Essay Review: Rational Artistry,Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition: The History of Argument and Explanation Especially in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and Arts

Crombie A. C. , Augustine to Galileo: The history of science a.d. 400–1650 (London, 1952; hereafter AG), cited from the 2nd edn, Medieval and early modern science (2 vols, Garden City, N.Y., 1959; reprinted in 1 vol., London, 1979), i, 25–26; idem, Robert Grosseteste and the origins of experimental science, 1100–1700 (Oxford, 1953). See Koyré A. , “The origins of modern science: A new interpretation”, Diogenes, xvi (1956), 1–22; McMullin Ernan , “Medieval and modern science: Continuity or discontinuity?”, International philosophical quarterly, v (1965), 103–29; Murdoch John , “Pierre Duhem and the history of late medieval science and philosophy in the Latin West”, in Gli studi di filosofia medievale fra otto e novecento (Rome, 1991), 253–302; Eastwood Bruce S. , “On the continuity of Western science from the Middle Ages”, Isis, lxxxiii (1992), 84–99; Grant Edward , The foundations of modern science in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1996); and Lindberg David C. , The beginnings of Western science: The European scientific tradition in philosophical, religious, and institutional context, 600 b.c. to a.d. 1450 (Chicago, 1992), 355–68.

AG, i, 24; ii, 114, 334, 118, 121. For a succinct recent account of this thesis — Also indicated in the title Styles of scientific thinking — See Crombie A. C. , “Designed in the mind: Western visions of science, nature and humankind”, History of science, xxvi (1988), 1–12 (reprinted in Crombie A. C. , Science, art and nature in medieval and modern thought (London, 1996; hereafter SAN), 1–12).

AG , i, 184, 131–2, 142–3, 147, 183, 191–2, 196–252. For the lack of systematic experimentation see ibid., ii, 114 and 128–9. Eastwood points out that Crombie increasingly emphasised the university and academic origins of early modern science throughout the 1950s; cf. Eastwood , op. cit. (ref. 1), 86 and 95–96. See Beaujouan G. , L'interdépendance entre la science scolastique et les techniques utilitaires (XII^e, XIII^e et XIV^e siècles) (Paris, 1957); Hall B. S. , “Giovanni de' Dondi and Guido da Vigevano: Notes towards a typology of medieval technological writings”, in Cosman M. P. Chandler B. , (eds), Machaut's world: Science and art in the fourteenth century (New York, 1978), 126–42; Ovitt G. , “The status of the mechanical arts in medieval classifications of learning”, Viator, xiv (1983), 89–105; Newman W. , “Technology and alchemical debate in the late Middle Ages”, Isis, lxxx (1989), 423–45; Whitney E. , Paradise restored: The mechanical arts from Antiquity through the thirteenth century (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, lxxx; Philadelphia, 1990); and for a slightly later period, Hall B. S. , “Production et diffusion de certains traités de techniques au Moyen Âge”, in Cahiers d'études médiévales, vii: Les arts mécaniques au Moyen Âge, ed. by Allard G. et Lusignan S. (Paris, 1982) and the excellent articcle by Long Pamela , “Power, patronage, and the authorship of ars: From mechanical know-how to mechanical knowledge in the scribal age”, Isis, lxxxviii (1997), 1–41.

AG, ii, 17, 19–24 and 29–34. See Eastwood , op. cit. (ref. 1), 91–94; Wallace W. , Galileo and his sources: The heritage of the Collegio Romano in Galileo's science (Princeton, 1984); idem, Prelude to Galileo: Essays on medieval and sixteenth-century sources of Galileo's thought (Boston, 1981); Crombie A. C. , “Sources of Galileo's early natural philosophy”, in Bonelli M. L. Righini Shea W. R. , (eds), Reason, experiment and mysticism in the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1975), 157–75 (reprinted in SAN, 149–63); Crombie A. C. Carugo A. , “The Jesuits and Galileo's ideas of science and nature”, Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, viii (fasc. 2) (1983), 1–68 (reprinted in SAN, 165–229); Jardine N. , “Galileo's road to truth and the demonstrative regress”, Studies in history and philosophy of science, vii (1976), 277–318.

SST (the work under review), i, pp. ix, x–xii. Collingwood's most accessible account of the nature of ‘questions’ or what he called the “questioning activity” is to be found in his An autobiography (London, 1939, 1970), esp. pp. 24, 26–27, 33, 37, 39, 69, and 75. About to move from full-time research in zoology to a post as Lecturer in History of Science at University College London, Crombie reviewed Collingwood's The idea of nature in May 1946 in The Cambridge review and later reminisced about the impact that Collingwood's teaching had had on him at Oxford. See Crombie A. C. , “Beginnings at Oxford”, Isis, lxxv (1984), 25–28 (reprinted in idem, Science, optics and music in medieval and early modern thought (London, 1990; hereafter SOM), 461–4, esp. p. 463). More generally, see Jardine N. , The fortunes of inquiry (Oxford, 1986), 123–32 and idem, The scenes of inquiry: On the reality of questions in the sciences (Oxford, 1991), 50–51, 53, 56–58, 68, 146–51.

SST, i, 3–5. SST is almost two-and-a-half thousand pages long, although one-fifth of this (and most of vol. iii) is composed of an extensive bibliography whose compilation is, with the analytical index, credited as having been supported by the Director-General for Science, Research and Development of the Commission for the European Communities (at a conservative estimate there are over 16,000 entries in the bibliography). In such a gargantuan undertaking the errors are relatively small: The entire p. 2232 is reprinted instead of 2332, on p. 2305 Richards R. J. Richardson A. R. are independently credited as being the authors of the same article, and on p. 2401 Westfall R. S. is credited as being the author of Westman's R. S. article on Jung, Pauli and the Kepler–Fludd polemic.

