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The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760
Understanding the emergence of a scientific culture -- one in which cognitive values generally are modelled on, or subordinated to, scientific ones -- is one of the foremost historical and philosophical problems with which we are now confronted. The significance of the emergence of such scientific values lies above all in their ability to provide the criteria by which we come to appraise cognitive enquiry, and which shape our understanding of what it can achieve.
The period between the 1680s and the middle of the eighteenth century is a very distinctive one in this development. It is then that we witness the emergence of the idea that scientific values form a model for all cognitive claims. It is also at this time that science explicitly goes beyond technical expertise and begins to articulate a world-view designed to displace others, whether humanist or Christian. But what occurred took place in a peculiar and overdetermined fashion, and the outcome in the mid-eighteenth century was not the triumph of 'reason', as has commonly been supposed, but rather a simultaneous elevation of the standing of science and the beginnings of a serious questioning of whether science offers a comprehensive form of understanding.
The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility is the sequel to Stephen Gaukroger's acclaimed 2006 book The Emergence of a Scientific Culture . It offers a rich and fascinating picture of the development of intellectual culture in a period where understandings of the natural realm began to fragment.
The period between the 1680s and the middle of the eighteenth century is a very distinctive one in this development. It is then that we witness the emergence of the idea that scientific values form a model for all cognitive claims. It is also at this time that science explicitly goes beyond technical expertise and begins to articulate a world-view designed to displace others, whether humanist or Christian. But what occurred took place in a peculiar and overdetermined fashion, and the outcome in the mid-eighteenth century was not the triumph of 'reason', as has commonly been supposed, but rather a simultaneous elevation of the standing of science and the beginnings of a serious questioning of whether science offers a comprehensive form of understanding.
The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility is the sequel to Stephen Gaukroger's acclaimed 2006 book The Emergence of a Scientific Culture . It offers a rich and fascinating picture of the development of intellectual culture in a period where understandings of the natural realm began to fragment.
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First published November 25, 2010
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About the author
Stephen Gaukroger
69 books27 followersStephen 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 5, 2014
For someone with my interests this book is an astonishing find. I was familiar with Gaukroger's meticulous scholarship and clear writing, but this book focused on a period and problems that particularly interest me. How was the transition made from Descartes' ideas about matter and motion to the beginnings of an understanding of organisms. This book is long and dense, but clearly written. Having read it once I now want to read it again to try to be able to hold the panorama that he describes in my mind.
April 17, 2020
My review of the full Science and the Shaping of Modernity series here.
February 13, 2022
I know everyone else who reviewed this book seemed to love it, but I think by the time I got to the end – the 950th page of the first two volumes of this series over a three-week period – I was more annoyed than enraptured.
And look, I challenge you to read 950 pages of dense, complex prose about the history of science and religion and not feel like your brain, too, was put into a vice for days on end.
So, to be fair: Gaukroger is a clear enough writer, he's clearly insanely brilliant, and he tells a story that is both interesting and extremely informative. But by the end of this book, I was tired of his constant passive voice, the numerous digressions ("to understand this obscure concept, we must go back and describe the 500-year history of this even more obscure concept"), and the ongoing love affair with Descartes. After Volume 1, I was OK with these issues because he had managed to jam four centuries of history into 500 pages, and that seemed appropriate, even if the book didn't need to be quite so long. But Volume 2 needs 450 pages to cover just ninety years, and by the end of the first hundred pages, familiarity had bred plenty of contempt – and a sense of just which chapters I could skim without losing too much of his argument.
Hey, I still rated it three stars. I did like the book, and I did learn a lot from it, but it could have been a 300-page volume without too much trouble, and it would have been stronger and clearer for the extra effort it would have required to properly edit it to that length.
And look, I challenge you to read 950 pages of dense, complex prose about the history of science and religion and not feel like your brain, too, was put into a vice for days on end.
So, to be fair: Gaukroger is a clear enough writer, he's clearly insanely brilliant, and he tells a story that is both interesting and extremely informative. But by the end of this book, I was tired of his constant passive voice, the numerous digressions ("to understand this obscure concept, we must go back and describe the 500-year history of this even more obscure concept"), and the ongoing love affair with Descartes. After Volume 1, I was OK with these issues because he had managed to jam four centuries of history into 500 pages, and that seemed appropriate, even if the book didn't need to be quite so long. But Volume 2 needs 450 pages to cover just ninety years, and by the end of the first hundred pages, familiarity had bred plenty of contempt – and a sense of just which chapters I could skim without losing too much of his argument.
