Revealing natural processes through the laboratory: the search for principal materials in the three kingdoms up to the specialization of sciences in the sevenhundreds

• Grant number: 05/56638-7
• Support Opportunities: Research Projects - Thematic Grants
• Start date: November 01, 2006
• End date: October 31, 2011
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of Science
• Principal Investigator: Ana Maria Alfonso-Goldfarb
• Grantee: Ana Maria Alfonso-Goldfarb
• Host Institution: Pró-Reitoria de Pós-Graduação (PRPG). Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Pesquisadores principais: Márcia Helena Mendes Ferraz
• Associated research grant(s): 10/52354-2 - George Sebastian Rousseau | University of Oxford - Inglaterra, AV.EXT; 08/53879-1 - Frank a j l James | royal institution londo - Inglaterra, AV.EXT; 08/54262-8 - Piyo M. Rattansi | University College London - Inglaterra, AV.EXT
• Associated scholarship(s): 07/50101-7 - Music as science in the Sixteenth Century work of Vincenzo Galilei, BP.DR

Abstract

The refinement of our group's previous researches revealed a network of conceptions on the principles of matter that continued until the eighteenth century at least. These conceptions had a distinctive, and (particular but) very interesting development among people who relied on laboratory processes to understand nature. Almost always focused on all the three kingdoms of nature, these conceptions pointed to the existence sometimes of a specific principle in each one of them, other times of a single principle, which appeared differently composed in each kingdom. The need to process diverse materials (a principle, or principles, often being assumed to pass from one kingdom to the other) seems to have motivated intense laboratory work and also the revision of theoretical sources, both traditional and classic. Our group intends to analyse this network (made up of continuous as well as of broken connections), which brought the various sciences of matter together and left its mark even when the eighteenth-century process of specialization started to undo it. (AU)