Mormino argues that this was a result of Huygens's conflict between flexible models of research in the investigation of natural phenomena, on the one hand, and an inflexible ideal of scientific writing that aimed to produce works worthy of noble glory, on the other. Marco Beretta explicates a very different form of communication in his discussion of the illustrations of Georg Agricola's De re metallica; he emphasizes the ways in which the illustrations clarified apparatus, procedures, and technical vocabulary relevant to mining and ore processing. Other essays in this section include those by Aldo Brigaglia and by Massimo Galuzzi on forms of mathematical communication, both of which include explorations of the differences between geometric and algebraic forms in the writings of Descartes and Newton.

In the final section on the life sciences, Maria Teresa Monti provides a fascinating comparative analysis of the laboratory notebooks of two eighteenth-century physiologists, Albrecht von Haller and Lazzaro Spallanzani, and investigates the relationship of their notebooks to their published writings. Walter Bernardi discusses Spallanzani's radical "paradigm shift" from a theory of epigenesis to one of preformation, emphasizing the effective erasure of Spallanzani's past of epigenesis in his published writings. Marino Buscaglia contributes an important essay on Abraham Trembley's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire d'un genre de polypes d'eau douce à bras en forme de cornes (1744) in which he explores the relationship of scientific practices, textual explication, and illustrations. We then jump back to the fourteenth century, with Jole Agrimi's study of Arnald of Villanova's use of aphorisms and parables; and up to the seventeenth, with Guido Giglioni's discussion of visual images...