Prologue: Solving The Problem of The Scientific Revolution

prologue
solving the problem of the scientific revolution
The affairs of the Empire of letters are in a situation in which they never were and
never will be again; we are passing now from an old world into the new world,
and we are working seriously on the first foundation of the sciences.1
Dom Robert Desgabets OSB, 18 September 1676
Around 1600 the pursuit of nature-knowledge was radically transformed. This happened
in Europe over the course of a few decades, and our modern science is what grew out of
the event. The transformation and its immediate aftermath have for quite some time been
known as the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. In a book published in 1994, The
Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry, Isubjected to critical scrutiny some sixty
views on the event selected from the vast literature for their boldly creative, interpretive
sweep. I nowpresent my own view. It has taken shape in critical dialogue with those sixty
and several more-recent interpretations and also with many more narrowly focused studies.
In good measure, it also rests upon firsthand familiarity with the subject. In the final chapter
of my historiographical book I presented a preliminary sketch of my own budding view.
That sketch has served me well as a stepping-stone, but my thinking has taken many a new
turn in the meantime. I hereby discard that final chapter, with thanks for the encouragement
it once gave me.
In tracing over time a range of events which culminated in 17th-century Europe, I seek
answers to two basic questions. The first is: How did modern science come into the world,
and (as part of that question) why did this happen in Europe rather than in China or in
Islamic civilization? The other question is: Why did this 17th-century breakthrough in the
pursuit of knowledge about nature instigate the as-yet-unbroken chain of scientific growth
that we are wont to take for granted in our own time, four centuries later? Why did it not
peter out, as every previous period of florescence suggests it very well might have? In short,
the questions this book claims to resolve are whence the onset, and whence the original staying
power, of modern science?
On the first question, the principal point I shall be concerned to make is that modern
science came into the world by way of a threefold transformation. Transformed in revolutionary fashion were three mutually very different and also very much separate modes
of acquiring knowledge about nature. The mathematical portion of the Greek corpus of
Cohen How Modern science.indd 15
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nature-knowledge, after several centuries of reception and enrichment in Islamic civilization and then in Renaissance Europe, was unpredictably turned by Galileo and by Kepler
into the beginnings of an ongoing process of mathematization of nature experimentally
sustained. Another portion of the Greek corpus, the speculative, contained four distinct,
rival systems of natural philosophy, with Aristotles paramount. It was replaced, at the instigation of Descartes and other corpuscularian thinkers, by a natural philosophy of atomist
provenance that was decisively reinforced by a novel conception of motion broadly similar
to Galileos. Thirdly, a specifically European-colored mode of investigation intent upon accurate description and practical application that had arisen by the mid-15th century began
to consolidate around 1600, under the aegis of Francis Bacons calls for a general reform of
nature-knowledge, into a fact-finding, practice-oriented mode of experimental science.
Thus, the onset of the Scientific Revolution yielded three distinct modes of natureknowledge of a kind that the world had never seen. If we wish to understand how modern
science could arrive in the world, we must ask how, around 1600, these three almost simultaneous transformations could come about. Most answers to be given here are specific to
each distinct case of revolutionary transformation. Insofar as answers pertain to the question of why in Europe and not elsewhere? they hinge on a comparison between Greek and
Chinese nature-knowledge and on a historical theory of upswing, downturn, and chances
for refreshment yielded by feats of cultural transplantation all of which I unfold in a foundational first chapter. If, next, we wish to understand how kernels of recognizably modern
science2 managed to stay in the world once they had arrived there, we ought to note first
that their very survival was a close call by midcentury the revolutionary movement was
undergoing a veritable crisis of legitimacy. But, rather than losing momentum for good, a
new political climate and the emergence, by the early 1660s, of an ideology for innovative
nature-knowledge allowed the movement to regain pace. Three distinct driving forces propelled it forward. One was a specific dynamics built into the 17th-century practice of mathematization of nature experimentally sustained; another was a similar yet characteristically
different dynamics built into the 17th-century practice of fact-finding experimentation. And
I shall make a case for a midcentury event that has so far not been conceptualized at all. This
is the unprecedented breaking down of barriers between the Galilean, the Cartesian, and
the Baconian modes of nature-knowledge, leading in the 1660s to mid-1680s to three more
revolutionary transformations marked by hugely productive mutual interaction. In sum, the
Scientific Revolution of the 17th century may fruitfully be regarded, not as one monolithic
event, but rather as being made up of six distinct revolutionary transformations, each of
some twenty to at most thirty years duration.
So much by way of an outline of the argument to be unfolded in the present book in the
format of an ongoing, chronological narrative.
To any reader professional historian of science or not, student or not the book has a
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story to tell. Between ancient Greece and Newtons Principia and Opticks it covers the major
episodes and the major figures (also numerous minor ones). I take pains to avoid jargon
and to present successive issues as clearly and simply as I can. Details not directly relevant to
the story line (e.g., biographical data that go beyond the brief characterization or the telling
anecdote) are left out. Even so, the book builds its message up from a long concatenation of
topics, and my detailed treatment of certain issues may tax the patience of the nonprofessional. For over and above its providing a story, this book is meant to be an argument. It is
directed in the first place at convincing my co-professionals in the history of science that the
conception here unfolded of how modern science came into the world is worth considering
in earnest. In view of how history-of-science writing has developed over the past decades,
this may not be an easy task it runs up against an ingrained skepticism concerning the very
questions I now claim to have resolved.
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The historiography of the Scientific Revolution: Past and present state

The concept of the Scientific Revolution was coined in the 1930s, as one product of a major
historiographical overhaul that took place between the mid-1920s and the early 1950s. It was
meant to identify a period in European history that covers roughly the second half of the
16th and almost all of the 17th century (i.e., between Copernicus and Newton) as marking
a uniquely radical, conceptual upheaval out of which modern science emerged essentially
as we still know it. This view quickly began to be articulated in the budding profession of
historians of science. It did so in ways that turned the previously customary listing of one
heroic scientific achievement after another into the careful reconstruction of such conceptual knots as those individuals who brought the Scientific Revolution about actually faced
and strove to disentangle.
Out of the concept-focused mode of history writing thus emerging came a range of
pathbreaking narratives. These shared, at a minimum, a focus on how the once self-evident
conception of our Earth as a stable body at the center of the cosmos gave way to the core of
the modern worldview the Earth and the other planets placed in a solar system, itself a tiny
portion of an infinite universe. The major vehicle to bring about this fundamental reversal,
along with several other major, closely related accomplishments (a new conception of motion; deliberate creation of void space), was held to be a quickly expanding process of mathematization of nature. By this was meant the subjection of increasing ranges of empirical
phenomena to mathematical treatment in ways suitable as a rule to experimental testing.
Key figures in the process were held to be Copernicus, as the man first to compute down to
the required detail planetary trajectories in a Sun-centered setting; Kepler, as the man first to
turn Copernicus setup into a previously unthinkable celestial physics leading to his discov-
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ery of the planets elliptical paths; Galileo, as the man first to mathematize with success a significant terrestrial phenomenon (falling and projected bodies) in an effort to counter major
objections to Copernicus setup; Descartes, as the man first to conceive of the universe and
of the particle-governed mechanisms at work in it mathematically; Newton, as the man to
cap the whole development by uniting terrestrial and celestial physics in his mathematically
exact, empirically sustained conception of universal gravitation. Not that these men and
their principal accomplishments were taken to represent all there really was to the Scientific
Revolution. Still, for decades historians were inclined to treat other noteworthy attainments
of a modern-scientific nature, such as Harveys discovery of the circulation of the blood or
Boyles chemical-testing procedures, as by-products, somehow, of the major development.
Starting in the 1960s, a range of perspectives was introduced that led to a widening of
this master narrative. Our history-of-science forebears unreflectively identified the presentday definition and classification of scientific disciplines with their apparent 17th-century
counterparts. This habit has been given up in favor of a still-increasing awareness that what
we now call mechanics, for example, scarcely had a counterpart in the early 17th century, so
different, and differently aligned, was the intellectual context in which problems of motion
used to be considered from the ancient Greeks onward. Even science as a general expression
is on its way out. It carries too many associations far removed from 17th-century realities
(e.g., the professional identity of scientist is a term of the 19th century, not earlier).
Further, research subjects and/or people previously left wholly or partly in the margins
have come to be included in the narrative. Examples are subjects that (at the time) were nonmathematical and chiefly descriptive, like magnetism and illness; subjects that are scarcely
practiced anymore, like musical science, and/or are held under grave suspicion, like alchemy; but also previously neglected contributors not of the first or even quite the second rank
(e.g., hosts of ably experimenting Jesuits).
Most important of all, the goal of putting the history of scientific ideas in institutional
and other sociocultural contexts has become a fixture of most articles and books on the
subject. History writing in the vein of this major thinker brought this particular conceptual breakthrough about, then that thinker that one has not come to an end, but a sense
has emerged that a proper understanding of scientific accomplishment requires an awareness of how it was situated in time and place. In this way, for example, we have learned of
the considerable extent to which practitioners depended upon Europes patronage market.
Also, an influential argument has been made for a constitutive link between the contested
viability of instrument-aided experimentation per se as articulated in Boyles and Hobbes
early-1660s dispute over the void and the politics of the Stuart Restoration. As a result, local
particularity has in recent decades been gaining the upper hand over the universal validity
claimed with ever diminishing vigor for the most seminal outcomes of the Scientific Revolution. One genuine accomplishment of this context-oriented approach is a greater concern
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for the day-to-day practice of experimental research and for the trustworthiness of results
so attained. Another has been a heightened sense that there is room for contingency in the
story not everything that happened was bound to happen, or was bound to happen the
way it did happen. Historians of science have further become aware that there were more
significant reasons for contemporary perceptions of modern-science-in-the-making as innately strange and disturbing than sheer backwardness and/or superstition.
With regard to the concept of the Scientific Revolution, the net effect of this plurality
of mostly productive, novel viewpoints has been resignation. What numerous historians of
science have in the meantime given up is not, to be sure, the ongoing production of novel interpretations of episodes in 17th-century science but the very idea that, deeply underneath the
surface of individual events, something identifiable holds so complex a series of events together.
And it is certainly true that a once-enlightening yet too one-sided formula like Scientific
Revolution = mathematization of nature can no longer be accepted. But is this conclusion
tantamount to giving up the quest for underlying coherence altogether?
In everyday practice, it surely is. True, publishers keep inviting authors to produce texts
for the classroom. The dozen or so up-to-date surveys to result from such requests are of as
great a use to the students taught therefrom as they are vital for the health of the profession.
But inevitably they obey a format that precludes a concentrated effort to seek an underlying
coherence.
The reigning atmosphere of skeptical resignation does not, to be sure, stem solely from
the manifold perspectives brought to bear upon the Scientific Revolution over the past decades or solely from a despair-inducing sense of the ever more apparent complexity of the
event. Resignation stems in perhaps equal measure from the apparent elusiveness of all those
big why? questions once raised about the origins of modern science. The causal adventure,
enthusiastically embarked upon in the 1930s, has ended in failure and disillusion. Starting in
the 1980s it has gradually petered out. But should it have?
The difficulty with much causal debate at the time rested neither in its vivacity nor in
the vital nature of the questions asked but rather in the peculiar habit historians of science
acquired to investigate them. Efforts at explanation almost invariably took shape as a thesis,
usually named after the historian to put it forward, about the one and only, all-encompassing cause of the Scientific Revolution. The Zilsel thesis explained the Scientific Revolution
through an alleged, early-17th-century closing of the perennial gap between scholars and
craftsmen. The Merton thesis was made by adherents and opponents alike to explain the Scientific Revolution through the contemporary adoption of Puritan values in a capitalist setting. The Yates thesis explained the Scientific Revolution as the next step both extending and
opposing a magical worldview of Hermeticist origin. The Duhem thesis explained the Scientific Revolution as a 14th-century revolt against Aristotle. The Eisenstein thesis explained the
Scientific Revolution through Europes move from script to print. And such piling up of ex-
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planations went on and on, without much exchange taking place between adherents over the
respective merits of these theses, each of which was shown by acute critics to fail to clinch
the all-encompassing case made for it. It is small wonder that explanatory habits so unsubtle
have in the end induced a sense of resignation. True, Thomas S. Kuhn once proposed to cut
such causal theses down to size by restricting their scope to one identifiable portion of the
Scientific Revolution rather than to the whole of innovative 17th-century science. And in my
historiographical book I broadened his constructive proposal into a plea for judicious combination and cross-fertilization leading to consciously applied transformation of available
conceptions of the Scientific Revolution.3 But the drift of history writing has gone in another
direction that of giving up the causal quest altogether.
The message that such a posture of resignation manifestly conveys to outside scholarship is that the advent of modern science a decisive event in world history, really the most
outstanding among prime motors of our modern world was in effect due to chance. But,
as the great pioneer of cross-culturally comparative history of science Joseph Needham remarked in another context, to attribute the origin of modern science entirely to chance is
to declare the bankruptcy of history as a form of enlightenment of the human mind.4 He
made the point half a century ago. As globalization gains pace by the day, scholars from
other venues want to understand even more than they already have why modern science
arose in Europe rather than in any of the other great civilizations of the past. Scholars from
other venues have a manifest and rightful interest in being presented with accounts of how
modern science arose and fared in Europe that seek and find coherent pattern and order in
the event other than by arranging an array of episodes to meet the needs of the classroom.
Nor are historians of science compelled by any necessity to keep their fellow scholars
waiting. A great deal of material, as well as numerous partial interpretations of penetrating profundity, is ready to hand to seek solutions to the big questions involved. No more
is required for bringing these materials and these interpretations to bear upon them than
a determination to shake off the reigning sense of resignation and to rethink from scratch
ways and means to go about such a quest. No return to the ways of the forefathers is desired
or even possible who cares any longer for a monolithic answer? Instead, we must inspect
our toolkit all over again and refresh it from the bottom up. Here is how I have done it.
The toolkit
First and foremost, this book is meant to be analytical. I have sought to make storytelling
and analysis go well together; but wherever I had to choose, analysis has prevailed. What,
then, does the writing of what may be called analytical history actually entail?
Not only in the natural but also in most human sciences as also in philosophy, clear-cut
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conceptualization is a cardinal requirement. A failure to define ones concepts sharply and

