The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685

by Stephen Gaukroger

Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners.

The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture , Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development--and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer.

Genres: History, Science, Philosophy, History Of Science, Nonfiction, World History

576 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Stephen Gaukroger is a British philosopher and intellectual historian. He is Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney. Recently he also took up a position as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen.

He received his BA (hons) in philosophy, with congratulatory first class honours, from the University of London in 1974, and his PhD, in history and philosophy of science, from the University of Cambridge in 1977. He was a Research Fellow at Clare Hall Cambridge, and then at the University of Melbourne, before joining the Philosophy Department at Sydney in 1981. In 2011, he moved to the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, a Corresponding Member of l’Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences, and in 2003 was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal for contributions to history of philosophy and history of science. He is presently Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science, and ARC Professorial Fellow. His work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Serbian.

Reviews

[Sanjay Prabhakar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review of the full four volume Science and the Shaping of Modernity series.

Disclaimer: I am very far from being an expert.

The virtue of long-view histories is that you get to see how threads develop, intertwine and contradict in a way that is not possible with more focussed accounts. Gaukroger's series runs, roughly speaking, from 1210 to 1933, though we also get discussions of the Greek philosophers, Augustine, Abelard, Avicenna, Averroes and mentions of post-1933 developments. Fascinatingly, the foundational historical facts which seem to underpin this history of science and modernity are the two I have come to believe from other literature are the most fundamental for understanding the West more generally: the West is Christian; and since late antiquity it has been politically fractured.

These two facts together, with in addition the catalyst of Aristotelianism, set up the basic forces driving the core thread of the series: the desire to construct a unified worldview. We begin from the "Augustinian synthesis". This was first problematised by the tension between secular and spiritual powers in post-Roman Latin Christendom, crystalised in the Investiture Controversy. Aristotle, when he became available, was seized upon as a resource to reconcile the secular and spiritual, by philosophically grounding theology. The historic significance of this move was, in the first place, to put natural philosophy at the heart of the philosophical project, in sharp contrast to its marginality in platonic systems, and in the second place to reproblematise even more dangerously the tension between secular and spiritual, by attempting to reconcile the two using a pagan who maintained the eternity of the world and denied the immortality of the soul. Tertullian's famous quip - "what has Athens to do with Jerusalem" - returns here with a vengeance. The difference is that in the period of the Church Fathers, when Tertullian registered this dissenting opinion, Christianity was in the driving seat, appropriating what it liked from the pagans. But in the high middle ages philosophy has a new autonomy in its role as reconciliatory agent, and the strains between Aristotelianism and Christianity begin to show - with natural philosophy the setting. By the renaissance this is becoming increasingly clear, and Aristotelianism, with its essences (including the soul) essentially being in the realm of matter theory. To escape Aristotelianism's tendency to ascribe active powers to nature, a dangerously magical notion, and to escape its understanding of the soul, one needed a new natural philosophy.

This natural philosophy had to be constructed in such a way as to be insulated from any slippage into magicalism. There, then, is the distinctly orthodox motivation for mechanism, the most inert natural philosophy ever constructed. This inertness however had a whole host of problems (some of which were imported into philosophy proper, see below), and mechanism could not last the C18th. The much more promising development of the C17th was an English one, with Boyle at the centre. With a genealogy that fascinatingly mingles natural theology, biblical exegesis, legal and political history and hermeneutics, natural history and medicine, physico-theology emerges as the great synthesis of Christianity and natural philosophy (and even humanism), and in fact I would have liked to have seen in more detail how it fails to last, as focus in the C18th moves more to France and Germany. Its phenomenalist approach marks a historic break with 2000 years of matter-theoretical natural philosophy, and introduces a new methodology that serves to liberate the various natural-philosophical enterprises from the controlling metanarrative of mechanism. Even as mechanism goes into decline, however, it has done its job: the toppling of Aristotelian natural philosophy by presenting a concrete alternative. The phenomenalist experimentalism of Boyle et al, however, is not a clear natural philosophy so much as a philosophical problem. With Locke and his reception in France the question of the standing of phenomenalism, as against speculative systematising, becomes embedded in philosophy more broadly, and indeed through the bourgeois context of the Republic of Letters in culture more generally. By contrast with English physico-theology, however, it is put to anti-clerical use in France.

