Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Science & Its Conceptual Foundations

by Peter Dear

Although the Scientific Revolution has long been regarded as the beginning of modern science, there has been little consensus about its true character. While the application of mathematics to the study of the natural world has always been recognized as an important factor, the role of experiment has been less clearly understood.

Peter Dear investigates the nature of the change that occurred during this period, focusing particular attention on evolving notions of experience and how these developed into the experimental work that is at the center of modern science. He examines seventeenth-century mathematical sciences—astronomy, optics, and mechanics—not as abstract ideas, but as vital enterprises that involved practices related to both experience and experiment. Dear illuminates how mathematicians and natural philosophers of the period—Mersenne, Descartes, Pascal, Barrow, Newton, Boyle, and the Jesuits—used experience in their argumentation, and how and why these approaches changed over the course of a century. Drawing on mathematical texts and works of natural philosophy from all over Europe, he describes a process of change that was gradual, halting, sometimes contradictory—far from the sharp break with intellectual tradition implied by the term "revolution."

Genres: History, History Of Science, Science, Philosophy, Mathematics

304 pages, Paperback

First published November 25, 1995

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite a terribly daunting title (and a bit of a dense introduction) this book proved to be a really interesting read.

Dear sets up the Scientific Revolution as the shift from experience to experiment. The scholastic mode of thought (especially in natural philosophy) moved from presumed universal truths to specifics. In this sort of mind frame, a singular experiment is essentially unhelpful, because it's impossible to induct from one case whether the results could apply universally. Dear traces how this shifts, especially do to the activity in fields of 'mixed mathematics' like astronomy and optics, from universal experiences to scientists attempting to recreate universal experiences (lots of witnesses, lots of repetitions, accounts told in universal passive voice) to Newton, who's presented as the first to really extol the singular experiment as the indicator of a natural truth.

I'm not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, so I'm not qualified to judge Dear's accuracy in that field. But it's a really interesting book that shines a bit of light on the history of thought.

[Tawney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I am new to the philosophy and history of science, this book is somewhat of a stand out in the way it tackles how science made the break with Aristotelian methodology. This is both a good and bad thing. Good in that Dear presents a gradual picture of the scientific revolution, and details factors and actants as connected to a larger world rather than portraying "science" as this inner world where people sit around destroying former paradigms (I'm looking at you Kuhn, well not really, but that formative book). Bad in that Dear spends a lot of time talking about Jesuits as if they had no religious context and sort of neglects the impacts of the protestant reformation.