to delineate ones theories and hypotheses carefully causes the investigation to go astray. But
historians tend to avoid clear-cut conceptualization. We seem to be happiest keeping our
concepts a bit fuzzy. Many academics philosophers and sociologists at the forefront uncharitably ascribe what they regard as our mindless fact-grinding to a congenital lack of capability for abstract thought (history is sociology with the brains left out). There are some
good reasons for the apparently lax habit, though. The prime commodity we are uniquely
dealing in is change over time. But change over time cannot be captured well by means of
fixed concepts imposed upon a subject in flux. If the concepts selected to handle it are just
modern ones projected back upon the past, the investigation tends to end in presentism
(anachronistic accounts written as if history were destined to move toward some preordained end finally attained in modern times). Also, a gap between the facts reported and the
concepts invoked to capture them is bound to remain. If, on the other hand, the concepts
selected are confined to those employed by ones protagonists themselves (so-called actors
categories), the historian robs himself of the enhanced understanding that flows from his
privilege to look beyond the temporal horizon to which his subjects were inevitably confined. Indeed, maintaining some conceptual fuzziness provides the middle way needed here.
But conceptual fuzziness is not a virtue in itself. One may easily slip into giving ones
key terms a multiplicity of meanings, which is as unreflective as it is confusing. Insofar as
conceptual fuzziness exceeds the exigencies of the historians inevitable predicament, then,
it ought to be combated. That is, we should seek to make our concepts as clear-cut as our
sense of the past its manifold complexity, the sheer richness and endless variety of human
life over time allows us.
To the extent that historians are sensitive to philosophers and sociologists condescension toward our ingrained methods of dealing with concepts, they often seek to mimic those
other disciplines, borrow a conceptual apparatus there, adopt it wholesale, and inform accordingly the historical tale to be told. One major example is how social-constructivist conceptions that in the 1980s emerged from work in the philosophy and the sociology of present-day scientific knowledge were adopted in certain accounts of 17th-century episodes in
nature-knowledge. Thus imported, the conceptual apparatus served as a useful searchlight
that nonetheless turned history-of-science writing into a battle scene for ideological contests
of questionable relevance to the core business of the historian to make sense of past events
in their otherness from, and in their likeness to, our present-day concerns.
Sensitive likewise to a preference for restricting fuzziness of concept formation and theory building to the minimum that our predicament as historians dooms us to, I have sought
in the present book for a solution other than parachuting a ready-made conceptual apparatus smack into the premodern world. Avoiding presentist categories as much as an a priori
limitation to actors categories while also refraining from squeezing the facts of history into
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concepts imported wholesale from elsewhere, I have found myself exploring a process perhaps best called conceptualization as we move along.
In the writing of history, pattern must be discerned, not imposed. Wishing neither to
press my causal accounts into preset conceptual schemata nor, on the rebound, to refrain
from conceptualization altogether, Ihave coined my concepts and conceived the historical theories that bind them together as I went along, in ongoing dialogue with the empirical material I
found myself handling at every stage. Dialogue is the key word here. This ongoing process of
concept formation and theory building has not been inductive only as if facts could ever
speak for themselves. The process has been deductive as well, insofar as I have selected the
facts to go into the making of these concepts and theories with such broad conceptions in
mind as work on my historiographical book had alerted me to. Also, in the course of my historiographical inquiries I have found certain fertile conceptualizations of numerous authors
(e.g., Joseph Ben-David, Thomas S. Kuhn, Richard S. Westfall) that with a little adaptation
proved well suited for pressing my analyses further.
As far as I can tell, the procedure here followed is an uncommon one, and it seems advisable to mark it. Wherever in the book that follows I have solidified my factual material into
concepts and theories by means of this partly inductive, partly deductive process, I have put
the reader on the alert by inserting the term Theory in the titles of the relevant sections.
Chapter I, where I discuss the problem of decline and develop one of the key concepts of
part I, cultural transplantations, abounds with conceptualizations of this kind.
Part of the effort at reconceptualization requires our aligning anew the world history of
science. It is time to replace the still customary, Eurocentric periodization of the history of
science. In a globalizing world it is growing more obsolete by the day. It also stands squarely
in the way of resolving the question of why modern science emerged in Europe and not
elsewhere.
Here is the easy answer to that hoary question. The adventure of science started in the
West, namely, in ancient Greece, and (but for a holding action by the Arabs) the adventure
has always remained of the West, namely, of Europe, where what the Greeks began was destined to come to full fruition. This broad view of things has been reiterated often, and there
is no easy way to refute it squarely. Still, that something is amiss with the West-centered
view so readily taken for granted by preceding generations is suggested by the one apparent
anomaly it contains suddenly nature-knowledge turns up in Islamic civilization and then
just as suddenly vanishes from the story without leaving a trace. Thus, the West-centered
view implies that the entire development from the Greeks up to and including the rise of
modern science was of the West, yet somehow not quite. This chink in the armor is accompanied by another: the broad picture rests upon an underlying presupposition about Greece
itself, which is that ancient Greece is where the West took shape. And indeed, values and
viewpoints that go back to ancient Greece have gone into the making of European civiliza-
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tion right from its inception in Carolingian times. Yet ever since the 19th century, not only
has some sort of identification with Greece been made in European, especially in German
and British, historical thought, but this identification has been carried one step further: the
Greeks came to look very much like 19th-century Germans or Britons. Almost, the Greeks
were already us, and the sole task left to Europeans was to take the final step and become
truly us. Historians of ancient Greece have since broken with this still deeply ingrained picture and have sought to draw a different one that stresses, not so much the extent to which
ancient Greece was already like Western Europe, but rather its radical otherness.
However one-sided and overdrawn that new picture of Greece was, it did provide a
healthy corrective to a conception of the West that still lingers in historians everyday thinking, the thinking of historians of science definitely included. The obvious way to overcome
it is to reconceive of the issue in a world-historical setting. Two book-length efforts have so
far been made to provide such a setting.
In The Geography of Science (1991) Harold Dorn outlines a world-historical panorama
that in effect underwrites the standard view. Science, he argues, used to be cultivated in one
of two possible ways. The state-run, narrowly utilitarian type of science is characteristic of
civilizations that depended on techniques of water management and on the organized mass
labor force needed to keep it going. The contrasting type of science is largely autonomous,
curiosity driven, and unconnected to any state or statelike structure. It marks those rare
civilizations that are set in temperate climes with regular and moderate rainfall leading to an
even spread of sufficient water the principal incentive for the power monopoly of a central
state is lacking here. Before modern times, Dorn argues, the bureaucracy-dominated type of
science was the rule. In this alignment Greece and Western Europe appear as the sole cases
of the latter type, against Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Islamic civilization, India, the empire
of the Khmer, and a range of pre-Columbian civilizations.
In The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (1993), Toby E. Huff tries
out another alignment of the world history of science. He treats the science of China, of
Islamic civilization, and of medieval Europe as three by and large independent units of comparative analysis to show how the indispensable conditions for modern science that first
emerged in medieval Europe grew to full maturity in early-modern Europe.
Both alignments miss the profound similarity of nature-knowledge in Islamic civilization and Renaissance Europe in both it stemmed from what survived of the Greek corpus,
