Robert Hooke's microscope: the epistemology of an instrument

Abstract

Robert Hooke's Micrographia of 1665 displayed the intricacies of tiny nature as they had not been seen before, and in doing so it represented a novel idea of the relationship between humans and the natural world. As this relationship shifted, so too did ideas about effective ways to gain knowledge, and even about the nature of knowledge itself. This epistemology is the topic of this thesis. I focus on Hooke's microscope examine his indelible contribution to the meaning of experiment and instrument use in natural philosophy. This approach complements existing Hooke scholarship, which focuses largely on his achievements with instruments, rather than his physical practice with them or his view of the knowledge his instruments themselves articulated. Micrographia was born of Hooke's ingenuity and skill at manipulating everything from lenses to light to insects, stabilised into a printed artifact. In 1665, the microscope was a relatively new instrument, and its use for natural philosophers was not obvious. To unpack the philosophical import that Hooke attached to his construction of knowledge, I examine his instrument in two main ways. First, I take his microscope apart to look into the materials that composed it and Hooke's techniques in manipulating them. Second, I discuss concepts of the microscope as they appeared in the writing of contemporaries such as Henry Power and Margaret Cavendish. From here I take a broader view, and situate Hooke's work both in a philosophical and an institutional context. Hooke was working in the wake of the revolution in optics sparked by Kepler and Descartes, at the height of the popularity of mechanical philosophy, and within the collaborative ideal of Baconian natural philosophy. These general themes, focused to a point by his microscope, revealed to Hooke the contingency of human experience, and the necessity to observe nature from contrived perspectives to approach philosophical knowledge