Associate Professor Ofer Gal

MA Tel Aviv University; PhD University of Pittsburgh
Room 434 Carslaw

+61 2 9351 3856

Ofer Gal works on the coming to being of science as practice and culture during the 17th century and on the on ontological foundations of its success since. He has written on the history of celestial mechanics and optics, on realism and constructivism, on Galileo, Newton, Descartes and Kepler.

Current projects

Ofer is currently working on two main projects, the first is entitled Baroque Science, in which he attempts to show that the success of late 17th century science was predicated, against common wisdom, on the assumption that nature is an imperfect machine and that mathematics, rather than allowing the submission of all phenomena to a small set of exact and universal laws, is a set of tools for creating human-size approximations. The other project is titled Empiricism and the Life Sciences in Early Modern Thought and is conducted with PhD candidate Alan Salter and APF Charles Wolfe. The project shows that the empiricism and experimentalism that modern science inherited from the 17th century have their origins in anatomy and physiology rather than mechanics, Aristotelian disputation rather than civil discourse, religiously motivated curiosity rather than stately benevolence; that their openness owes more to the public spectacle of the anatomy theatre than to the gentlemanly trust and that its primary source was not the teaching of Francis Bacon but to the anatomical practices of William Harvey.

Key Thinkers Lecture Series 2009

"Galileo on Free Fall"

• Interview about Galileo
• Galileo Lecture

Grants

• ARC Discovery Projects:
• “The Imperfection of the Universe: Music, Mathematics, Technology and the (Dis-) Order of Nature in Baroque Science” ($270,000 2006-2008)
• “The origins of scientific experimental practices: from the anatomical theatre to the conversations of the Royal Society” ($450, 000 2007-2010).

Selected publications

• Baroque Optics and The Disappearance of the Observer: From Kepler's Optics to Descartes Doubt. Journal of the History of Ideas 71:2 (2010) 191-217.
• Empiricism Without the Senses: How the Instrument Replaced the Eye. (The Body As Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science Springer Science:Dordrecht (2010) 121-147.
• “The Use and Non-Use of Mathematics: The Archaeology of the Inverse Square Law Part II” (With R. Chen-Morris). History of Science 44.1 (March 2006):49-68.
• “Hooke’s Programme: Final Thoughts.” Hunter, Michael and Michael Cooper (eds.) Robert Hooke: Tercentennial Studies. Aldershot: Ashgate (2006): 33-48.
• “The Invention of Celestial Mechanics.” Early Science and Medicine 10.4 (2005): 529-534.
• “Constructivism for Philosophers.” Perspectives 10.4 (2003): 523-549.
  Meanest Foundations and Nobler Superstructures: Hooke, Newton and the Compounding of the Celestial Motions of the Planets. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2002).
• “Tropes and Topics in Scientific Discourse: Galileo’s De Motu.” Science in Context 7.1 (1994); 25-52.

Areas of teaching and supervision

Teaching

• HPSC 2100: The Birth of Modern Science
• HPSC 3016: The Scientific Revolution
• HPSC 4101: Philosophy of Science
• HPSC 4103: Sociology of Science

Supervision

• History of Early Modern Science;
• Philosophy of Science and Technology;
• 17th Century History of Ideas.

Other professional contributions

Ofer is the Vice-President of the Australasian Association for the History and Philosophy of Science (AAHPSSS).