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"There was no such thing as the Scientific
Revolution, and this is a book about it." With this
provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin
begins his bold historical exploration of the origins of
the modern scientific worldview. The result is a vibrant,
accessible introduction to the subject.
Rejecting the notion that there is anything
like an "essence" of early modern science, Shapin
emphasizes the social practices by which scientific knowledge
was produced and the social purposes for which it was intended.
He shows how the conduct of science emerged from a wide
array of early modern philosophical agendas, political commitments,
and religious beliefs. And he treats science not as a set
of disembodied ideas, but as historically situated ways
of knowing and doing.
Shapin argues against traditional views
that represent the Scientific Revolution as a coherent,
cataclysmic, and once-and-for-all event. Every tendency
that has customarily been identified as its modernizing
essence was contested by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
practitioners with equal claims to modernity.
Experimentalism was both advocated and rejected;
mathematical methods were both celebrated and treated with
skepticism; mechanical conceptions of nature were seen both
as defining proper science and as limited in their intelligibility
and application; and the role of experience in making scientific
knowledge was treated in radically different ways. Yet Shapin
points to the many ways that contested legacy is nevertheless
rightly understood as the origin of modern science, its
problems as well as its acknowledged achievements.
Challenging and sophisticated in its conception,
yet wonderfully concise and readable, The Scientific
Revolution is an extraordinary fusion of historical,
sociological, and philosophical sensibilities that will
profoundly influence our understanding of scientific knowledge
and its practice.
Steven Shapin is professor of sociology
at the University of California, San Diego. His books include
Leviathan and the Air-Pump (coauthored with Simon
Shaffer) and A Social History of Truth: Civility and
Science in Seventeenth-Century England, the latter published
by the University of Chicago Press.
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