John Theophilus Desaguliers

a newtonian between the patronage and the market relations

Abstract

The focus of the present article is the intellectual trajectory of John Theophilus Desaguliers who was the Curator or “Official Experimenter” of the Royal Society of London and became a pioneer in the divulgation of Newtonianism and the most respected English independent lecturer of Mechanical and Experimental Philosophy in the first half of eighteenth century. His personal trajectory reflected, in some sense, the crossroad of Modern Science and many learned people who were advocating or divulgating it, being in the middle of a transition process from an aristocratic society, based on nobility values and patronage relations, to a new capitalist society established on the production and consumption of material and cultural goods which adopted more and more the nature of merchandises.