Spinoza and Mechanical Infinities

The Mechanically Bound Infinite I want to respond to Corry Shores’ wonderful incorporation of my Spinoza Foci  research into his philosophical project (which has a declaimed Deleuzian/Bergsonian direction). It feels good to have one’s own ideas put in the service of another’s productive thoughts. You come to realize something more about what you were thinking. [...]

Evidence toward the nature of Spinoza’s Lathe(s)

Writing an email today to an interested party I found myself running over the evidence that Spinoza used either a hand driven lens-grinding lathe, or one of the springpole variety, such as the Hevelius lathe (Selenographia, 1647). It seemed best to briefly summarize them hear, as though the evidence is scant, it is not non-existent. [...]

The 1661 Technique of “Glass Drops”, a Possible Link to Bead Lens Microscopes

Robert Hooke published a very brief account of the technique for the making of bead lenses, by melting little threads of glass until they balled up. Such minute glass balls could then be ground into spherical lenses which required very short focal lengths, but in the hands of a master such as van Leeuwenhoek, produced [...]

Govert Bidloo’s 1698 Reference to a Spinoza Microscope

No Second Spinoza Scope For those that have been following my thought process and research, for a brief moment I believed we may have found another user of a Spinoza microscope, Govert Bidloo in a 1698 open letter to van Leeuwenhoek on the nature of the flatworm parasite F. hepatica. Unfortunately in looking at the [...]

Govert Bidloo, A Spinoza Microscopist?

[Addendum, September 10th: in looking at the full text of the letter referenced below, indeed Bidlow did NOT use a Spinoza microscope, but was only referencing Kerckring's use as well as his observations on the limitations of the microscope. I keep the post up though, to preserve the thought process of a deadend of research, for [...]

Simple or Compound: Spinoza’s Microscopes

Smaller Objective Lenses Produce Finer Representations A very suggestive clue to the kinds of microscopes Spinoza may have produced is Christiaan Huygens’ admission to his brother Constantijn in a May 11 1667 letter that Spinoza was right in one regard, that smaller objective lenses do produce finer images. This has been cited by Wim Klever [...]

The Simple Microscope in the Hands of Van Leeuwenhoek and Huygens

Spinoza’s Microscopology: a prospective comparison of context It strikes me that there is a subtle, yet important contrast between the single lens microscope that Christiaan Huygens ended up offering by the Fall of 1678 and the design which was consistently used by Van Leeuwenhoek, a contrast that points up a branching out of conception of the relationship between instrument [...]

Huygens Appropriation Further Notes and Complications

More Notes on Huygens’s New Microscope Having now read Marian Fournier’s “Huygens’ Designs for a Simple Microscope” (1989) the extended hypothesis that Christiaan Huygens was somehow aided in his quick production of a “new microscope” by the grinding techniques that may have been found in the purchase of equipment from Spinoza’s estate, suffers complication. This is [...]

On the Issue of Clarity and Light: Van Leeuwenhoek’s Lenses

Because the grinding of a droplet-made spherical lens can increase the clarity of the glass in use, and as this reflects upon the hypothesis that Spinoza’s equipment may have rendered Christiaan Huygens’ new microscope more feasible, and considering the fact the known users of glass-bead lenses – Van Leeuwenhoek, Hudde and Hooke did grind them – we add the testament [...]

Did the Huygenses “buy” Spinoza’s lens polishing technique?

The Meteoric Rise of Huygens’s Microscope The following is an exercise in historical imagination, only meant to elicit what is possible from what we know. Perhaps a fiction bent towards fact. Wim Klever has brought to my attention a detail which sheds some light upon the possible lens polishing techniques Spinoza employed. Admittedly the connective tissue for [...]