Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [12]
As these customs were beingworked out, the sciences were in turmoil. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, natural philosophy (loosely, the predecessor to science) was still distinct from the world of mechanical arts. It was a university enterprise, devoted to explaining routine natural processes by means of an Aristotelian causal analysis. It was qualitative (the mathematical sciences occupied a lower disciplinary level), discursive, and disputational. Between the discovery of the New World in the late fifteenth century and the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia in 1687, every aspect of this enterprise came under challenge, and most were overthrown. The claims of astronomers, mathematical practitioners, physicians, and natural magicians cast doubt not only on existing knowledge but also on the processes, personnel, and institutions that should be granted intellectual authority And outside the walls of the universities, itinerant practitioners laid claim to knowledge of nature that yielded not just talk, but power. Paracelsian and alchemical practitioners in particular advanced this remarkably ambitious notion of creativity. They represented the craftsman- not just the artist, but the humble miner, farmer, or baker- as almost godlike in his power to transform and renew. They made such peasant figures into agents of universal redemption, critical to the realization of Providence. More even than the great Italian Renaissance philosophers, theyvoiced a real transformation in the status of the laboring artisan who knew nature's powers by hard experience. This figure they made into an author of an extraordinarily ambitious kind- one who could transfigure, transmute, create.?
This was an extraordinarily radical challenge. It extended to basic notions of what knowledge was, who produced it, how it circulated, and why. Artisans produced a practical, powerful understanding that might not be written down but was nevertheless vital. It is only now that we are coming to appreciate once again the subtlety and richness ofwhat Pamela Smith justifiably calls "artisanal epistemology." It maywell be that we owe to this epistemology central elements in the concepts of invention and discovery that we have inherited from that period. These include accounts ofwhere new ideas come from, how they are distributed, and their relation to commerce, power, and personal virtue. For example, artisanal traditions posed the question of whether knowledge came as an infusion from God into an individual justified knower, or was capable of being produced by anyone of sufficient skill by cleaving to rules of method. This distinction implied radically opposed conceptions of the nature of discovery, of the transmission of knowledge, and of the very possibility that knowledge could be "stolen." And it was widely circulated in the vernacular, not in the Latin of the schools.
It was a time when learning itself lost its place. Not just artisans, but historians and surgeons, navigators and astronomers -all seemed newly mobile. Mathematical practitioners circulated from town to town, posting problems as challenges to all and sundry. A question of authority in knowledge thus arose and rapidly became acute. Whom should one regard as credible, and on what basis? Contemporaries of Paracelsus and Servetus liked to lament that learning had once resided in the universities, but that self-appointed authorities were now springing up everywhere, generating a dangerous profusion of rival claims leveled at disparate constituencies.
Aspirants to such authority drew upon one craft in particular to advance their claims: that of the printer. The press facilitated appeals beyond the cloister, at first to