Knowledge in Motion: The Circulation of Maupertuis’s Discours sur les différentes figures des astres (1732) between Switzerland and Germany
From Firenze University Press Book: Philosophical Reviews in German Territories (1668–1799)
Marco Storni, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
- The Circulation of Philosophical Ideas: A Culturalist Approach
Amongst historians of philosophy, there has been a long-standing interest in the study of the circulation of knowledge. Investigating the circulation of knowledge implies an examination of “how knowledge moves, and how it is continuously moulded in the process” (Östling et al. 2018, 17). A good example of the study of circulation, in terms of the quality and quantity of works published, is the historiography of the dissemination of Isaac Newton’s (1643–1727) natural philosophy in Europe in the eighteenth century.1 Newtonian theories spread to different regions and were received and adapted differently according to local sensibilities, especially as they were grafted onto pre-existing debates. One might consider the reception of Newton’s natural philosophy in the Netherlands, where its acceptance was favoured by the local sensitivity to experimentalism, but also by its theological relevance, as it was seen as a useful tool to combat superstition and incredulity (Israel 2006, 201–203; Jorink and Maas 2012). A different case is that of the diffusion of Newtonianism in Italy, where its implantation was more complex: although the vestiges of the Galilean tradition constituted an optimal environment for its germination, numerous Peripatetic and Cartesian philosophers thwarted its advance, often motivated by concerns over heterodoxy rather than solid scientific criticism (Casini 2022, 73–75). T he circulation of knowledge is usually studied as an intellectual process. The diffusion of ideas is conceived, to quote a famous theory of the biologist Richard Dawkins, as the transmission of “memes,” namely cultural units (ideas, beliefs) that can travel from one mind to another (Dawkins [1976] 2016). Memes evolve historically according to the laws of evolution, i.e. they undergo processes of variation, competition, selection and inheritance, since their success lies in their ability to influence the greatest number of individuals. The parallel with memetics is here useful to emphasise that historians of philosophy often tend to study circulation as a phenomenon in which the human mind is the main, and oftentimes the only, actor. However, it is important to recognise that the circulation of knowledge, at least before the advent of the “information age,” necessarily involved a gesture of a practical, physical nature. Consider the early modern period (c. 1600–1800) on which this paper focuses: in this era, marked by the rise of print culture, knowledge circulated thanks to networks of travel and exchange — as well as, in the words of historian Robert Darnton (2021), of “pirating” and counterfeiting — that allowed books to move from one place to another.2 While this observation may seem trivial at first glance, adopting it as a methodological precept can help to make the often too abstract history of the circulation of philosophical ideas more tangible, transforming it into a history of the particular trajectories of objects and people, namely the supports that conveyed theories and the carriers who facilitated their circulation. To be sure, my aim is not to break down intellectual circulations into a heap of microhistories, thereby atomising the historical narrative; rather, I aim to suggest that any “diffusionist” account conceals a complex web of mediations, negotiations, gaps, dead ends — in short, a physical and living network. In materialising the circulation of ideas, this contribution adopts a culturalist approach to the history of philosophy, which — to quote a programmatic text co-authored by three French historians — considers philosophy “at once a theoretical knowledge, a social practice and a cultural object” (Anheim, Lilti and Van Damme 2009, 7). The aim of this paper thus is to provide an example of the fruitfulness of broadening the scope of the historiography of philosophy with insights from cultural history, an approach that is sometimes announced in the presentation of scholarly work, but rarely adopted as a consistent research methodology.
DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0573–3.04
Read Full Text: https://books.fupress.it/chapter/knowledge-in-motion-the-circulation-of-maupertuiss-idiscours-sur-les-diffrentes-figures-des-astres-i/15852
