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Featured Review
| Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston, editors.The Cambridge History of Science. Volume 3: Early Modern Science. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. xxvii, 865. $160.00.
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| The Scientific Revolution has served as the linchpin of the history of science at least since the late nineteenth century, although it did not acquire that name until the 1930s. Usually referring to the period between Copernicus and Newton (roughly 1500 and 1700), it has traditionally served as the terminus ad quem for the ancient and medieval developments that preceded it and the terminus a quo for all that followed. According to traditional accounts, this period witnessed the birth of modern science and its attendant methods and institutions. |
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Like other historical disciplines, the history of science has experienced profound changes in the last two or three decades; and like other great historical periods such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the defining characteristics and significance of the Scientific Revolution have been seriously revised. A growing emphasis on social history and cultural studies has turned the attention of many historians of science away from the close reading of texts and a focus on conceptual developments to the consideration of the institutions in which natural knowledge was produced, the political and social contexts and meanings of these practices, and the various classes of people involved in producing natural knowledge. Where older studies of the Scientific Revolution gave pride of place to the mathematical and physical sciences, recent scholarly developments have recognized the important roles played in early modern developments by disciplines no longer considered relevant to modern science—for example, theology, alchemy, and astrology—as well as by nonmathematical disciplines such as natural history and medicine. |
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Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston's volume in the new, eight-volume Cambridge History of Science fully embraces a revised picture of natural philosophy and the sciences from the early Renaissance to the early eighteenth century. The explorations of the New World, Africa, and Asia and the discovery of hitherto unknown plants and animals revealed the limitations of ancient authorities such as Ptolemy in geography and Pliny in natural history. The increasing use of mathematics to solve problems in natural philosophy violated Aristotle's classification of the sciences, a classification that had defined disciplines on the basis of their subject matter and methods and had declared that physics and mathematics were separate disciplines. The title of Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), traditionally viewed as the herald of modern science, would have seemed to embody a category mistake to scholars working a century earlier. Emphasizing actors' categories rather than the anachronistic categories of modern science that traditional historians of science tended to impose on the early modern period, Park and Daston stress the fact that disciplinary boundaries have changed over time and that the early modern disciplines do not map onto those of the modern sciences. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Aristotelian classification of the sciences was giving way to incorporate a variety of sources of new knowledge. This historical insight is an important theme linking the thirty-three essays in this volume. |
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