One important and very interesting thread worth mentioning here is Gaukroger's continued insistence on the idea of the ideal persona of the philosopher, an idea that really first gets going in the attack on scholasticism as sterile and speculative, and is continuously reinvented, with a clear contemporary instantiation. From the French Enlightenment on it seems to me to be at least to some degree an affectation, and particularly so today, where it is most often wielded by non-academic proponents of scientism, who use it as a way (just as did Descartes the scholastics) beating particularly the religious over the head, but more to the point as a way of demonstrating superior rationality and being on the Right Side of History. For it is an idea whose development is ruthless, coming to undermine those who set themselves up in contrast to the earlier type. So Descartes suffered at the hands of the philosophes the fate he had imposed on the scholastics.

The story in the C18th is of the successes of autonomous individual natural-philosophical enterprises (hence the vindication of Royal Society phenomenalism), the decline of mechanism as a unifying principle, and the various projects of naturalisation - the reinterpreting of human nature and our place in the world in terms that are empirical. The generating force for naturalisation as an aspiration was the Lockean justification of phenomenalism, and in this way the natural philosophy of physico-theology comes to spawn projects that rival Christian (and humanist) worldviews. In particular, the marshalling of natural philosophy in the C17th as a key ally of Christianity for the first time gave it the task of addressing the non-propositional realm of human aspirations and anxieties. The naturalisation projects entrench this by taking science as a model for human existential understandings, and at the very time when actual natural-philosophical practice is looking so disunified (and in fact flourishing in this disunity) that without this wider embedding of science as a paradigmatic form of understanding it would have been impossible for it to reach a point where it could take the central role in grounding a unified worldview.

The various naturalisation projects failed to provide lasting ground for worldviews however, and in the C19th science, or at least the idea of it, comes to the fore. This happens for various reasons. The first is that the naturalisation projects based on empirical understandings of man as physical specimen tend to give way into even more heavily naturalising projects. The second is the rise of political economy, and the introduction of statistical thinking that with Bentham achieves a dehumanisation that makes C18th projects look quaint. The third is the fall and discrediting of classical philosophy in Germany after the death of Hegel, where the Bildung tradition had been the most viable naturalisation project of all, and its replacement by a metascientific neo-Kantianism, which construes philosophy as nothing more than the clarification and grounding of science. The new ideology is more horrendous than anything we have yet come across in the series. It overthrows religious and humanist worldviews in the name of a "scientific" one, which however takes as premise the unity of the scientific project, and cunningly promotes on the one hand the pure rationality of the theoretical sciences (which had little to do with much of science) and on the other the industrious improvements of standards of living due to technology (which had until the mid-C19th in fact had little to do with theoretical science). Gaukroger convincingly reveals this ideology as one more attempt to construct a unified worldview, scientism too an heir to the Investiture Controversy and the tensions of the baptism of Aristotle. It is a task that science in itself can not hope to fulfill, and this is the point of scientism: it is the metascientific, extrascientific project to put science, often vulgarly construed, at the heart of a unified worldview. So much the worse for us all.

The series shows fantastically the interrelatedness of history, science and philosophy in various ways. I'll mention the two I found most fascinating. The first is how many of the problems of early modern philosophy can be understood as artifacts of the adoption of mechanism. The idea is that a natural philosophy based on reduction to a minimal number of inert microconstituents has very few explanatory resources, and therefore must radically restrict the range of phenomena that are regarded as needing natural-philosophical explanation. Thus we have the bifurcation of phenomena into primary and secondary qualities, and the problematisation of epistemology. This manifests in Locke's project to philosophically justify the phenomenological approach of the Royal Society, Malebranche's occasionalism, and later in Kant's inaccessible noumenal realm. A particular problem is the inability of mechanism to satisfactorily deal with force and dynamics. As well as being a genuine scientific problem, it is the particular culprit regarding Malebranche's occasionalism, and read as a feature of mechanism's determination not to introduce anything resembling active powers into natural philosophy, is also crucial to understanding Kant. It was revelatory to me to understand that for Kant it was a foregone conclusion that teleology could at best be a regulative idea precisely because he has allied himself to mechanism, and this for dubious reasons. In fact the general impression we get of Kant is a slightly isolated individual, with somewhat antiquated views on natural philosophy and philosophy more generally, even given his famous Humean awakening from his dogmatic slumber. I think all of this shows quite forcefully that one cannot hope to ignore the natural-philosophical convictions and aspirations of philosophers on the grounds of today's carving up of the realm of knowledge.

The second interrelation between history, science and philosophy worth mentioning is a particular highlight of the series, culminating in an enjoyably polemical attack on reductionism in the final volume. The point is that the questions in the philosophy of science that make it a distinct subfield of philosophy are historically grounded. The fundamental issues are firstly the question mark over what kind of knowledge Boyle and his fellow Royal Society phenomenalists were producing, a question which is not as obvious in the context of matter-theoretical natural philosophy, and secondly whether the idea of the unity of science is genuinely internally generated by science itself. It is the latter point which is central to the task of the series, and when it is addressed head-on, with the historical accounts settled, it is very difficult to disagree with Gaukroger that the idea of the unity of science is a metascientific one, and furthermore one which never would have occurred had not science been given the task of grounding a unified worldview. As he says, it has become a premise of the programme of scientism that everything should be explicable in terms of reduction or emergence (which he argues is in essence no different from reduction itself), even if concrete accounts may be lacking. We see the close resemblance between the late modern promoter of the unity of science and the early modern mechanist - both with totalising aspirations emerging from a desire to construct a unified world picture of a certain type.

In my reading, the figures who come off "best" are Boyle, Hume, Herder, Heidegger, and unpretentious natural historians/biologists; those who come off "worst" are Kant, in the way already mentioned, utilitarians and particularly Bentham, IQ-peddlers, and reductionist popular science writers. I don't mind using this kind of language because there is a certain value-ladenness implicit (and sometimes explicit) in this, as in all histories, particularly in the natural emergence of a philosophy of science from history of science already mentioned. To explain briefly the "protagonists": Boyle is in this reading perhaps the person with most claim to being the father of modernity - if there was a scientific revolution in the C17th, it was his methodological break with matter-theoretical natural philosophy; Hume's critique of systemising rationality remains an exemplary way of responding to contemporary claims of scientific totality; Herder offered the naturalisation project that was most viable in the C18th as the grounding of a unified worldview, which consciously or not was what all of these projects were centrally about; Heidegger we meet briefly in the context of his clash with Cassirer at Davos, and he serves as a paradigm of understanding the meaning and implications of modernity as a scientific culture; the unpretentious biologists because they embody Boylean phenomenalism. As for the "antagonists", Kant has already been discussed; Bentham and utilitarians more generally come off as the most vulgar slaves to the Zeitgeist, at the same time terribly effective dehumanisers, usherers-in of scientific modernity, harbingers of eugenics and wage-slavery; in a similar way IQ-peddlers, who following on from utilitarian anthropology have abolished what was once thought of as "reason" in favour of a abstracted, algorithmic rationality; and the reductionist popular science writers for being the most pathetic demonstrations of the central thesis of the series - that in late modernity we have tried to give science the task of grounding a unified worldview, one that it can only give the impression of fulfilling due to the popular science writers' propaganda.

Nietzsche wrote that in order to understand him one needs "something for which one has almost to be a cow and in any case not a 'modern man': rumination". Indeed there is much in Gaukroger's series to ruminate on, not least the value of rumination, and its place as a way of Being-in-the-world at complete odds to that of "scientific" modernity.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a monster of a book – 500 densely written pages describing the development of "scientific" thought over a four-century period. It's not for the light of heart, but for all of that, it's actually pretty readable, and it's fascinating in its own right, as Gaukroger details how a scientific culture emerged in the West as a dominant mode of thought – in other words, how science became the way in which we westerners think about everything, including non-scientific subjects like theology.

Gaukroger's primary argument is that, contrary to the stereotypical Enlightenment view, religion was not something holding science back or something from which science had to free itself, but rather something without which science would not have achieved the intellectual dominance it holds today. He shows how theological treatments of Aristotle's philosophy in the late medieval and early modern periods led increasingly to increasingly large boundaries for natural philosophy (i.e., proto-science), and eventually to the key formulation of natural philosophy as the way to understand God through exploration of the God-designed natural world. In other words, science doesn't exist as we know it today without the assumption that it could provide insights into theology.

Now, for all that I learned reading this book, did it need to be 500 pages long? No. Rarely does any book need to be 500 pages long! And in this case, the bulk of Gaukroger's case gets made in the first 250 pages. The second half explores numerous tangents, especially when it comes to the writings of Descartes – a vitally important figure, of course, but it's no surprise to find Gaukroger frequently citing his own 500-page biography of the man.

But those first 250 pages, along with the last chapter? Well worth reading for anyone with an interest in science and religion – and especially those dissatisfied with the cheap-and-easy stereotypes about the categories' inherent incompatibility. Now on to his 450-page sequel!

