The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue (review)

Jones argues that thinkers of the scientific revolution — in particular Descartes, Pascal, and Leibniz — developed their mathematical and scientific works primarily with the aim of producing affective techniques for cultivating moral virtue. That they cast their efforts within the context of this larger picture is not news, of course, since they clearly say as much in their writings, and it has been common knowledge for some time among philosophers who specialize in this area of the history of philosophy. So why does Jones argue for the obvious? Who does Jones think the book is for?

There are history of philosophy books written by scholars whose primary professional training is history, and there are those written by scholars whose primary professional training is philosophy. Jones's book is the former. The trouble as I see it is that his project, at least as he sets it out for himself, is really a philosophical one, not a historical one. To be sure, a detailed look at the history is a must for those philosophers working in the history of philosophy, and such a look is usually the starting point, but it is never the end point. Jones gives the reader his historical analysis of texts, but he overlooks almost everything in the way of their philosophical import. Discussions of the mathematics are clear, and I think valuable to those working in the field of early modern philosophy. Even so, the focus on such details never pays off, for it is never made clear to the reader why such a focus was necessary. In working out the details of the quadrature of the circle, for instance, we never learn how this is connected to cultivating virtue exactly, other than the obvious — namely, that doing such a mathematical exercise was apparently connected.

In a discussion of Leibniz, for example, Jones entertains Leibniz's interest in ichnographies (building plans) and scenographies (perspectival drawings). Here, he mentions in passing the monad, but plows right over it, focusing instead on historical facts about the former sorts of items. In another discussion, Jones claims that for Leibniz "[t]he world conserves the ability to cause future effect" (263), and yet offers no philosophical discussion about what Leibniz might have meant by this — one would expect a discussion about emanative causation, for instance. In a remark about Leibniz's proof of the conservation of force, he writes that "[i]ts inclusion in the Discourse shows that it belongs among Leibniz's decorous ways of publicizing knowledge of that natural order" (265). But, is this really the reason for the proof's inclusion? No. The proof is not included in the Discourse because Leibniz liked knowledge published in the form of philosophical dictionaries (which is what Jones's assessment suggests). It is there for important philosophical reasons — reasons found internal to the Discourse. Jones's superficial treatment of the philosophical texts made the book a frustrating read for me.

Unlike Daston and Gaukroger, whose reviews appear on the back cover, I did not find the book a "tour de force, offering a fundamental reassessment of what drives early modern philosophical thought," or a "new way of making seventeenth-century moral, political, and scientific thought cohere" that will "challenge" what scholars currently think of Descartes, Pascal, and Leibniz. Rather, I found the book (strangely enough) to argue for the obvious, and then lead its reader through a dense field of historical facts (some interesting, some not) with the occasional look at some difficult mathematical problem, which in the end never pays off.