A bit early on a Sunday morning, here's Lorraine Daston on preternatural philosophers, those sixteenth and seventeenth century philosophers who specialized in unpacking magical phenomena:
"Natural philosophy had its own traditional criterion of the marvelous, if not the rare: ignorance of causes provokes wonder, which in turn is the origin of philosophy. Conversely, knowledge of causes destroys wonder...the preternatural philosophers understood their mission in the most Aristotelian terms: to explain away wonder...theirs were to be the Herculean labors of a natural philosophy that quenched wonder with knowledge....on the other hand, preternatural philosophers were aficionados of wonder, their treatises overflowing with stories and examples that could and did find their ways into unabashedly popular compilations of marvels."
Daston's essay is a tale of the decline and fall of preternatural philosophy, a pursuit extinguished by the rise of natural science and the climate of Enlightenment rationalism in general. In the end, she tells us, preternatural philosophers are accused of simply making up many of the marvels they seek to debunk. And if it was true that this was sometimes the case, Daston tells us, their fictions were replaced by a completely different sort of fictionalizing. This is the moment in history when we see the emergence of descriptions of natural phenomena which, instead of focusing on the anamolous, omit incidences which might render the description baggy, inconclusive or contradictory. The wunderkammern are taken out of the front parlor and put in the back room; they no longer serve to display wondrous objects, but serve instead as the storage-locker for inconvenient phenomena. They are locked, and the key is frequently misplaced. Statistics are born.
12:16:35 PM 
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