Customer Reviews

The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry

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Floris Cohen does the most extensive review of the literature on the Scientific Revolution in English. It is well worth reading.

The one major weakness in his treatment is his antagonism to consideration of social and economic factors in the rise of modern science in Europe. This is seen in his treatment of the work of Joseph Needham, primarily known as historian of Chinese science, but also a theorist of why mathematical/experimental science rose in the West rather than in China, with its more advanced technology and surprisingly modern philosophy of nature, and of Edgar Zilsel, whose views on the economic context of science and the sources of the ideal of laws of nature are seminal. (Zilsel believed that modern science arose from the economic crisis that threw together illiterate artisans with literate but non-manual classical scholars, to combine experiments and apparatus with mathematical theory. Zilsel and, following him, Needham, also claimed that the notion of laws of nature arose through an extension of the notion of law in jurisprudence to non-human nature in the late middle ages.) Of course Cohen must refute the ideas of the Soviet physicist-historian Boris Hessen (or Gessen) on the economic and social roots of Newton's ideas. Cohen is very much influenced by the Cold War mentality, and feels he must refute any idea that he thinks might be tinged with or resemble Marxism in any manner. Cohen feels he must discredit any author whose views he fears to be associated with Marxism. In the case of Zilsel, Cohen accuses him of plagiarizing from Leonardo Olischki. The latter's Geschichte der Neusprichlichen Wissenschaftlichen Literatur (History of Vernacular Scientific Literature) indeed deserves to be more well known, but the accusation that Zilsel borrowed his ideas from it is a canard. Cohen constantly accuses Hessen of Stalinism, when in fact Gessen's work was produced before Stalin's siezure of total power . Hessen's paper was delivered along with those of a group led on a visit to London by Bukharin, many of whom including Bukharin, Vavilov, and Gessen disapeared in the purges. Cohen goes further to associate Robert King Merton, dean of standard sociologists of science, with Stalinism, because of the social analysis in his dissertation. Cohen similarly repeats the earlier criticisms of Hessen and Zilsel by G. N. Clark, Rupert Hall, etc., without further analyzing whether those criticisms have stood up, or discussing later refinements and uses of Hessen and Zilsel's work. Similarly, Cohen uses Needham's notorious accusation of US use of bacteriological warfare during the Korean war to attempt to irrelevantly discredit Needham's unrelated comparisons of early Chinese and Western science. On a minor point, I believe Cohen misinterprets the anecdote concerning the origin of Needham's interest in the question of what experimental/mathematical science did not arise in China. Cohen claims the question was asked Needham by his Chinese graduate students. Other versions of the story suggest that it was the high scientific abilities of Chinese graduate students, combined with a growing interest in China that led him to ask the question.

In short, although Cohen's volume is valuable as a thorough review of the historiographical literature, its animus against social explanations of the Scientific Revolution unfortunately distorts and weakens the work.

This is one of the best analyses of the history of science, and more, the historiography of science. The history of science is an enigma of world history, as it seems to wax and wane in the tide of millennia between the Greeks and the rise of the modern, and thus accounting for a 'scientific revolution' as either some spontaneous emanation of the seventeenth century or a slow evolution form the Middle Ages is the object of considerable theorizing between Duhem and Koyre and many others. This account is one of the most full-bodied of this genre (cf. also, e.g. Shapin's The Scientific Revolution) with a sure fire plot as a detective story, the 'case of the missing centuries'.

Cohen seems to have read everything on where and how science originated, and he reviews it all with great care. Final chapter presents a credible summary of where science came from.

This is a well put-together set of book reviews along with fast-paced, snappily written dialogue on The Scientific Revolution. It's written by one author and it's something every serious scientist who is truly literate should read.