Chapter 7 examines Benjamin Worsley’s manifesto of natural sciences that contained utopian ideas about human capacity to overcome death, if only the right scientific approach and the right moral attitude could be achieved. Revelation substituted what Boyle believed was the impossibility of grasping moral natural law rationally. Therefore, the study of moral natural laws is practically irrelevant in his work. Boyle moved constantly between a self-sufficient and mechanistic idea of the physical world and recourse to an infinitely wise God as a guide to human knowledge. He wrote several ambitious works on these issues, which are nowadays considered foundational to the Scientific Revolution but remain practically unknown beyond specialist circles nowadays. The chapter looks in particular at The Origine of Formes and Qualities and A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature. These works articulate Boyle’s ambition to transmute everything in nature and his momentous critique of nature, a metaphysical and sacred concept that had been part of Western culture since at least the era of the great Greek philosophers.

Chapter 4 discusses the circle that formed around the intelligencer Samuel Hartlib (1600–1662). Its overarching argument is that utilitarian science offered guidance in finding the simplicity of the unum necessarium (Luke 10:42), a common theme exalted by contemporary Millenarianism of the Protestant cause. In practical terms, knowledge about necessities became the means to achieving that goal of faith. The scepticism of the period and its obvious corrupting effects on morality and devotion led to inventiveness in pursuit of substitutes for the classical moral principle of the light of reason. The Reformers worked towards a political and theological project of a utilitarian science as a means by which to reach God and reproduce Paradise on earth. Scientific knowledge about trade became central and was expressed, significantly, in the momentous Navigation Acts of 1651.

In the Introduction the three interwoven theses of the book are presented. The first of these concerns the Anthropocene era and contends that a more accurate understanding of the history of natural law and its impact on the development of modern Europe, which, significantly, focuses and draws on previous transformations of the concept of nature, will facilitate the addressing of key current issues in respect of that era. The second concerns the metaphysics of human nature and nature more broadly and contends that the sceptical denial of the light of moral nature and of its epistemological freedom is related to the disappearance of nature as a sacred space. The third thesis concerns the modification of natural law in England during the seventeenth century and contends that the most important seventeenth-century scientists/natural lawyers buttressed their liberal politics by means of philosophical and ethical necessitarianism.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scientists, philosophers, writers, artists, and composers were interested in questions of order and structure – of the universe, human society, and the individual. So were the people who read, saw, heard, and discussed their works in clubs, coffeehouses, salons, newspapers, and journals. Many people developed new ways to contemplate the universe and the place of humans in it: physicians, chemists, and alchemists observed and experimented on the natural world; astronomers searched the skies with the newly invented telescope; mathematicians posited laws to explain how basic forces worked. Philosophers increasingly argued that reason was the best tool for understanding the world, though most thought that the capacity for rational thought varied widely between different types of people. Concern with order and the limits of human understanding emerged in literature as well, while art and music saw giant works on a huge scale but also smaller, more reflective pieces. The eighteenth century saw a broadening of culture and learning, but also a growing split between professional and amateur – both trends that created a larger market for many types of cultural products.

There was nothing special about James Hargreaves. Born in 1721 near Blackburn in Lancashire, he never learned to read. As he grew to adulthood his only job prospect was that open to other Blackburn men of his standing: he became a hand-loom weaver who turned yarn into fabric to make a living. From his meagre salary he supported his wife and thirteen children.

Eighteenth-century England was an important textile producer. To produce fabric from wool or cotton requires three steps: carding, spinning and then weaving. At the time, it usually took three carders to provide the roving for one spinner, and three spinners to provide the yarn for one weaver. To increase the amount of fabric, one needed to speed up the process early in the chain of production. And so, in 1764, the story goes, Hargreaves was working with a one-thread spinning wheel when it accidentally fell over.

Margaret Cavendish has recently become the subject of intense academic interest among scholars from a wide range of disciplines. In addition, she is increasingly becoming visible in popular culture. In the Introduction of this collection, Brandie R. Siegfried and Lisa Walters explore Cavendish’s influence upon Western philosophy, science, literature and women’s rights. The Introduction also provides contextual information about Cavendish’s life and works and her importance in early modern literary culture as well as the scientific revolution. Indeed, Cavendish is an important figure for understanding the seventeenth century’s collective efforts at advancing knowledge, particularly in philosophy. However, no other natural philosopher of the early modern era developed the sheer breadth of literary versatility and inventiveness peculiar to Cavendish, who explored her philosophy and science in poetry, romance, orations, fictional letters, science fiction, and drama. Hence, this chapter emphasizes the importance of understanding of Cavendish’s diverse and wide-ranging body of thought by situating her ideas within a multidisciplinary conversation among scholars.

Philosophical arguments must be understood in relation to the historical contexts in which they were produced. This yields the recognition that the distinction between early modern “philosophy” and “science” is an anachronistic imposition—the philosophical foundation of modernity and the Scientific Revolution are facets of the same transformations. However, the “contextualist turn” presents methodological difficulties arising from the opposition of philosophical analysis and historical narrative. This introduction presents two strategies for resolving these tensions in the study of the period. First, examination of how authors identified with peers and opposed themselves to foes generates a fine-grained understanding of early modern disciplines, without anachronistic impositions. Second, shifts in disciplinary boundaries can be used as entry points into the networks of influences that ramified across the intellectual landscape, yielding narratives that are sensitive to a wide range of textual and contextual factors. Together, awareness of disciplinary boundaries and their “inflection points” offers an updated methodology for the investigation of the early modern period. Anachronistic grand narratives of early modern philosophy and of the Scientific Revolution will be superseded by more modest but much more sophisticated accounts of the multiplication and reorganization of intellectual disciplines.