[Daniel Schotman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning book. By far the best, most complete and detailed book I ever read about the scientific revolution. Only not a book to grasp in one read. Probably will take a few times more as it is stashed with so many ideas, people and important moments, one can simply not grasp all of that at once.

Gaukroger did the world a huge favour with writing this book. I immediately ordered all his other books too and look forward to the remaining books in this series of 6 that he still need to publish. Extremely highly recommended.

Only now I have too much reading to do. Bacon, Descartes, Galilei.......

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The Emergence of a Scientific Culture' is the first part of a projected five-volume series, aiming to provide a synoptic history of modern science. Gaukroger is a renowned historian of philosophy, specialising in 16th and 17th century philosophy/science, and, in particular, Cartesian natural philosophy and metaphysics. This is an excellent, scholarly work, full of interesting insights, contextual analyses, and technical details and characterised by a noteworthy historical sense. Gaukroger has amassed an impressive bibliography which he puts to good use, avoiding the pitfalls of the internalist/externalist debate in the historiography of science, as well as the recent relativist twist in sociological treatises of the subject. One might argue that Gaukroger is closer to an old-school historian of science in the vein of Pierre Duhem or William Whewell. I suspect that the reasons for Gaukroger’s seemingly anachronistic approach are twofold: his main aim is to provide an explanation of why human axiology has been dominated by scientific values, or, in simpler terms, why scientific values have taken over every aspect of human activity. Secondly, Gaukroger wants to maintain that, contrary to popular belief, scientific inquiry has benefitted from theological considerations. It seems to me that both of Gaukroger’s goals can largely be pursued independently of any specific historiographical or sociological thesis. Having said that, I was fairly disappointed that the aim of Gaukroger’s first volume is to set the scene for his wider and more interesting claims, rather than explore the latter in painstaking detail. It is true that Gaukroger suggests that one of the main reason why Aristotelianism was abandoned was due to Aquinas’ failure to competently harmonise theology and natural philosophy. Moreover, Gaukroger clearly emphasises the prominent role of God in Boyle and Newton’s thinking (as well as the peripheral role of God in Descartes’). Lastly, a very interesting proposal, that of the construction of the natural philosopher, is also put forth. Yet, having read the whole book carefully, I do not feel that Gaukroger’s first question was answered, nor do I believe that Gaukroger’s second claim was competently supported. All this is understandable of course; four volumes follow!

Evidently, Gaukroger's interest in Descartes is quite obvious here and certain chapters are seemingly tedious and potentially overwhelming, risking to alienate readers who are more interested in a wider overview of the four centuries under examination. While it is true that Gaukroger's discussions of Cartesian matter theory, and, consequently, Cartesian physics and astronomy are excruciatingly dense and difficult to follow, I can appreciate why Gaukroger goes at such lengths in his book. It should be clear that Cartesian science is a link between the old and the new. Simply put, Cartesian science is an inquiry that shares many characteristics with Aristotelian natural philosophy (particularly a foundationalist approach that shapes, anticipates and demarcates scientific discourse), but is also one that radically departs from the former, paving the way for modern science. For one, Descartes clearly emphasised the importance of mathematical methods to the study of nature (despite his difficulties in actually providing explicitly mathematical theories). Moreover, Descartes put forth a radically mechanical view of nature, one that both unified matter theory and the earthly/corporeal realms, and also provided the basic conceptual framework for understanding physical phenomena. For example, Descartes adopted a corpuscular hypothesis and sought to explain macroscopic phenomena by referring to the atomic constitution of bodies, and, more specifically, by appealing to differences in the shape, size, and motion of the various corpuscles. Finally, Descartes was an avid experimentalist who sought to implement these concepts in his more elaborate theories in optics and astronomy.

[Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very dense book, but it presents a fascinating discovery: the discovery of space. That is to say, the idea of empty space, and all sorts of other concepts now embedded in our daily language, did not pop out of existence but had to be invented in a centuries-long scientific revolution. This book lays out all the gritty details, but it's very much aimed towards a narrow, specialized readership in the philosophy of science. I had trouble with all the chapters after the first, the rather fun 1277 denunciation of Aristotle that marked the beginning of a transformation in cosmology.

[Maarten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very tough to get through, but provides invaluable insights into how science has become "such a thing". Still reading, few pages at a time. 5 stars not on the basis of legibility, but because I value unique insights highly.