Revolution or resurrection?

The Scientific Revolution is probably the single most important concept in the history of science. Usually referring to the period from Copernicus to Newton (roughly 1500 to 1700), it is taken as the central episode in the history of science, the historical moment in which that unique way of looking at the world that we call “modern science” and its attendant institutions emerged—the terminus ad quem of classical and medieval science, and the terminus a quo of all that followed. Not itself an explanatory concept, the Scientific Revolution becomes a beacon guiding historians of science in their consideration of questions about what it was, what exactly happened, why it happened, and why it happened when it did.

Historians have constructed a master narrative that begins with the Copernican challenge to Aristotelian cosmology and Ptolemaic astronomy; it continues with the discovery of Kepler’s laws in astronomy, Galileo’s development of a new physics, and the emergence of the mechanical view of nature that replaced Scholastic Aristotelianism; and it reaches a triumphant climax with the Newtonian synthesis that bound these strands together into one coherent whole, thus heralding the triumph of modern science. This story presumes that there was a definitive rupture between the worn-out Scholasticism of pre-Copernican thought and the new science that emerged in the seventeenth century. The revolution (in cosmology and metaphysics) included the following transformations: the finite Aristotelian cosmos was replaced with an infinite Newtonian universe; nature was mathematized and mechanized; and experiment played a newly important role in the justification of scientific theories.

Although I would not want to deny that these changes took place in some areas of thought, several assumptions that ruled the traditional narrative bear close examination. One of these, drawn from nineteenth-century positivist classifications of the sciences, is that physics is the most fundamental science, and that consequently the mathematization of physics in the seventeenth century was the most significant feature of the Scientific Revolution. Following from this is the corollary that the other sciences underwent their revolutions only when they became similarly mathematized. This corollary lies at the root of the oxymoronic extension of the Scientific Revolution into a process that took many centuries to complete, since the revolutions in chemistry and biology occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively. A further assumption is that disciplinary boundaries have remained static throughout the history of science. This is based on even deeper assumptions that embody an essentialism about science: accordingly, science is considered to be one sort of thing, unambiguously identifiable in every historical era, and divisible into specific sciences that—as categories of intellectual activity—have remained the same throughout history. Critical examination of these assumptions has shown that they all can be challenged in light of recent scholarship.

Both Steven Shapin and Andrew Cunningham accept the need for new interpretive strategies to take account of the erosion of the traditional understanding of the Scientific Revolution. In The Scientific Revolution, Shapin undertakes a global reassessment of early modern science, but in the end his account reduces to putting old wine in new bottles. Cunningham’s book seems prima facie to deal with a much narrower topic—the study of anatomy in the sixteenth century—but, in the end, his work points to far more radical changes in our understanding of early modern thought about the natural world.

Shapin’s book is clearly designed to be used as an introductory text. As such, it offers a wide-angle perspective. Opening with a dramatic flourish, Shapin announces that “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it” (p. 1). Claiming to take full account of recent scholarship about the period of the Scientific Revolution, he assumes that science is a “historically situated and social activity and that it is to be understood in...