Date:
Location:
Lecturer:
Since the early phases of the New Science, natural philosophers and mathematicians embraced fantastical stories and imaginary scenarios to undermine the traditional and well-entrenched Aristotelian and Ptolemaic systems of the world. Whether in Kepler's Somnium, Galileo's imaginary experiments, or Descartes' fictitious world-system, the assumption was that, in Shakespeare's words, only by "transfiguring" the audience's mind "so together" can a great constancy grow. This utopian notion that in traveling to another fantastical place, one can learn the truth about one's own world pervaded much of 17th-century scientific thought in its aspiration to fashion a new world picture. Beginning with the 1660s, however, the notion of a fantastic journey became leverage for criticizing and exposing the vain presumptuousness of the "New Science." In her Blazing World, Margaret Cavendish blatantly attacked the Royal Society, mocking its reliance on such instruments as the telescope and the microscope. The Jesuit Gabriel Daniel, in his Voiage du Monde de Descartes, used the trope of space traveling to ridicule the French philosophers' system of the world. Thus, at the end of the 17th century, leading savants such as Fontenelle or Huygens turned to speculate on planetary worlds, marginalizing the role of fantasy and instead seeking to establish a new astronomical and physical commonsense