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Metascience (2014) 23:613618 DOI 10.1007/s11016-014-9904-9
ESSAY REVIEW
Reworking Descartes mathesis universalis
John Schuster: Descartes-agonistes: Physico-mathematics, method and corpuscular-mechanism 1618-33. (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Volume 27.) Dordrecht: Springer, 2013, xix+631pp, $179.00/142.79/122.00 HB
Fokko Jan DijksterhuisPublished online: 25 June 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Descartes-Agonistes is the magnum opus of John Schuster, formerly of the University of New South Wales, honorary fellow at the University of Sydney. Its roots go back to the dissertation he wrote 35 years ago under Thomas Kuhn at Princeton University. As Schuster correctly remarks, some regard his dissertation as an underground classic. I count myself among them: Schusters work has been directional in my work on the history of early modern science. Schuster himself prefers to regard his dissertation as a vestige of a history of science of the 1970s that he has since gone beyond. In the 1980s, he elaborated and published on some central insights in a series of seminal articles, but his work on Descartes really got into its stride again around the turn of the millennium (Schuster 1980, 1990; Gaukroger et al. 2000). This book is the acme of this work, and grand it is: clocking 600 pages (excluding appendices) it extends, deepens and reinforces his analysis of Descartes into a dense and penetrating exposition. The result is a cogent interpretation of Descartes philosophy that is of vital importance to our understanding of early modern science and philosophy.
In developing a new dynamical image of Descartes work and its signicance for the scientic revolution, Schuster has closely collaborated with fellow expat Stephen Gaukroger. They understand the work of Descartes from its intellectual development in intense interaction with the knowledge cultures of his time. In this way, the published works are read as products of responses to and deliberate moves in a lifelong struggle with promising ideas, disillusioning insights, and ingenious reections on the production of knowledge. This offers an alternative for the usual modern reading of Descartes, explaining his ideas from his main philosophical works, the Meditationes and the Discours de la Mthode. At the same time, it overcomes the unease of historians of science for whom Descartes represents
F. J. Dijksterhuis (&)
Department of Science, Technology and Policy Studies, University of Twente,...