Abstract

Peter Dear's brief survey of the Scientific Revolution joins a growing list of recently published books of the same sort, including my own. This proliferation is no bad thing. The subject is now so big that there is no one right way to summarize and characterize it. Dear's contribution, like each of the others I know about, makes one kind of sense of it, so that, taken together, they constitute a mosaic of useful understandings.Dear starts with the ancient Greeks and works up to the early eighteenth century, covering along the way both physical and life sciences, with the emphasis on the former. This is not a primer but an advanced, though brief, conspectus. The prose is clear and the arguments cogent, but the approach is sophisticated and demanding and requires some previous background. This is not a book for the beginner but for the initiated, and even the specialist may be engaged by it. Dear assists the reader by providing a brief bibliographical essay, a list of the thinkers discussed in the text, and a glossary of difficult terms.Dear concentrates on certain key thinkers and devotes little attention to others. Those on the A‐list include Aristotle, Paracelsus, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes , and Newton. Those who get much less coverage are Boyle and Pascal, for example, while Bruno, Campanella, Mersenne, Gassendi, and Wilkins are passed over with barely a mention.Certain themes are also emphasized and others neglected. Dear makes much of the impact of humanism on science but has less to say about such key issues as science and Protestantism or science and the English Revolution. In general, his account is distanced from the larger religious, social, and political contexts of science. Instead, what he gives us are the philosophical, rhetorical, and educational contexts in which scientists were trained and formulated their arguments. The famous confrontation between Hobbes and some of the leading Fellows of the Royal Society, for example, is reduced to a discussion of their differences over the nature and validity of experiments and how to arrive at demonstrative truth. This is fine as far as it goes, but it begs the important question of how the ideological differences between Hobbes and his opponents in the Royal Society reflected a crisis of order and authority in society at large.Dear's treatment has its strengths, of which I shall mention two that stand out for me. First, Dear shows how the Aristotelian framework in which medieval science was cast continued to operate both positively and negatively on the development of scientific argument throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Second, Dear's extended treatment of the development of Cartesian natural philosophy by both Descartes and his followers is a model of exposition. My only caution here is that Dear gives short shrift to Descartes's The Passions of the Soul, published not, as he says, in 1647 but in November 1649. Recently scholars, led by John Cottingham, have put this work at the center of Descartes's philosophical enterprise and shown that his science had two goals, that is, to make us not only “masters and possessors of nature” but also masters of ourselves, which would give us emotional and psychological self‐control. This a big theme, not just in Descartes but in early modern natural philosophy, and it deserves more attention in the textbooks.Dear writes with a gravitas befitting his subject but ends on a distinctly anachronistic note. His final sentence reads: “The modern world is much like the world envisaged by Francis Bacon.” But Bacon's science is sponsored by an autocratic state and is meant to be benevolently and systematically directed to the relief of human misery and want. As Bacon says, “the role of science is both to inquire [into nature] and to desire wisely” . This latter function—the wise desiring—is fundamental to the emergence of modern science but light years from the modern world I know and live in. One must look elsewhere than to Dear for this crucial side of the story