To what extent did scholars use science to pursue the good life in the seventeenth century? How to articulate the Scientific Revolution with ethical questions? These are the questions at the core of the investigation led by the historian of science Matthew Jones in his book The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution. At first glance, his project is simply an extension of research on the social history of truth that has encouraged historians for two decades to decipher the moral norms that gave credit to the use and production of scientific knowledge. Civility, politeness, honor led to specific research that highlighted the cultural and social context surrounding the practices of scientific innovation in the Classical Age. This book deepens these questions by asking how mathematical practices were considered moral reflections. This article will discuss the contribution of this book by first examining the three attempts at experimenting mathematical morals led by Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz. The article then shows how Matthew Jones successfully draws on the work of Pierre Hadot by considering mathematical exercises as spiritual exercises. In a third broader step, the article examines how the book exemplifies a return of the moral issue in Anglophone history of science in the last twenty years while the French classical epistemology has avoided this kind of questioning. The article argues that these approaches open up avenues of research for historians to better understand the relationship between science and passion, science and spirituality, and more largely science and religion in the early modern period.

Dans quelle mesure les savants ont-ils utilisé les sciences pour poursuivre une bonne vie au XVIIe siècle? Comment articuler révolution scientifique et questionnement éthique? Ce sont les questions que formule l’historien des sciences Matthew Jones dans son ouvrage The good life in the scientific revolution. Son projet s’inscrit d’abord dans les prolongements des recherches sur une histoire sociale de la vérité qui a encouragé de nombreux historiens depuis deux décennies à déchiffrer les normes morales qui garantissent l’usage et la production des énoncés scientifiques. La civilité, la politesse, l’honneur ont donné lieu à des recherches précises qui ont permis de souligner le contexte culturel et social qui entoure les pratiques de l’innovation scientifique à l’âge classique. Ensuite, il approfondit ces interrogations en se demandant comment la pratique mathématique est considérée comme une mise en jeu, et non comme le reflet, de ces normes morales. Cet article se propose de discuter des apports de ce livre en examinant d’abord les trois formes d’expérimentation d’une morale mathématique menées par Descartes, Pascal et Leibniz. L’article montre ensuite comment Matthew Jones puise dans les travaux de Pierre Hadot sa conception des exercices mathématiques comme exercices spirituels. Dans un troisième temps, l’article étudie dans quelle mesure le livre illustre un retour de la question morale en histoire des sciences anglophone depuis une vingtaine d’années alors que l’épistémologie classique à la française s’est toujours tenue à distance de ce questionnement. On montrera comment ces approches ouvrent des pistes de réflexion pour les historiens pour mieux saisir les relations entre sciences et religion à l’époque moderne.

Through its focus on the question of circulation, world history attained a central position amongst the historical configurations in the last decade. Indicative of our fundamentally changing world, the past thereby reveals itself to have been shaped by commercial, human and intellectual flows of global dimension. The history of science has been particularly receptive to such methodological developments, especially with regard to works influenced by a markedly social approach to science and knowledge, which has focused for some time on the analysis of intellectual networks. From the French provincial Enlightenment to Athansius Kircher's circles—including the relationships of patronage of mathematicians and court philosophers—social, intellectual and epistemological configurations have been designed, allowing us to consider different scales in the circulation of knowledge.