Experimental philosophy was institutionalized as a discipline in Central Europe with the first seminars and professorships. Major requested but did not receive a professorship in this discipline, yet he taught one of its first seminars. At the beginning of each meeting, Major lectured on experimental norms, but then spent most time experimenting upon objects in his collection in a purposefully nonmethodical way. The seminar integrated current research by Major and his students. Whirling from one experiment to the next, Major dramatized shifting, probabilistic knowledge and tried to lure students away from a priori systems. He often deployed phenomena from global craft or even street performances, but he distinguished experimental philosophy as a liberal discipline from its application to use. Major’s son-in-law, Wilhelm Ulrich Waldschmidt, became the first chair of experimental philosophy in Kiel in 1693. He taught many of the same experiments as Major, but, like others of his generation, he rearranged them to lend experimental philosophy a much more methodical air. A pedagogical presentation of experimental method developed distinct from the practice of experimental research.

The book concludes by examining striking cultural continuities as expressed in language. The final chapter reveals how Nahuatl documentary traditions retained much of their vitality and importance. The sources themselves underwent changes, in orthography and content, that amounted to departures from earlier forms of written expression. These changes reflected the autonomous local traditions of documentary production in Native communities. At the same time, though, the sources also exhibited a remarkable degree of resilience and stability in its vocabulary and grammatical structures. Surprisingly the sources exhibited few of the common signs of Hispanic influence in which Native speakers could now be expected to incorporate not only Spanish nouns as loanwords in Nahuatl but also verbs, particles, and other grammatical elements. All of these innovations remained conspicuously absent from Xochimilco’s Nahuatl records. Xochimilco thus remained a predominantly Nahua place at the end of the colonial period, in terms of demographic orientation, even as it also successfully preserved many aspects of its rich cultural heritage.