front cover of Discipline and Experience
Discipline and Experience
The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution
Peter Dear
University of Chicago Press, 1995
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."
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front cover of The Intelligibility of Nature
The Intelligibility of Nature
How Science Makes Sense of the World
Peter Dear
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Throughout the history of the Western world, science has possessed an extraordinary amount of authority and prestige. And while its pedestal has been jostled by numerous evolutions and revolutions, science has always managed to maintain its stronghold as the knowing enterprise that explains how the natural world works: we treat such legendary scientists as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein with admiration and reverence because they offer profound and sustaining insight into the meaning of the universe.

In The Intelligibility of Nature, Peter Dear considers how science as such has evolved and how it has marshaled itself to make sense of the world. His intellectual journey begins with a crucial observation: that the enterprise of science is, and has been, directed toward two distinct but frequently conflated ends—doing and knowing. The ancient Greeks developed this distinction of value between craft on the one hand and understanding on the other, and according to Dear, that distinction has survived to shape attitudes toward science ever since.

Teasing out this tension between doing and knowing during key episodes in the history of science—mechanical philosophy and Newtonian gravitation, elective affinities and the chemical revolution, enlightened natural history and taxonomy, evolutionary biology, the dynamical theory of electromagnetism, and quantum theory—Dear reveals how the two principles became formalized into a single enterprise, science, that would be carried out by a new kind of person, the scientist. 

Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, The Intelligibility of Nature will be essential reading for aficionados and historians of science alike.
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The Scientific Enterprise in Early Modern Europe
Readings from Isis
Edited by Peter Dear
University of Chicago Press, 1997
This collection brings together thirteen articles on early modern Western science, each representing an important contribution to the ways in which the scientific revolution is regarded today.

The anthology features classic and prize-winning articles by renowned scholars, including "Totius in verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society," by Peter Dear; "The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Theory," by Robert S. Westman; "Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science," by Owen Hannaway; "Geography as Self-Definition in Early Modern England," by Lesley B. Cormack; "What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?" by Keith Hutchison; and "Galileo, Motion, and Essences," by Margaret J. Osler.

Also, "Scientific Patronage: Galileo and the Telescope," by Richard S. Westfall; "The Telescope in the Seventeenth Century," by Albert Van Helden; "Descartes on Refraction," by Bruce S. Eastwood; "Early Seventeenth-Century Atomism," by Christoph Meinel; "Robert Boyle and Structural Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century," by Thomas S. Kuhn; "Newton's Alchemy and His Theory of Matter," by B. J. T. Dobbs; "The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England," by Steven Shapin; and "Maria Winkelmann at the Berlin Academy," by Londa Scheibinger.

This carefully structured collection will help readers approach complex questions—involving argument and experiment, audience and agency, authority and institutions.
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