The Cambridge History of Science (review)

Lurking below the surface of Early Modern Science is the question of how to deal with the Scientific Revolution in light of the enormous number of recent studies that have breached the boundaries of the grand narrative of paradigm shifts and sea changes in the content and methodology of natural studies. Park and Daston are acutely aware of this question and solicited a volume of contributions that "has challenged the traditional view of the 'Scientific Revolution' while emphasizing profound but diverse changes in natural knowledge" (i) that occurred in Europe from 1490 to 1730. This strategy embraces the complex message that the contributors collectively voice: that the old narrative is abandoned with difficulty, that it no longer fits the historical record and must go, and that we all miss it very much and need a replacement. But creating that replacement is no easy task in a field endowed with a diversity of scholarly perspectives, which has produced histories that are in some instances difficult to reconcile and which itself has drifted away from history of philosophy and toward a broader cultural study. The result is a mosaic of overlapping studies retelling elements of the Scientific Revolution, and yet indicating where this retelling fails, while providing a rich critical apparatus of expansive, meticulous footnotes that document recent scholarship.

The diversity of historiographical perspectives is superficially evident in the structuring of Early Modern Science into sections of philosophical histories, studies of the people and sites producing new knowledge, disciplinary histories, and essays on how changes in natural knowledge were contextualized in other aspects of culture: for example, art, religion, and literature. Contributions in the first category present the traditional face of the Scientific Revolution, emphasizing transformations in epistemology and new ontological models of nature.

After the editors' excellent historiographical introduction, Dan Garber develops the "metaphysical foundations" approach familiar to historians of science, emphasizing the mechanization of the world picture and the roles of mechanical philosophy, mathematization, and quantification in revolutionizing science. Framed in terms of the bankruptcy of Scholastic-Aristotelian natural philosophy, Garber's account features the emergence of mathematical realism and abstraction by Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei, the rejection of Aristotelian matter theory and metaphysics by sixteenth-century chemical philosophy, and, ultimately, its replacement by Robert Boyle's mechanical corpuscular philosophy, which was built on the twin foundations of Cartesian materialism and Pierre Gassendi's adaption of classical atomism. Culminating the Scientific Revolution is the new philosophy of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, after which the search for a consensual metaphysical basis for experimental science was effectively separated from "the scientific enterprise itself" (68).

Lynn Joy then nuances this traditional view of a rigid medieval Aristotelian paradigm and examines how the Philosopher's ideas were adapted to new problems and yielded with reluctance to the new science, which is marked by Boyle's rejection of substantial forms as "intrinsic causes of natural substances" (78), signaling the breakdown of any meaningful distinction between internal and external efficiencies. In due course, Newton also rejected Aristotelian causation, but retained a dualism of passive and active principles in matter. Joy briefly acknowledges the importance of alchemical theory to Newton, but does not enter into discussion of it, instead presenting Newton as a bridge between sixteenth-century neo-Aristotelian thought and corpuscular philosophy, sustaining the basic story of the Scientific Revolution articulated by Garber. But it is precisely to the history of alchemy (and medicine) one must look for antecedents to both corpuscular philosophy and experimental science.

Recent work in these areas reveals the limitations of Garber's account and shows that the traditional story of the triumph of inert mechanism over inner efficient causes does not accurately describe seventeenth-century natural philosophies, in which hard bits of matter, vital spirits, and efficient agencies often intermingled. Boyle and Newton drew on a well-developed experimental tradition and corpuscular matter theory derived from thirteenth-century Aristotelian alchemy and...