Artisans and Their Philosophers: Leibniz and Hooke Coordinate Minds, Metal, and Wood
Artisans and Their Philosophers: Leibniz and Hooke Coordinate Minds, Metal, and Wood
This chapter investigates Leibniz’s relationship to skilled labor in the conception and creation of his calculating machines. It shows Robert Hooke and Leibniz working to organize and coordinate the skills and knowledge of others. These cases reveal no stable, strict hierarchy between inventor and artisan, creator and implementer, between intellectual and manual labor. Despite a lifetime of effort and a small fortune, Leibniz never produced a machine deemed functional; the challenge of making machine inflected his philosophical reflections on the value of practical knowledge.
Keywords: calculating machines, seventeenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Robert Hooke, Ollivier, labor history, tacit knowledge, thinking matter
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