subsequently to be enriched in quite similar ways. So my own alignment as unfolded in the
present book runs as follows. I start with the Greeks (whose approach I contrast with that of
the Chinese, albeit from a more content-oriented point of view than Dorns treatment). In
books dedicated to the Scientific Revolution Greece provides an unusual point of departure.
E.J. Dijksterhuis Mechanization of the World Picture (1950) is the only exception; most others
confine themselves to 17th-century Europe or take their point of departure in the European
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Middle Ages or in 1543 (in view of Copernicus and Vesalius revolution-inducing books
appearing in that year). In the alignment that governs my account, Greece brings forth a
definitely nonmodern corpus of nature-knowledge that (unlike its Chinese counterpart)
was enabled by certain military events to be revived and enriched three times in succession:
in Islamic civilization, in medieval Europe, and all over again (a crucial insight that I owe to
Noel M. Swerdlow and to P.L. Rose) in Renaissance Europe. In this alignment, medieval Europe no longer serves as the preparatory stage, a role still customarily ascribed to it. Medieval
Europe appears instead as the exceptional case of the three, in that this time the revival of
the Greek corpus was a highly curtailed one and, as such, not only unrepresentative but also
doomed to remain locked in its own framework. I shall further demonstrate that although
the two other recipients, Islamic civilization and, later, Renaissance Europe, adopted, appropriated, and then creatively enriched the Greek corpus almost independently, the two have
enough in common to make for fruitful historical comparison.
In thus replacing a unidirectional alignment with a concatenation of episodes of structural comparability, I throw open the gates to a full-scale comparative approach. As the
motor of historical thinking,5 comparison is indispensable for coming to grips with the big
questions I seek to resolve. The historical comparisons consistently undertaken here come
in three kinds.
I compare how nature-knowledge was pursued in a variety of civilizational settings. For
example, I make a range of comparisons between certain well-circumscribed aspects of nature-knowledge in Islamic civilization and in Renaissance Europe.
I further compare the outcomes of certain pursuits of nature-knowledge considered over
time within a single civilization (Europe in particular). For instance, I compare Newton to
Huygens and Hooke on a range of concerns shared between them, with a view to explaining
what enabled Newton in the end to transcend conceptual boundaries still maintained by his
farthest-seeing elder rivals.
But I also compare roughly simultaneous events with each other. One example is a sustained comparison between three notorious 17th-century cases of perceived sacrilege and
consequent persecution Galileo versus the Inquisition and the pope; Descartes versus the
university and the city council of Utrecht; French Cartesians versus their king and their
archbishop. The comparison has enabled me to disclose a specific pattern of contested authority amounting to a looming crisis of legitimacy for nature-knowledge all over the Continent.
Meanwhile the question is, can the outcomes of such comparisons still satisfy the rules
of empirical scholarship, or are they too speculative for that?
As historians guardians of the unique and the unrepeatable we tend to view comparative approaches to the past with deep and abiding suspicion. We do so in particular when the
comparison is between Western and nonWestern civilizations. We do so even more when
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the comparison is between what did happen (e.g., the Scientific Revolution in 17th-century
Europe) and what did not happen but allegedly might have (a broadly similar Scientific Revolution elsewhere, at another time).
All kinds of objections have been raised against comparative research, particularly of the
first, cross-cultural type. Some are methodological; for example, how broadly similar may an
event be allowed to be for it still to count as similar at all? Or, what can one possibly learn from
events that never took place? How can one argue that some events might have taken place even
though probably with good reason in historical reality they didnt? In other words, is there
room in history for the category of the possibleyetunreal? Other objections are cultural; for
example, does not the very act of raising the question of why only the West originated modern
science already bespeak an undue sense of Western superiority? Still other objections are about
the nature of science; for example, can one properly speak of nonWestern scientific traditions? Or (with the thrust reversed), what is so special about Western science in the first place?
Other criticisms are just practical; for example, how many languages and how many scientific
traditions must one master before being entitled to compare nonWestern and Western science with each other? That is, must one not be wellnigh superhuman to address such questions in a productive manner? And to be even more practical: is it not the case that the very
failure of precisely such an almost superhuman figure to wit, Joseph Needham to come up
in the end with a convincing answer to his selfstyled question of why Europe created modern
science whereas China did not, show the futility of such questions?
In my historiographical book I seized on Needhams and others pioneering work in
cross-cultural comparative history of science to ponder such skeptical questions at length.
In the present book I prefer to demonstrate rather than argue all over again that (despite all
the traps that Needham-the-bold-pioneer fell into) there are ways to make cross-cultural
comparisons produce viable insights insights, moreover, that can be gained by no other means.
Not that I fancy my own results to be definitive in any way. No one individuals can be. Not
even to a historian of Needhams astonishing breadth is it given to attain a sufficiently deep
knowledge of so many culturally and linguistically distinct traditions. This is especially true
since specialists in traditions such as the Chinese and the Islamic have abstained so far from
providing nonspecialists with handy, chronologically arranged, reliably sources-based survey histories and also tend to disagree among themselves rather forcefully, making it hard for
the sympathetic outsider to decide between specific interpretations. So what we need is not
just one but a plurality of historians to do the comparing the more, the better. For so much
is certain that (as Toby Huff phrased it) viewed from a comparative and civilizational point
of view, the rise of modern science appears quite different than it does when seen exclusively
as an intraEuropean movement.6
In regard to my second and third types of historical comparison I further add that the
comparative method forms one effective antidote to the historians venial sin of presentism. It
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makes it possible to determine, again and again, what was new and different, in a manner that
does not look back from the present but rather builds things up from a deeper past which then
serves as the proper touchstone. Finally, and most importantly, such determination of what, at
any given time and place, was truly new and different is indispensable if one wishes not just to
analyze things but also to explain them.
One brief textbook excepted (John Henrys The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of
Modern Science of 1997), there is no book-length treatment of the Scientific Revolution in
which description and interpretation are intertwined with explanations of what is being
described and interpreted. In the few books where attempts at explanation are undertaken at
all, this is done by inserting a causal chapter that, inevitably, falls into the trap of seeking to
explain the Scientific Revolution whole, as one monolithic unit. Equally inevitably, no cause
or causes then appear to match so sizable and complex an event, thus contributing to the
sense of resignation I have deplored above.
In the present book I interweave analysis and explanation in the following manner. As
just set forth, the analysis proceeds by way of comparison, and this is what yields my explananda those components of the full story that require explanation. Next, I seek with
care and precision to match each distinct explanandum with its specific explanation or explanations. The operative causal mechanism invoked to link the explanandum to the explanation must be shown in each case to be causal indeed that is, not just linked arbitrarily
to the explanandum but able to clarify how what did happen could happen. One example
of how to refrain from monolithic theses without missing what light these may still shed
upon specific events is that I do not invoke the replacement of script by print as a catchall cause of the Scientific Revolution, in the way pioneered in 1979 by Elisabeth L. Eisenstein. Rather, I ask at each stage of the Scientific Revolution and its Renaissance prehistory
