The Two Comets of 1664-1665: from a French to an International Perspective

In November 1664, an immensely bright comet appeared in the European skies. When it disappeared in March 1665, another comet appeared, even brighter than the first one. These two comets were the occasion of one of the first scientific debates that took place on an international scale: astronomers formed for the first time truly international networks and exchanged observational data to determine their trajectories. The debates also involved, with different modalities in different countries, the "public," that is to say here all those who were not astronomers: comets, being still Unidentified Flying Objects, sparked all kinds of discourses of natural philosophy, when they were not seen as signs announcing forthcoming events.

In my talk, I will first summarize my earlier research in which I took all the books published in France on these comets as a prism to reveal the different positions on natural philosophy in France in the 1660s and the conflicts that developed between some of them. Taking into consideration both the intellectual contents of these books and the social identities of their authors, I organized them in four groups, to which I added the group of those whom, for lack of a better word, I call “isolated voices.” I will then go beyond this national case study and use the existing secondary literature to delineate a new project, which would aim at a systematic comparison of the reactions to these comets in different European countries. The very general questions I would like to ask in this project concern ideas, data, their circulation, and its various modalities likewise. In a word, the aim of this new project would be to consider these comets as a prism, not only for natural philosophy in France but for what we would call the science/society debates in the various countries concerned.

Sophie Roux is Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, where she was a director of the graduate program in Humanities and Social Sciences and where she is currently director of La République des savoirs (CNRS-Collège de France-ENS). After her Ph.D., she held positions at the MPIWG (Berlin), at the Centre Alexandre-Koyré (Paris), and at the University of Grenoble. Her main research interest is in the history of early modern science and early modern philosophy, and more specifically in the history of Cartesianism and anti-Cartesianism in France. She also wrote papers concerned with the philosophy of science (e.g. on thought experiments or on mathematization) and with the history of philosophy of science (e.g. on Pierre Duhem, on Louis Couturat or on the so-called French historical epistemology). During the year 2021-22 she is a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

The latest details on the colloquium can be found here.

Meeting-ID: 650 8736 9704, Kenncode: 262112