The Industrial Revolution cannot readily be modelled if research is treated as a public, private or club good. Recent work on the knowledge commons and on ‘network’ and ‘anti-rival’ goods has offered more promising perspectives, but we have proposed that research is most suitably considered as a novel good, namely a ‘contribution good.’ A contribution good is a non-depletable good jointly available only to those who have contributed to its creation. Here we show that the Industrial Revolution, and some of the institutional developments that accompanied it, conform well with a contribution good model of technical change.

Shakespeare, the first and still greatest psychologist of the modern (post-Medieval) era, shows us in his plays the psychological evidence leading to and confirming three great discoveries. First, that the moral emotions of shame and guilt, along with the moral value systems they motivate (shame and guilt ethics), although intended to prevent violence, actually stimulate violence, toward others (shame) or the self (guilt). Second: with the scientific revolution, the traditional sources of moral authority (custom and tradition, God and religion, and beliefs consisting of assertions unsubstantiated by evidence) lost their credibility. Thus, Hamlet could find no answer to his question: What should I do? Third, violence can be prevented by replacing the moral emotions of shame and guilt with love, the emotion that transcends morality, making it unnecessary and redundant, and replacing moral value judgments and commandments with psychological understanding and evidence-based knowledge – thus restoring relationships and trust.

This chapter examines current assumptions about the agenda of the history of science where the dominant narrative concentrates on the Greek legacy and then on the transformations that took place in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. A Great Divide is often postulated between the workings of the Savage Mind and those of Western scientific modernity. When Greek ideas concerning nature, magic and metaphor are critically examined the way is open to expand the remit of the history of science to make room for a fuller appreciation of the work of other ancient societies and modern indigenous groups.

This chapter explores four different types of explanatory factors that might be invoked to account for the emergence of different groups of scientific theories, ontologies or cosmologies, namely ecology, language, technology and socio-political factors. It arrives at the negative conclusion that none of these singly nor all four taken in conjunction allow us to predict and explain the world-views and modes of scientific investigation that the historical record and the ethnographic data provide evidence for. The varying trajectories of the different developments that we encounter thus demand nuanced particular analysis.

This chapter investigates the problems posed by the difficulties of translation across different natural languages and conceptual systems. While there is no totally neutral vocabulary in which this can be effected, this does not mean that mutual understanding is quite beyond reach, although that will depend on allowing for the revisability of some of the initial preconceptions in play. Comparing divergent schemata is indeed an important means of expanding the horizons of the history of science.

Kuhn used the duck–rabbit figure as a metaphor for revolutionary change in science. The two aspects of the drawing stand for two ways of perceiving the world, before and after a revolution, while the drawing itself represents the world that, paradoxically, both changes and remains the same. I argue that Kuhn, aiming to bring about a revolution in philosophy of science, did not want to eliminate the paradox, but rather to exploit and underscore it to challenge what he saw as the dominant epistemological paradigm. I also argue that Kuhn rejected the two-tiered view of perception, first observing and then interpreting raw data, in favour of the theory-ladenness of observation that echoed Wittgenstein’s account of ‘seeing’ rather than Hanson’s assimilation of scientific observation to ‘seeing as’. According to Wittgenstein, ‘seeing as’ is parasitic upon regular seeing and, in that sense, cannot illuminate the general case of perception in science. Finally, I show that the analogy between the dawning of an aspect and novelty in science, informed Kuhn’s views on creativity. In his view, advances in science emerge when a system of beliefs is transformed by new patterns of organization.

I argue historical information on the relationship between Copernicus’s work and Islamicate astronomy, which came to light when Kuhn was writing The Copernican Revolution, complicates the depiction of Copernicus’s work as revolutionary, or discontinuous with previous astronomy. I consider Saliba’s claim that Tusi’s work was “a Scientific Revolution before the Renaissance.” I conclude that, although Tusi’s work is important, it is better understood as extending normal science. Similar arguments undermine the claim that Copernicus’s work was revolutionary. Earlier histories of the Copernican revolution have given too little credit to the innovations of Tycho Brahe, and his imitators and opponents, and the solid scientific reasons for preferring Tycho’s system over Copernicus’s as late as 1650. However, the situation in European astronomy and cosmology from the career of Copernicus to the death of Newton does look like a Kuhnian crisis state. It is also possible to locate incommensurabilities between heliocentric and geocentric cosmologies, especially beginning with Kepler. The concept of incommensurability remains an important resource for understanding the history of science.

This chapter explores a crucial transition in the understanding of infinity during the eighteenth century. Originally a divine attribute, against which the finite is reduced to insignificance (e.g., in Baroque poetry), the infinite becomes a feature to be embraced within the finite world itself. Together with developments in science and mathematics (e.g., the invention of the calculus at the end of the seventeenth century), other cultural spheres played a crucial role in normalizing the ‘anomaly’ (T. S. Kuhn) of the infinite. Chief among them were ‘physico-theology’ and religiously inflected poetry (especially Heinrich Brockes), which celebrated the divine within the grandest and minutest aspects of creation, and Pietism, which explored feelings of the sublime in nature and the soul (especially Friedrich Klopstock).