Hey, I still rated it three stars. I did like the book, and I did learn a lot from it, but it could have been a 300-page volume without too much trouble, and it would have been stronger and clearer for the extra effort it would have required to properly edit it to that length.
August 31, 2021
Read this for a Philosophy of Science bookclub. It’s a fairly accessible text that doesn’t require any prerequisite knowledge. It strikes the right balance and was a crowd pleaser in our group.
Loved it <3
Loved it <3
December 2, 2015
Partially because I finished this book awhile ago and eagerly expect the next volume in the series, almost as if it were a mystery or fantasy, I find it very difficult to write a review of this book. It will need a review of all five books, once his story is complete. (The first volume came out in 2006, this one in 2010, and volume III is expected in Jan. 2016) However, I will summarize some of his major points in order to remind myself once the five books are out what I thought of this one volume. While it seems that philosophy and ways of knowing more generally had the simple aim of achieving perfect explanatory power, say in the same way physics or maths explains something, and that this was the case at the end of the 17th-century, Gaukroger shows with exemplary historical and natural-philosophical detail that this 'aim of science' was problematic. In the period under discussion (1680–1760), a period I focus on in my research as well, many different strands (or many paths, to use another metaphor) were possible. Three are worth point out: one was metaphysics as described by Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, which Gaukroger says ended in a dead end. Yet, as we see illuminated in the correspondence between Clark and Leibniz, this was a very real possibility (a 'living philosophy' so to speak) at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Another dead end of the time, but one that was crucial for the relationship of philosophy and theology, was what was called 'physico-theology' (and a book of mine called Philosophy Begins in Wonder also has a great chapter on this theme). This theme, exemplary for someone like Burnet or Pluche and even influenced Kant to some extent, truly attempted to merge the ways of scientific knowing and Biblical (or theological) knowing, claiming that these were not two different ways (for example, natural vs. revealed) of knowing. Another example of this would be Buffon's Lockean criticisms of Linnaeus, but as we know now Linnaeus and classification won out in the end over physico-theology (see ch. 5 of this book).
The third, and the most interesting in my opinion, is what happens in the title of this book: the collapse of mechanism and the rise of sensibility. The story for Gaukroger begins with Fontenelle and moves through the philosophes to Hume. I would probably tell the story differently, but I am reviewing his book here. The key distinction in this story is reason vs. sensibility, which fragment knowledge, and become a conflictual tension in the human being and in culture. Whereas for the seventeenth-century, the conflict was primarily one between mechanics and matter-theory, here is whether to follow reason or the passions. One key quote from Gaukroger: "This conception [of natural philosophy] answered to the needs of a general model for cognition in a more satisfactory way that [sic!] did its predecessor, not least in that the notion of sensibility tied together developments in natural philosophy, philosophical psychology, literary culture, and moral and political theory. Diderot and others argued that sensibility actually underlay cognition, and this had fundamental implications for our understanding of our relation to the world." (4) In the end, Gaukroger shows how sensibility did not solve (just like metaphysics and physico-theology) the problems of cognitive knowing, but rather made them all the more unstable. Finally, an example of non-Whiggish history at work!
The third, and the most interesting in my opinion, is what happens in the title of this book: the collapse of mechanism and the rise of sensibility. The story for Gaukroger begins with Fontenelle and moves through the philosophes to Hume. I would probably tell the story differently, but I am reviewing his book here. The key distinction in this story is reason vs. sensibility, which fragment knowledge, and become a conflictual tension in the human being and in culture. Whereas for the seventeenth-century, the conflict was primarily one between mechanics and matter-theory, here is whether to follow reason or the passions. One key quote from Gaukroger: "This conception [of natural philosophy] answered to the needs of a general model for cognition in a more satisfactory way that [sic!] did its predecessor, not least in that the notion of sensibility tied together developments in natural philosophy, philosophical psychology, literary culture, and moral and political theory. Diderot and others argued that sensibility actually underlay cognition, and this had fundamental implications for our understanding of our relation to the world." (4) In the end, Gaukroger shows how sensibility did not solve (just like metaphysics and physico-theology) the problems of cognitive knowing, but rather made them all the more unstable. Finally, an example of non-Whiggish history at work!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews