Expansion of Preclassical Mechanics in the Early Modern Period

The preclassical mechanics of the 16th and early 17th centuries was characterized by an elaboration of the available mechanical theories in view of challenging objects. Preclassical mechanics, defined in this way as a historical stage in its own right in the development of mechanics, was pursued by engineer-scientists who addressed the technical challenges by drawing on heterogeneous bodies of knowledge—the increasing number of available ancient scientific and technical texts. As a consequence, a multiplicity of pathways developed, sometimes leading to the same insights about a given problem, sometimes to diverging views. At the same time, intrinsic tensions within a given traditional body now emerged in fuller clarity due to the fact that it was no longer, as was typically the case in antiquity, a single author or a string of authors separated by generations who were involved in its elaboration. Alternatively, one and the same problem was now often addressed from distinctive perspectives, thus becoming a borderline problem of different knowledge traditions, catalyzing their conflictual integration. The heterogeneity as well as the fragmentary nature of the shared knowledge of early modern science, in particular with regard to the heritage of ancient science and its subsequent transformation, has been investigated by analyzing the conflictual integration of Aristotelian and Archimedean knowledge resources on mechanics, as it can be traced in the works of Guidobaldo del Monte, Giovanni Battista Benedetti, Galileo Galilei, Francesco Maurolico, Bernardino Baldi, Henri de Monantheuil, Simon Stevin, and Isaack Beeckman. In particular, an in-depth study was dedicated to a copy of Benedetti’s Diversarum speculationum mathematicarum et physicarum liber containing hand-written marginal notes by Guidobaldo, the leading expert on mechanics of the generation before Galileo and himself the author of the most influential early modern text on mechanics (Peter Damerow, Jürgen Renn). Guidobaldo’s views on mechanics were also compared to those of Maurolico, Baldi, Stevin and others in light of the different roles that mathematics played in physical explanations (Maarten van Dyck).