A Dialectic of Seventeenth-Century High Culture

The “New Science” of Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, Descartes, Boyle, Steno, etc., and the Baroque in visual arts and literature, are two conspicuous aspects of seventeenth-century European elite culture. If standard historiography of science can be relied upon, the former of the two was not affected by the latter. The lecture asks whether this is a “fact of history” or an artefact of historiography. A delimitation of the “Baroque” going beyond the commonplaces of overloading and contortion concentrates on the acceptance of ambiguity and the appurtenance to a “representative public sphere”, contrasting with the quest for clarity and the argument-based public sphere of the new science, suggesting that Baroque and New Science were indeed incompatible currents. A close-up looks at Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, who was a major Baroque theoretician but also wrote much on mathematics, finding even within his mathematics love for ambiguity. The way his mathematics is spoken about in the Oldenburg correspondence shows that the mainstream of the New Science saw no interest in this.