Stephen Clucas, “Argument, authority and textual fragmentation in Natural Philosophy: Browne, Burton and Galileo”
In Galileo’sDialogo di … sopre i due massimi sistemi del mondo le ragioni filosofiche, e naturali (Florence, 1632), the argumentative techniques of seventeenth-century Aristotelian natural philosophy were subjected to a prolonged critique. Part of this critique was aimed at the Aristotelians’ habit of arguing by means of liberal quotation from different parts of the Aristotelian corpus. Salviati compares this selective culling of quotations ‘scattered here and there’ (disseminate in qua, e in là) in the works of Aristotle to now largely discredited cinquecento literary fashion for centonismo, and the piecemeal quotation of sententiae by humanist writers, which were increasingly scorned by the literati of the seicento:
But then, what you and other learned philosophers do with Aristotle’s texts, I will do with the verses of Virgil or Ovid, by making patchworks of passages [centoni] and explaining with them all the affairs of men and secrets of nature.
By contrast to these stale and bankrupt literary modes of argumentation, Galileo presents the dialogue as a vital and dynamic mode of logical investigation. After mocking the patchwork nature of Aristotelian discourse, Salviati exhorts Simplicio to ‘come freely with reasons and demonstrations … and not with textual passages or mere authorities because our discussions are about the sensible world and not about a world on paper.’ This use of Aristotle's works is – he says – philological, rather than philosophical. It is ‘shameful’ he says, when dealing with ‘demonstrable conclusions’ to use texts (rather than demonstrations) to ‘shut the mouth of an opponent’. These appeals to texts as inviolable authorities makes such scholars ‘historians or memory experts’ (ò Istorici, ò Dottori di memoria) rather than philosophers.
In this paper I will use Galileo’s remarks to cast retrospective light on the self-conscious and equivocal use of textual authorities in the works of Thomas Browne and Robert Burton. In their different ways Browne and Burton’s works bear witness to the waning confidence in the compilation of arguments ex auctoribus, and the development of new modes of argumentative rhetoric in natural philosophy. |