whether events were such as to require the printing press, or whether these might just as
well have taken place in a script culture. Here sustained comparison with Islamic civilization
provides ready-made empirical material to explore. I similarly treat the accomplishment of
the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution in a vein of sustained comparison with the extent
to which their immediate predecessors had prepared the way. This, and this alone, enables
the historian to determine with sufficient precision what actually was transformed and how
radical the transformation was, as an indispensable preliminary to the causal inquiry.
The multicausal plurality that goes with my partly inductive, one-at-a-time procedure
runs the risk of leading to undue fragmentation. To alleviate it I have at several places (pp.
271, 284, 599) taken care to draw my findings together. The outcome confirms my hunch
that some underlying coherence to the Scientific Revolution can indeed be realistically
detected.
Operative causal mechanisms may come in several varieties not just one mode of explanation is being applied here. Notably, the causal mechanism central to my argument in
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prologue
parts I and II rests in a conception of latent developmental possibilities unfolding under the xxvii
impact of certain events that I have dubbed cultural transplantations the transfer, that is,
of an entire body of knowledge to a civilization not previously touched by it (p. 45). Behind
the scene of my frequent invocation of this particular mode of explaining historical events
and episodes lurks a definite conception of history. Three passages (one quoted from a great
literary author, the others from two great historians of the 20th century) express or at least
intimate the conception of history that seems to me most appropriate for doing justice to
the flow of human events:
[Milan Kundera (1992)]: Man is bound to advance through the fog. But when he looks back
to judge those who lived before him, he fails to detect any fog on their path. From his present,
which was their far-away future, the path looks to him entirely clear, visible over its full extension. He can see the path, he can see the people who advance, but the fog is no longer there.7
[Franois Furet (1995):] No understanding of our age is possible if we do not liberate ourselves
from the illusion of necessity: The [20th] century is not explicable (insofar as it is at all) if we
fail to acknowledge all that was unforeseeable about it.8
[Hugh Trevor-Roper (1998):] History is not merely what happened: it is what happened in the
context of what might have happened. Therefore it must incorporate, as a necessary element,
the might-have-beens.9
In the view of history that I adopt here, the past, as also the present, displays a blend of
situational logic and contingency. There are linkages rigorously concatenated over time and
unfolding with apparent inexorability; but what looks inexorable may at unforeseeable moments be overthrown by something itself unforeseeable. Events are neither wholly predetermined nor just a matter of chance. As for the Scientific Revolution, we must keep in mind
that it was neither miraculous (i.e., beyond explanation) nor foreordained (i.e., bound to
happen regardless). I shall even argue (p. 71) that one particular Scientific Revolution (or at
least the onset thereof) that never occurred may revealingly be incorporated in my account
as, indeed, a might-have-been.
To the extent that the actual Scientific Revolution and the fog-covered path toward it can
be subjected to explanatory analysis, then, we must define with care what our unit of analysis is going to be. For this is the one piece of conceptual apparatus that cannot be developed
as we go along, in dialogue with our factual material. It must be established at the outset;
that is, right here.
Ongoing historization of the past of science has made nearly unfeasible a practice that
we were once accustomed to apply without even pausing: organizing our historical accounts
in accordance with present-day disciplines. But Aristotle and Galileo were not two experts in
mechanics, with the main difference between them that the former had it mostly wrong and
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xxviii the latter had it almost right. Even though moving objects were a significant shared concern,
the assumption that they worked in the same discipline is bound to mislead rather than enlighten Aristotle was a philosopher and, as such, sought to grasp the totality of the world,
whereas Galileo, in the mathematicians customary way, deliberately operated in a piecemeal
fashion. Prior to the 19th century, disciplines in their present-day alignment can hardly ever
be employed as viable units of analysis. Neither would my ends in this book be served by
selecting research subjects or individuals or successive time segments for my unit of analysis.
To do so would obscure rather than help uncover what underlying coherence the Scientific
Revolution possessed. The same is true of the six styles that A.C. Crombie identified. He
presented these in his monumental Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition
(1994) as timeless entities amenable neither to transformation nor to mutual interaction,
thus missing the very dynamics that have propelled scientific advance from early in the 17th
century onward.
Instead, the unit of analysis I have in the end found myself working with is modes of nature-knowledge. By this I mean consistent ranges of distinct approaches to natural phenomena, which may differ in several dimensions. Their scope may have been comprehensive, with
a view to deriving the whole wide world from first principles, or deliberately partial. The
way in which knowledge was attained may have been predominantly empiricist or chiefly
intellectualist. If any practices went with a given mode of nature-knowledge, these may have
been observational, experimental, instrumental, etc. Knowledge may have been sought for
its own sake or with a view to achieving certain practical improvements. Exchange may or
may not have taken place between practitioners of distinct modes of nature-knowledge that
were pursued at the same time and place.
Of particular concern in distinguishing a variety of modes of nature-knowledge is what
I label their knowledge structure. By this I mean something that the principal difference
between Aristotle and Galileo illustrates. For instance, we shall find in due course that in the
17th century much conceptual confusion emerged from the different handling of seemingly
similar or even overlapping conceptions (notably those of motion and force) in different
modes of nature-knowledge (those of Aristotle and Galileo, but also those of Galileo and
Descartes). Was knowledge organized wholesale or rather piecemeal? How was knowledge
conceived to be oriented in time did practitioners see themselves as working toward an
open future, or as reconstructing past perfection, or as personally constructing the truly
definitive schema of all possible knowledge? At what level of abstraction did they seek to
capture natures phenomena? How were empirical facts handled in their own right or
made to serve some a priori schema and, if the latter, by way of illustrative confirmation or
for a posteriori checking?
I treat these modes of nature-knowledge as dynamic entities. What turns them into viable instruments of historical analysis is the additional category of transformation. Modes of
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prologue
nature-knowledge need not remain fixed over time. At least potentially they were subject to
being transformed, in ways that varied from enrichment within a given framework to such
revolutionary transformations as came in time to mark the Scientific Revolution.
The entities here distinguished as modes of nature-knowledge do not form actors categories; rather, I present them as a historians constructs. Still, they are not just arbitrary
categories which happen to suit my ends. Distinguishing between diverse modes of natureknowledge captures patterns of thought and behavior that did manifest themselves in the
reality of the past. As a rule, distinct modes of nature-knowledge were practiced in almost
watertight separation from one another until, in the mid-17th century, an unprecedented
breakdown of barriers occurred. Before that time, even if one individual practiced two
modes of nature-knowledge at a time (as for instance Ibn Sina, Joo de Castro, and Thomas
Harriot did), his thought and practice in the one had scarcely an impact upon the other.
Consequently, in this book I routinely assign this practitioner to this specific mode of nature-knowledge (e.g., al-Biruni to mathematical science in the Alexandrian tradition), that
one to another (e.g., Clavius to natural philosophy in the Athenian tradition). This is not
a pointless game of squeezing events and people into preset categories. Only the unfolding
story can determine whether the use of modes of nature-knowledge as my principal unit of
analysis serves more than taxonomic purposes and enables us to catch both the conditions
under which the Greek corpus could be revolutionized and the specific dynamics that then
propelled the Scientific Revolution forward.
xxix
Major questions here resolved

