ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Wolffian or Newtonian Textbooks - Jens Kraft and the Creation of an 18th-Century Epistemic Community

• In Event: Science and Education 3: Making Expertise

English Abstract

Recent scholarship on eighteenth century Newtonianism has profoundly challenged traditional ideas of what ‘Newtonianism’ was and to whom. This paper contributes to current Newtonian studies by exploring how textbooks as an epistemic genre were part of ongoing debates on Wolffianism and Newtonianism in Scandinavia. During the eighteenth century, textbooks were as important as the Principia itself when it came to debating Newtonian ideas. In my paper, I contrast the notion of Wolffian and Newtonian text-book styles in making the argument that epistemic genres are central to the creation of epistemic communities.
I do so by close reading student manuscripts from Jens Kraft’s (1720-1765) lectures and his printed textbooks focusing on hydraulics and hydrodynamics. I demonstrate how textbook styles both explicated adherence to epistemic communities and established new communities. From 1746 Kraft was the professor of mathematics and philosophy at Soröe Academy, a central Enlightenment institution in Denmark-Norway. At Soröe he wrote textbooks and lectured on applied mathematics according to the Wolffianism he ac-quired studying in Halle eclectically combined with Leibnizianism and Newtonianism.
In the historiography, however, Kraft is generally celebrated as the first Newtonian in Denmark-Norway – and amongst the early Scandinavian advocates. His 1760s textbooks on mechanics and hydrodynamics differ fundamentally in style and content from his early works exemplifying the close relationship between epistemic communities and the social function of genres. Thus, I am making the point that focusing on genres in the history of science and studying textbooks like Kraft’s provides important perspectives on the appropriation of Newtonianism.

Author

• Marcus Lee Naldal, Aarhus University, Denmark