The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685.

Shank, Michael H.

Stephen Gaukroger. The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. x + 564 pp. index. illus. tbls. bibl. [pounds sterling]5. ISBN: 978-0-19-929644-6.

This impressive and wide-ranging book is the first of a quintet devoted to the question: how in the (Western) world did all cognitive values come to be associated with scientific ones? In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, les belles lettres were fading as the keys to ethics and learning, worrying Casaubon and Gibbon; increasingly, religion, morality, and philosophy were judged by scientific criteria, a transformation that Gaukroger deems a fait accompli by the late nineteenth century.

This first volume sets up the problem, emphasizing the period from the 1210 condemnation of Aristotle at Paris to the eve of Newton's Principia. The breadth of Gaukroger's vision and his scholarship give the book a historical credibility that few recent accounts can match. He understands that Aristotelian natural philosophy became an important cultural force in Europe from the thirteenth century onward, but argues that it followed the "boom-bust" pattern of incipient revolutions in other civilizations. Like the latter, medieval Europe failed to "consolidate" its scientific culture. Gaukroger believes that Western science is unique in having broken the boom-bust pattern. (Caution: exceptionalism is a common pre-bust belief.) In the seventeenth century, revelation and the new natural philosophy reinforced one another; the natural philosopher was transformed into the legitimate arbiter of standards for most forms of inquiry. This short review allows only glimpses of the book's rich and complex arguments, which are difficult to summarize adequately, let alone to critique in a few words.

Gaukroger begins by clearing the decks for his own account, undermining explanations of the early modern "consolidation of scientific culture" that rely on the autonomy, neutrality, and method of science. In his historical reconstruction, thirteenth-century culture witnessed the large-scale introduction of Aristotelian natural philosophy alongside revelation. To bridge these forms of knowledge, Aquinas proposed metaphysics, but this uneasy answer ultimately proved unsatisfactory--witness the Pomponazzi Affair on the immortality of the soul. After Aristotelianism exhausted itself and faced competition from other philosophies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, a curious thing happened. In the seventeenth century, revelation became allied with various forms of the new natural philosophy, which thus acquired a new cultural role and a new legitimacy. Gaukroger sees this superimposition of "the 'two books' [of nature and revelation] ... into a single volume" (507) as an unprecedented development in the history of world culture. Since the unity of knowledge it presupposed was peculiarly the forte of the new (largely British) natural philosopher, his "persona" as an honest man capable of inquiring into all disciplines became the locus for the cultural authority of science in areas far beyond its original scope. In seeing early modern natural philosophy as systematically more consonant with revelation than its medieval counterpart, Gaukroger stands the old secularization narrative on its head, with distant echoes of the Merton thesis.

An argument of this scope relies necessarily on the synthesis of a vast, sometimes flawed, literature, and also demands the exclusion of many relevant sources. By way of critique, I point to several early choices that leave a deep imprint on his account. The privileged position of thirteenth-century Paris in Gaukroger's opening story gives his narrative an unduly Aquinocentric, theological, and Gilsonian cast (the Oxford story is very different). At the same time, his argument overrates the idiosyncratic Parisian condemnations of Aristotle and others, especially those of 1277, which allegedly "shaped the intellectual landscape for the next 350 years" (48). In the end, for Gaukroger, it is fundamentally a Thomistic framework that the Scientific Revolution will set aside.

Perhaps for this reason, Gaukroger passes very lightly over the non-Thomistic fourteenth-century transformations of natural philosophy into a high-powered logical and measurement-oriented enterprise that diffused into theology (a point relevant to Gaukroger's grand thesis). Also, given the importance of mathematization in the rise of the new natural philosophy, it is curious that he pays so little attention to either the mathematical sciences themselves (optics, astronomy) or the mathematizing trends in late medieval natural philosophy, which contemporaries rightly saw as going beyond Aristotle. (Problematic for similar reasons is his out-of-date account of Copernicus, whose predecessors did try to keep the mathematical and the physical aspects of astronomy together.)

Gaukroger's grand beginning of an even grander five-volume narrative is an exceptional book. Its structure of scientific authority, as it were, is certain to stimulate long and lively discussions among academics of every stripe, from medievalists through historical sociologists to historians of science, religion, and the world's civilizations.

MICHAEL H. SHANK

University of Wisconsin-Madison