Truth will sooner emerge from error than from confusion.
Francis Bacon, Novum organum (1620)10
This, indeed, is the prize I aim for in this book: to resolve those big questions that for so long
used to animate the profession of historians of science and that remain as valid as ever. I do
not claim fully to have resolved the two biggest questions how modern science came into
the world and how it managed to stay there. As the challenge is taken up and the big issues
are engaged afresh, new viewpoints will reveal novel aspects. But limits are also set to historical explanation per se. There is wisdom in an idea that, in 1948, one of the great historians of
science, Alexandre Koyr, expressed thus:
all explanations, however plausible they may be, ultimately turn around in a circle. Which,
after all, is not a scandal for the human mind. It is fairly normal in history even in the history
of the human mind that there are inexplicable events, irreducible facts, absolute beginnings.
. . . It is impossible, in history, to empty the fact, and to explain everything.11
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xxx
It is for this reason especially that I indicate at appropriate places where, in my own view,
I have reached the limit of what can be explained and where elements of contingency take
over or where certain facts stubbornly refuse to be reduced any further.
Among major issues resolved in the present book I count the following.
The question of decline has frequently come up with regard to nature-knowledge in ancient Greece but also in Islamic civilization. Proper definition followed by comparative
handling of the issues involved reveals the presence in premodern times of a general pattern of upswing and downturn of nature-knowledge (pp. 28, 64, 90).
Needham was the first to investigate on the grand scale why the Scientific Revolution
occurred in Europe and not in China. In my historiographical book I figured out how
he asked the question, reviewed his diverse answers, and examined critically his practice
of cross-cultural comparison. I now place myself on the shoulders of a man who, for all
his idiosyncrasies, was an intellectual giant, in hopes of seeing farther. My comparison
between structural components of Chinese nature-knowledge and its Greek counterpart
yields two answers of a novel kind to Needhams Grand Question (p. 44).
For decades historians of science were in the habit of debating whether the Scientific
Revolution was marked by continuity with preceding events (thus calling into question
the very phrase Revolution) or rather by discontinuity. Caricatures have often taken
the place of more historically responsible distinctions between events smoothly running
their course and events taking a sudden, unexpected turn, thus making a more or less
drastic (though never, pace Koyr, an absolute) break with the past. Here I have seized
upon a suggestion made in 1992 by David C. Lindberg to consider the possibility of a
differential rate of discontinuity for different segments of 16th- and 17th-century natureknowledge. Lindberg focused on optical science as displaying more continuity over time
than astronomy did. My own conception of the revolutionary transformation of modes
of nature-knowledge carries within itself the rejection of the idea of an absolute beginning it is always something that already exists that finds itself transformed, whether in
a more or a less revolutionary fashion. And this is indeed what I have come to conclude.
Of the three revolutionary transformations that together mark the onset of the Scientific
Revolution, the third (transition from coercive empiricism to fact-finding experimental science) turns out to display far more continuity with its immediate predecessor than
the other two (p.260).
The issue of continuity came up first when, in the 1910s, Duhem argued that modern
science really emerged in the 14th century, at the hands of certain Parisian scholastics
whose forgotten manuscripts he rescued from undeserved oblivion. On this view, Galileo and Descartes et al. just put finishing touches on work essentially accomplished already. No historian of science accepts Duhems conception wholesale any more; but the
underlying conceptualization of medieval science remains a lingering presence. I here
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prologue
break fully with those lingering remains. This makes it also possible to show the specific
manner in which the Aristotelian innovations that Duhems favorite scholastics certainly
did bring about, after a quarter-millennium-long deadlock became instantly productive
upon infusion with the revolutionary transformation that Galileo accomplished (p. 307).
There is another element of discontinuity that has not been conceptualized earlier.
Modern mathematical scientists are accustomed to resolving unexplained phenomena
by drawing large-scale analogies with better-understood phenomena. Here I show that,
once Galileo turned motion into a subject of mathematical science for the first time, the
method of modeling thus-far-uninvestigated types of motion after types already known
formed one element of radical discontinuity in the unfolding Scientific Revolution (p.
336).
Above, I remarked that for the most seminal outcomes of the Scientific Revolution, local
particularity has been gaining the upper hand over universal validity. In cultural history
generally, it often seems as if research spent on the local and time-bound circumstances
under which, by definition, each and every cultural product comes into the world precludes acknowledgment of the universal value some of them may over time attain. No
such opposition seems warranted, however. Attention ably given to what is situation
bound in even the greatest and most enduring human accomplishments is of course a
boon. Movies like Amadeus are particularly apt vehicles for reenacting the historical circumstances under which timeless masterpieces came into being and were originally perceived. The power that such movies possess to enchant us comes from how they illustrate
the very point here at issue. Opera buffs all over the world still enjoy the Nozze di Figaro
two centuries after it was composed in Amadeus we watch it born amid a meanwhile
senseless, courtly power struggle over the respective merits of a German versus an Italian
libretto. Here the tension that responsible historians face between careful reconstruction
of the local and proper acknowledgment of the universal is made visible in a quite cogent
manner.
In the history of science the tension makes itself felt with particular urgency. This is
so in view of the claim to truth so often made for science. By the 1980s the claim ceased in
many circles to be taken as self-evident. Two consequences followed. In its extreme version, nature itself has been defined as nothing but the outcome of negotiations between
scientists that reflect, not any state of things objectively there, but only the momentary
power balance between these scientists in their ongoing struggle for recognition and
funding. Few historians of science have fully gone along with this reductionist message
from the sociology of scientific knowledge. Still, in their everyday practice many have
come to regard the issue as a minefield better shunned. The rationale for this preference
not to engage an issue of crucial importance runs roughly thus: much past historiography of science was unpalatably triumphalist, in that much of it used to be portrayed as
xxxi
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xxxii
a seemingly inexorable march toward our present-day truths; in order, therefore, to get
rid of triumphalism we just bracket the claim to truth. The logic of this syllogism leaves
something to be desired there are other ways to accomplish the aim of nonpresentist
history writing than by throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
I have dealt with the tension between the universal and the local in two ways.
In parts I and II, I make the following distinction. Certain premodern modes of
nature-knowledge turned out soon after their emergence to be transferable to very different localities, thus acquiring distinct traits of universality. This applies notably to the
transfer of mathematical science and natural philosophy from Greece to Islamic civilization and beyond. In contrast, certain other components of premodern nature-knowledge were marked far more by the culture, such as notably a 15th- and 16th-century
movement of coercive empiricism that was profoundly colored by peculiarities of European civilization. So paths from local to universal may be uneven, and only the evidence
of history can help us make proper distinctions in this regard. As a consequence, the Scientific Revolution will be viewed in what follows, not as a one-time-only triumph of the
universal, but rather as a historically situated blend of rapidly universalizing and forever
local components.
From another point of view as well, the Scientific Revolution is not equated here
with universal verities. For every mode of nature-knowledge under scrutiny I have investigated empirically how practitioners actually sought in everyday practice to make their
knowledge claims clinching. Notably, the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution were well
aware that the claim to indubitable certainty that was customarily made for the ruling
philosophy of nature, Aristotles, could no longer be maintained. So they went about
finding out how far their everyday practice allowed them to stretch their own vivid sense
of establishing something definitely valid about the constitution of nature. How to steer
clear of arbitrariness, or the fansying that Newton still found to be rampant among
his contemporaries?12 For 17th-century fact-finding experimental science, historians like,
notably, Shapin and Schaffer have made a beginning by listing ways and means actually
taken by practitioners to make claims to knowledge as clinching as the case seemed to
allow. Here I have been able to build on the literature and expand its main findings (ch.
13). But for mathematical science and for natural philosophy the question has not even
been asked. For those two modes of revolutionary nature-knowledge I have made a comparative investigation into the means used by practitioners to attain maximum validity
for their knowledge claims (chs. 10 and 11).
Another recurrent topic that is closely connected to the Scientific Revolution and that is
still largely governed by preconceptions is the one known as the scholar and the craftsman. Here, too, by empirically investigating the subject I have sought to cut through a
maze of positions taken largely on apriori grounds. In chapters 10 and 13 I examine for
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prologue
each case of alleged improvement of craft practice by revolutionary science whether or xxxiii
not the promise was actually realized during the 17th century. For example, did organ
builders benefit from the mathematical schemes for temperament peddled at the time
by Huygens and others? If not, why not? Rather to my surprise, the conclusion, reached
at the end of an item-by-item survey of the literature, turns out to be that with very few
exceptions such promises did not even begin to be fulfilled until far into the 18th century.
This in its turn confirmed (or rather radicalized) my suspicion that ideology-fostered
expectations rather than actual feats of science-based craftsmanship helped give the new
modes of nature-knowledge a prominence and social anchoring without any precedent
in world history. It also served as the basis for an across-the-board investigation of what
contemporary impediments stood in the way of making reality match the promise of the
times.
Finally, all those proliferating, monolithic causal theses that made further efforts to explain the Scientific Revolution look like a sheer waste of energy find a place in my account. Their authors were not stupid, and most of their theses, when transformed and/or
cut down to proper size, turn out to have a role to fulfill. Not only have I woven them into
the account, but for some (such as the Zilsel thesis and the Merton thesis) I point out in
the Notes on Literature Used section appended to every chapter what in their original
makeup I find worth preserving.
Users guide
... history requires every bit as much attention to detail as does science
and the history of science perhaps twice as much.
Carl B. Boyer (1959)13
This book may well be used as a survey, but it is not set up that way. In particular, no historical facts are reported here on the mere ground that they happened. Just about every
fact related forms one part of the chain of my argument, be it as a small link or by way of
illustration of the point being made. Often a fact mentioned in passing at one place finds an
echo someplace else. For instance, in chapter 4 I mention that around 1540 the Portuguese
admiral Joo de Castro had his own reading of the compass checked by a caulker (a practical man of great experience, as Castro went so far as to add). This is echoed in chapter 13,
where I cite Robert Boyles lordly distrust in the ability of divers to produce trustworthy
reports. The echo serves to remind us that the social distance between elite and plebeian
circles was not fixed but varied with time and place.
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xxxiv The amount of evidence required to sustain an argument is not determined beforehand.
Although exhaustiveness has not been my aim, with certain issues it proved imperative to
