Natural philosophizing inside the late seventeenth-century Tuscan court

Abstract

The Accademia del Cimento in seventeenth-century Florence has traditionally been seen as the first European organization to employ an experimental programme, thus becoming a major participant in the so-called ‘birth of modern experimental science’. Such traditional accounts have also detailed the cultural, political and religious environment of the period that contributed to the Accademia's use of a supposedly atheoretical experimental method. However, despite the merits of such cultural histories, these stories do not portray the full details behind the Accademia's intellectual workings – how knowledge claims were constructed, interpreted and presented by the academicians according to their natural philosophical concerns. It is argued here that such an analysis will provide a more accurate account of the Accademia's activities than existing stories about the birth of an experimental programme or method. By looking past the experimental rhetoric produced by the academicians in their only publication, Saggi di naturali esperienze, we begin to see at play one of the major issues which made up the Accademia's knowledge-making process: the natural philosophical interests of this institution's participants, particularly Borelli, Viviani, Rinaldini and Marsili. Those interests are represented in the Accademia's experiments, including their work concerned with air pressure and the void.