"a new approach to the epistemological and methodological doctrines of the leading experimental philosophers of seventeenth-century England, an approach that considers their often overlooked moral, psychological, and theological elements. Corneanu focuses on the views about the pursuit of knowledge in the writings of Robert Boyle and John Locke, as well as in those of several of their influences, including Francis Bacon and the early Royal Society virtuosi. She argues that their experimental programs of inquiry fulfill the role of regimens for curing, ordering, and educating the mind toward an ethical purpose, an idea she tracks back to the ancient tradition of cultura animi. "

"Curiosity plays a key explanatory role in this book, but, curiously, Huff makes no attempt to explore what early modern Europeans thought about the subject. Historians Hans Blumenberg and Lorraine Daston have traced how, in the late Middle Ages, Europeans took a new view of curiosity: By transforming it from the vice of inquisitiveness into a cognitive virtue, they legitimated scientific inquiry. Unfortunately, Huff does not draw on the work of Blumenberg and Daston. Instead of tracing changes in what curiosity has meant, he assumes it has always been the same thing, and that Europeans just happened to have a surfeit of it, whereas others had a deficit. His attempt to establish this point, though, is flawed: Huff identifies things about which Europeans were curious, and then shows that Chinese and Muslim scholars were not equally curious about the same things. Because India had astronomers, Huff writes, “we can assume” that they would find the telescope “of intrinsic interest”—but he does not explain why that would be the case. Because of this methodological asymmetry, he misses areas in which non-Europeans demonstrated that they were quite capable of curious investigation—natural history, for example.

But Huff is not interested in what non-Europeans were curious about, because it was not modern science. In his account, the “breakthrough” or “march to the modern scientific revolution” appears inevitable. Despite occasional wrong turns onto “garden paths,” European scientists by and large made “progress” toward goals that they could not “resist.” Because Huff sees modern science as the inevitable result of curiosity, he assumes that other sophisticated cultures must have lacked it. The “discovery machine” was like a lighted match tossed into a powder keg; if it fizzled out for Chinese and Islamic scholars, that must have been because their intellectual powder was damp."

"In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus publicly defended his hypothesis that the earth is a planet and the sun a body resting near the center of a finite universe. But why did Copernicus make this bold proposal? And why did it matter? The Copernican Question reframes this pivotal moment in the history of science, centering the story on a conflict over the credibility of astrology that erupted in Italy just as Copernicus arrived in 1496. Copernicus engendered enormous resistance when he sought to protect astrology by reconstituting its astronomical foundations. Robert S. Westman shows that efforts to answer the astrological skeptics became a crucial unifying theme of the early modern scientific movement. His interpretation of this "long sixteenth century," from the 1490s to the 1610s, offers a new framework for understanding the great transformations in natural philosophy in the century that followed."

"The object of this paper is to look at the extent and nature of the uses of analogy during the first century following the so-called scientific revolution. Using the research tool provided by JSTOR we systematically analyze the uses of “analog” and its cognates (analogies, analogous, etc.) in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for the period 1665–1780. In addition to giving the possibility of evaluating quantitatively the proportion of papers explicitly using analogies, this approach makes it possible to go beyond the maybe idiosyncratic cases of Descartes, Kepler, Galileo, and other much studied giants of the so-called Scientific Revolution..." --- But you could make all kinds of analogies without using the word "analogy"!

The broader site looks interesting, too.

with commentary by Kenneth Arrow (!)

"examines the emergence during the early modern era of mathematicians, chemists, and natural philosophers who, along with military engineers, navigators, and artillery officers, followed in the footsteps of Archimedes and synthesized scientific theory and military practice. It is the first collaborative scholarly assessment of these early military-scientific relationships ... investigates the deep connections between two central manifestations of Western power, examining the military context of the Scientific Revolution and the scientific context of the Military Revolution. Unlike the classic narratives of the Scientific Revolution that focus on the theories of, and conflicts between, Aristotelian and Platonic worldviews, ... highlights the emergence of the Archimedean ideal—... a symbiosis ... between the supply of mechanistic science and the demand for military capability. "

In our library.

Do in Indo-European languages in fact have a vocabulary conducive to modern scientific concepts, or did they in fact have to force their way in?