treat all pertinent cases (as with my determination of how much improvement of 17thcentury craft practice was attained by science of a new kind). But even at those many places
where exhausting the issues would have been pointless or even self-defeating, an author may
confine the evidence to be selected to the bare minimum needed to make his points, or he
may catch it in a more tightly woven net. In this book I have opted for the latter. The selection of evidence has been governed throughout by a desire to enable the reader to enter into
dialogue with my argument, so as to provide her or him with material suitable for possible
disagreement. I do not want readers to feel constrained by the argument. Past facts can always be interpreted in more than one way, and the material that is presented should reflect
that capacity. Together with the widely acknowledged complexity of the subject, this goes far
to explain the length of the book.
Even so I could have made it longer still. I have not sought to include everything worthy
of note that happened in the pursuit of nature-knowledge in 17th-century Europe. Much
remained the same throughout the period my concern has been with the emergence of
revolutionary novelty against the background of what remained the same. Much novelty
made for dispute in ever-widening audiences, for example, debates over witchcraft and over
the portentous meaning of comets, in ways that seem to foreshadow the coming Enlightenment. I have neglected to discuss specifically such debates, focusing instead on the general
midcentury crisis of legitimacy that early disputes helped engender and later ones helped
resolve. Further, I have simplified much, at times perhaps beyond what specialists may be
prepared to endure. For instance, at the end of the section Toward the Principia I write that
in the spring of 1685 Newton, the groundwork for his dynamics established and three major
obstacles toward universal gravitation overcome, was now ready to write the Principia (p.
658). That way I tacitly bracket as needlessly cumbersome for the reader Newtons slaving at
Lectiones de motu which, through ongoing expansion and revision, gradually took shape
as the Principia.
In the master narrative of the Scientific Revolution, privileged treatment was given to
mathematical science. More directly empirical and/or experimental subjects used to receive
comparatively short shrift and were treated in any case as subordinate to the main story
line. By the same token, conceptual development used to prevail in historians treatment
over the everyday practice of experimentation. On the rebound, experimental practice has
over the past decades far outweighed purely conceptual development in mathematical science in most current surveys of the Scientific Revolution. I have here made an effort not
only to give each their proper due but also to compare their respective ways of advancing
their dynamics and the means by which practitioners sought to make their conclusions
stick. With fact-finding experimental science as also with speculative natural philosophy
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prologue
this makes for straightforward reading happily interspersed with some hilarious episodes. xxxv
With mathematical-experimental science this is not always so. Mathematical work must be
presented the mathematical way. I have done my best to clarify, to illustrate, and responsibly
to simplify. Even so, some elementary geometry on the readers part is required for following
the argument in full.
For more than half a century the historiography of science has been plagued by an alleged antithesis between internal and external approaches. The distinction is not pointless.
Over the past decades ways and means have been found to treat conceptual development
in a sociocultural context. Still, present-day contextualism goes only part of the way toward replacing the somewhat artificial opposition with a more balanced treatment, in that
it often remains confined to local circumstances. In the present book relevant portions of
world history provide the principal sociocultural context, allowing me to show under what
conditions nature-knowledge could flourish and take the course it did. As a consequence,
each chapter mixes aspects of the development of ideas with their circumstances and effects.
In some chapters the latter predominate (notably chs. 12 and 17 on the mid-17th-century
crisis of legitimacy and how it was overcome), and in others the former, but even where
conceptual development is preponderant, questions of historical conditioning and historical impact are addressed at the spots proper to them.
Big-picture presentations like this one require the points successively made to be illustrated by example rather than by the full empirical material available. I have regularly taken
my examples from a domain that was once my own specialty, the history of what we now
call musical acoustics. Its frequent usage for illustrative purposes is not meant as an implicit claim that the grand developments I discuss were somehow driven by what happened
in musical acoustics. Rather, I employ them because of their freshness and also because
they confirm what few historians of science are prepared to recognize that issues in musical acoustics form as much a legitimate and (at the time) fully recognized part of natureknowledge as planetary trajectories or magnets did and do. Something similar is true of two
other topics that are often neglected and that happen to reflect my personal background as
a Dutchman and a onetime museum curator as the account proceeds, scientific instruments and Dutch practitioners appear more frequently than usual. More generally speaking,
since the Second World War the geographic center for the history of science has moved to
the Anglo-Saxon world, and there has been a tendency to focus disproportionately on what
happened in England at the expense of the Continent. England certainly has a special place
in the story, which I go to great lengths to point out. Even so I have aimed for a balanced
treatment of European nature-knowledge wherever it flourished.
In present-day historiography care is increasingly taken to avoid our modern terminology if it fails to match 17th-century realities, such as science if meant as a general expression.
There is less agreement over what to use instead. Throughout the present book I have re-
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xxxvi placed science as a generic term with the deliberately bland expression nature-knowledge
(which can be found at times in 17th-century parlance). That way I enable myself to use
more pointed expressions for its various components over time (notably for natural philosophy, here used in a sense that I take care to define, and also to distinguish from broader
worldviews, on p. 9; 258). I reserve science, used in a sense that goes beyond individual
disciplines, for two cases only. Right from the start I speak of mathematical science without
more ado. And as the Scientific Revolution advances, occasions begin to present themselves
where the likeness to present-day science is so great as to make it sheer pedantry still to speak
of nature-knowledge or any other artificial equivalent.
Unless it becomes too awkward to do so, I have likewise avoided the names of presentday disciplines. I have scholars ponder light rays and vision rather than contribute to optics.
This restriction applies a fortiori to mechanics. I never employ the term before Newton in
the Principia creates the discipline known to him and us as mechanics (now for the first
time including the dynamics that in earlier times was missing from the statics that went
under the name of mechanics). I also avoid the adjective mechanical, following a recommendation of E.J. Dijksterhuis, who once listed six distinct meanings in current use among
historians of science. I have refrained in particular from adopting the expression mechanical philosophy, even though it was coined by a 17th-century actor, Boyle. Throughout the
historiography of the Scientific Revolution the expression has given rise to undue identification (or at least association) of this speculative, wholly qualitative philosophy of nature with
the mathematical science of (modern) mechanics. To the extent that the two ought to be
associated indeed, this must follow from careful scrutiny of the historical data rather than
be imposed by sheer terminological overlap. I have coined instead the expression kinetic
corpuscularianism. It may sound awkward, yet it points directly at the one feature that fundamentally distinguished this philosophy of nature from both ancient and contemporary
atomism its concern with how corpuscles move.
Two more terms eschewed are physics and technology. The latter term invites undue
association with the science-based type of technology that we at present are accustomed to
not until the 18th century did isolated portions thereof begin to emerge from the Scientific
Revolution. The phrase the arts and crafts provides a ready-made replacement. The case of
physics is more complicated. Until the 17th century the term was used as fully equivalent
to natural philosophy in the sense here employed. One event among those that mark the
Scientific Revolution as truly revolutionary is the change of meaning that physics underwent in the course of the 17th century more and more did it take on something close to its
present-day meaning. An early example is what Kepler meant when entitling his first masterpiece New Astronomy, or Celestial Physics. What he specifically meant by the expression
is a newly dynamic treatment of the hoary problem of planetary trajectories; that is, he considered the force or forces in play in the solar system. In the expressions that I employ when
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prologue
rendering Keplers work I have sought to convey the transition from natural philosophy to xxxvii
something closer to our modern idea of what physics is about.
I abstain throughout from the expression early modern. It carries with it an undue sense
that the coming-into-being of our modern world was already preordained by the 16th century or thereabouts. In my view Europe was not destined to give rise to our modern world
prior to the actual event, which I join a few global historians in situating in the early 19th
century, when the Industrial Revolution began to run at full steam (p. 729).
Finally, I had to come to grips with rational and its derivative rationality. Tacitly at the
background of much current denigration of the very idea of the Scientific Revolution is
the suspicion that proponents of the idea mean to convey thereby the unique rationality of
science. In his influential books on the Scientific Revolution, A. Rupert Hall portrayed the
event as the triumph, long in the making, of rationality over magic and what he took to be
other forms of obscurantism and superstition; others, in not quite so explicit a vein, have
followed suit. In the Epilogue I dissociate myself from much in their interpretation. There I
seek to define the specifically pointed kind of rationality that modern science embodies, in ongoing and indeed inevitable rivalry with other varieties of rationality that legitimately mark
other human pursuits (p. 734). So as not to prejudge the issue by means of the sheer choice
of terminology, I have generally abstained from using either rational or rationality before
reaching the Epilogue. I have opted instead for intellectualist when dealing with the classic
contrast between rationalist and empiricist approaches, while using circumlocutions like
reason-based in the few cases where I had to distinguish some given effort from enterprises
drawing on other resources (notably, religious revelation).
Big-picture thinking of the kind here undertaken requires a mind-set a little different
from how one approached ones material in an earlier scholarly life. Also, the material itself
differs in scope as well as in kind. Only in cases of prior personal acquaintance or of an urgent need to resolve a stubborn knot of major importance to the argument can one afford to
address the sources themselves. Decades-long participation in the profession ought to give a
sense of where to find some of the most reliable and most up-to-date literature on any given
topic. In the Notes on Literature Used appended to every chapter I have listed those books
and articles subject by subject, with some further comments inserted. When dealing with literature treated previously in my 1994 The Scientific Revolution. AHistoriographical Inquiry,
I just refer to SRHI, followed by section number. Further, I have often consulted but not, as
a rule, listed separately entries in the sixteen volumes of Dictionary of Scientific Biography,
which Charles C. Gillispie edited in 19701980 (abbreviated DSB) and which is currently being electronically updated.
Passages that I quote are referenced in consecutively numbered endnotes. More than
once in the historiography of science have misinterpretations (on occasion quite authoritative ones) emerged from faulty translation or even from entirely spurious sources. I there-
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xxxviii fore find it imperative to give the reader a chance to check the accuracy of the translations
here rendered. On www.hfcohen.com I have placed them side by side with the originals.
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prologue
notes on literature used
xxxix
Conceptualization in history of science is a tricky business. For articulation of my intuitions on how

