Skepticisms Pictures: Figuring Descartess Natural Philosophy

In seventeenth-century northern Europe, as the Aristotelian foundations of scientia were rocked by observation, experiment, confessional strife, and political pressure, natural philosophers came to rely on the printed image to fortify their epistemologiesand none more so than René Descartes. In Skepticisms Pictures, historian of science Melissa Lo chronicles the visual idioms that made, sustained, revised, and resisted Descartess new philosophy.

Drawing on moon maps, political cartoons, student notebooks, treatises on practical mathematics, and other sources, Lo argues that Descartes transformed natural philosophy with the introduction of a new graphic language that inspired a wide range of pictorial responses shaped by religious affiliation, political commitment, and cultural convention. She begins by historicizing the graphic vocabularies of Descartess Essais and Principia philosophiae and goes on to analyze the religious and civic volatility of Descartess thought, which compelled defenders (such as Jacques Rohault and Wolferd Senguerd) to reconfigure his pictures according to their local visual culturesand stimulated enemies (such as Gabriel Daniel) to unravel Descartess visual logic with devastating irony. In the epilogue, Lo explains why nineteenth-century French philosophers divorced Descartess thought from his pictures, creating a modern image of reason and a version of philosophy absent visuality.

Engaging and accessible, Skepticisms Pictures presents an exciting new approach to Descartes and the visual reception of seventeenth-century physics. It will appeal to historians of early modern European science, philosophy, art, and culture and to art historians interested in histories that give images their argumentative power.