This course studies cross-pollinations between literature, science, and philosophy in the formative period of modern scientific and literary cultures. We will ask what narrative perspective in Kepler’s early science fiction has to do with the Copernican Revolution in astronomy; how literature and philosophy explored the strange new worlds revealed by microscopes and telescopes; and why Newton and Goethe offered competing accounts of the nature of color. On this basis, we will consider how knowledge is formed and how, why, and whether it was necessary for the humanities and the sciences to go their separate ways as two distinct cultures.