to give concepts maximal sharpness in a historically responsible manner I have learned much from
how it is done in Joseph Ben-Davids The Scientists Role in Society. A Comparative Study. Englewood
Cliffs (NJ): Prentice Hall, 1971, and how it is both advocated and done in Nancy J. Nersessian, Faradays
Field Concept. In: D. Gooding & F.A.J.L. James (eds.), Faraday Rediscovered: Essays on the Life and
Work of Michael Faraday. London: Macmillan, 1985; pp. 175-187.
Surveys of the Scientific Revolution to come out before 1994 have been treated at length in part I of
my SRHI, and briefly in an entry Scientific Revolution that I contributed to W. Applebaum (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Scientific Revolution from Copernicus to Newton. New York/London: Garland, 2000; p.
589-593. Surveys to come out since are Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996; John Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science. Hampshire/London: Macmillan, 1997 (3rd ed.: Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Rienk Vermij, De
wetenschappelijke revolutie. Amsterdam: Nieuwezijds, 1999; James R. Jacob, The Scientific Revolution.
Aspirations and Achievements, 15001700. Amherst: Prometheus, 1999; Michel Blay, La naissance de la
science classique au XVIIe sicle. Paris: Nathan, 1999; Lisa Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution. New York: Nan Talese, 1999; Paolo Rossi, The Birth of Modern Science. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000; Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences. European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 15001700.
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
Also relevant here are two books covering larger periods: Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a
Scientific Culture. Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006, and
Peter Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature. How Science Makes Sense of the World. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006. For the books by Dorn and Huff discussed in the main text the full data are as
follows: Harold Dorn, The Geography of Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991 (the alignment
there probed has been extended in James E. McClellan III & Harold Dorn, Science and Technology in
World History. An Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999), and Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early
Modern Science. Islam, China, and the West. Cambridge UP, 1993.
David C. Lindbergs helpful discussion of the issue of continuity and discontinuity is in the final
chapter (pp. 355-368) of his The Beginnings of Western Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992 (2nd ed.: 2008).
Absent quest for underlying coherence. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, in their editorial Introduction: The Age of the New to idem (eds.), Early Modern Science. Cambridge UP, 2006 (vol. 3 of the
series The Cambridge History of Science), pp. 1-17, characteristically explain their decision to leave
The Scientific Revolution out of the title by stating on p. 13 that it is no longer clear that there was
any coherent enterprise in the early modern period that can be identified with modern science (my
italics). Rather, they regard the concept of the Scientific Revolution as a myth about the inevitable rise
to global domination of the West (p. 15; my italics). They do not explain why a renewed search for
11-10-10 10:53
greek foundations, chinese contrasts
xl
coherence (not really undertaken before, as all surveys since the mid-1980s have been meant primarily
for the classroom) would be doomed at the outset, nor why the concept necessarily implies historical
inevitability.
Terminology. E.J. Dijksterhuis distinction between six different meanings of mechanical occurs at
the end of his Die Mechanisierung des Weltbildes. In: Verffentlichungen der Gesellschaft fr internationale Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Sitz Bremen, 1952, pp. 5-31. Jack A. Goldstones article The Problem
of the Early Modern World. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41, 3, 1998, has
persuaded me never again to use the expression early modern. Rob Wentholts work (notably his typescript Selfish, Unselfish, And Much More Besides; A Treatise On The Nature Of Human Nature) has
alerted me to how important it is in scholarship generally to refrain from setting up arguments that on
investigation prove to derive from sheer terminological confusion.
11-10-10 10:53

Prologue: Solving The Problem of The Scientific Revolution

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prologue

solving the problem of the scientific revolution

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solving the problem of the scientific revolution

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The historiography of the Scientific Revolution: Past and present state

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solving the problem of the scientific revolution

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solving the problem of the scientific revolution

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conceptualization is a cardinal requirement. A failure to define ones concepts sharply and

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solving the problem of the scientific revolution

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solving the problem of the scientific revolution

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solving the problem of the scientific revolution

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solving the problem of the scientific revolution

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Major questions here resolved

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solving the problem of the scientific revolution

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solving the problem of the scientific revolution

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solving the problem of the scientific revolution

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solving the problem of the scientific revolution

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solving the problem of the scientific revolution

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notes on literature used

Conceptualization in history of science is a tricky business. For articulation of my intuitions on how

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greek foundations, chinese contrasts

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