“Roger Bacon’s Speculative Technologies”

Elly Truitt (Bryn Mawr College)

Abstract coming.

“Philosophical Machines, Enlightened Bodies, and Artisanal Minds”

Paola Bertucci (Yale University)

“The philosopher is a human machine like another man, but he is a machine that, because of his mechanical constitution, reflects on his own movements. He is, so to speak, a self-winding clock”. This statement by the French philosopher Du Marsais, echoed by several Enlightenment thinkers, highlighted the internal logic of clockwork machines as models of the rational mind and the morally righteous citizen. It constituted the basis for Enlightenment projects of educational reform. The paper places this abstract conceptualization of minds and machines in the context of a rich tradition of writings by learned artisans on invention and artisanal learning. This literature emphasized the role of embodied interaction with machines as key to the inventive process and therefore to the making of useful knowledge and the pursuit of the public good.

“Surgical Daedalism: Academic Alchemy and Renaissance Biotechnology”

Vera Keller (Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon)

Johann Ernst Burggrav, in a once widely read work, The Lamp of Life (Latin editions: 1610, 1611, 1629, 1630 and 1678; German translation: 1682) described a marvelous invention in the context of other amazing recent devices: a sympathetic lamp burning on the blood of a human patient, through which one could keep track of their health at a distance. This was a work of biotechnology, a mechanical intervention into life processes that not only promised immense power, but the inner understanding of nature’s working impenetrable to mere book-learners. Writing from the context of the first introduction of alchemy to the University curriculum under the aegis of Johann Hartmann at Marburg, Burggrav contrasted logodaedalism, the craftiness of words, with his own surgical daedalism, the mental and manual dexterity required to innovate in medicine. Yet, as few readers of this text have noted, Burggrav did not claim to have made the lamp of life; his description was speculative, offering a language for thinking about how vital processes interact with artificial human interventions. Despite his contrast between verbal and surgical daedalism, the Lamp of Life was primarily an ingenious text, one which staged an unfulfilled promise, apotropaically enticing attacks of charlatanry from alchemy's opponents in order to refute them. Burggrav argued that Nature herself acted as a charlatan, hiding her techniques. Only by developing their own craftiness could her students hope to parse her smooth moves.