Ibid., i, 6–8.

Ibid., i, 12–15, 16.

Ibid., i, 93, 95, 96.

Ibid., i, 99, 113–17, 128, 129.

Ibid., i, 131–75, esp. pp. 155, 162, 175. See also Crombie A. C. , “Expectation, modelling and assent in the history of optics. Part 1: Alhazen and the medieval tradition”, Studies in the history and philosophy of science, xxi (1990), 605–32 (reprinted in SAN, 301–28); Lindberg D. C. , Theories of vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago and London, 1981); and Smith A. M. , “Saving the appearances: The foundations of classical geometrical optics”, Archive for history of the exact sciences, xxiv (1981), 73–99. For the university system see de Ridder-Symoens H. , A history of the university in Europe, i: Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992); Grant , op. cit. (ref. 1), 33–53, and Lindberg , op. cit. (ref. 1), 206–18. For comparisons with Islamic contexts see Makdisi G. , The rise of colleges: Institutions of learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh, 1981) and Huff T. E. , The rise of early modern science: Islam, China and the West (Cambridge, 1995).

SST, i, 183–4, 187–9.

Ibid., i, 189, 190, 192, 197–200.

Ibid., i, 203–8, 211, 213, 215, 219, 225.

Ibid., i, 229, 231, 234, 239. For medieval learning in general see Lindberg , op. cit. (ref. 1); Grant , op. cit. (ref. 1); Murdoch J. Scylla E. , (eds), The cultural context of medieval learning (Dordrecht and Boston, 1975); and Cantor N. , The civilization of the Middle Ages. A completely revised and expanded edition of ‘Medieval history: The life and death of a civilization’ (New York, 1993).

SST, i, 243–5, 246, 248.

Ibid., i, 257, 265, 275.

Ibid., i, 280, 281, 282.

Ibid., i, 282–309 (espec. pp. 282, 305 and 308–9) and 332.

Ibid., i, 313, 314–15, 317 and 318. See Lawn B. , The rise and decline of the scholastic ‘quaestio disputala’, with special emphasis on its use in the teaching of medicine and science (Leiden, 1993). For the new sense of confidence in the capacity of human reason to comprehend the natural world and other truths, see Stiefel T. , The intellectual revolution in twelfth century Europe (New York, 1985). For a good recent account of translating activity, see Grant , op. cit. (ref. 1), 18–32.

SST, i, 348, 349–50, 352–3, 372–3, 374–5, 380–1, 388. See Grant , op. cit. (ref. 1), 168–206; Arnaldez R. Massignon L. , “Arabic science”, in Taton R. (ed.), History of science: Ancient and medieval science from the beginning to 1450 (New York, 1963), 385–421; and Sabra A. I. , Optics, astronomy and logic: Studies in Arabic science and philosophy (Aldershot, 1994). For the transmission of Greek learning into Islamic civilisation, see Peters F. E. , Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotelian tradition in Islam (New York, 1968); Sabra A. I. , “Greek science in Islam”, History of science, xxv (1987), 223–43; Russell G. A. , “The owl and the pussy cat: The process of cultural transmission in anatomical illustrations”, in Transfer of modern science and technology to the Muslim world , ed. by Ihsanoglu E. (Istanbul, 1992), 180–212; Rashed R. , “Problems of the transmission of Greek scientific thought into Arabic: Examples from mathematics and optics”, History of science, xvii (1989), 199–209; Lettinck P. , Aristotle's ‘Physics’ and its reception in the Arabic world (Leiden, 1994); and Rashed R. (in collaboration with Morelon R. C. ), (ed.), Encyclopedia of the history of Arabic science (London, 1996).

SST, i, 400–4, 406–7, 409, 410, 416–17, 417–19. For the development of spectacles see Rosen E. , “The invention of eyeglasses”, Journal of the history of medicine and allied sciences, xi (1956), 13–53 and 183–218, while for clockwork and its influence see Landes D. S. , Revolution in time: Clocks and the making of the modern world (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1983), 1–113. For a recent overview of these topics, Crosby A. W. , The measure of reality: Quantification and Western society, 1250–1600 (Cambridge, 1997).

SST, i, 424, 425. See Crombie A. C. , “Science and the arts in the Renaissance: The search for truth and certainty, old and new”, History of science, xviii (1980), 233–46 (reprinted in SOM, 161–74) and “Experimental science and the rational artist in early modern Europe”, Daedalus, cxv (1986), 49–74 (reprinted in SAN, 89–114). See also Shirley J. W. Hoeniger F. D. , (eds), Science and the arts in the Renaissance (Washington, D.C., 1985). For parallel developments in techniques of administration see Clanchy M. T. , From memory to written record, 1066–1307 (London, 1979).

SST, i, 425, 426, 430, 431. See also Mayr Otto , Authority, liberty and machinery in early modern Europe (Baltimore, 1986), 1–26.

SST, i, 431–60, esp. pp. 434–9, 444–6, 451, 453, 457. For perspective see in general Edgerton S. Y. Jr , The Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective (New York, 1975); idem, The heritage of Giotto's geometry: Art and science on the eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca and London, 1993), 23–222; White J. , The birth and rebirth of pictorial space , 3rd edn (Cambridge, Mass., 1987); Veltman K. H. , with Keele K. D. , Studies on Leonardo da Vinci, i: Linear perspective and the visual dimensions of science and art (Munich, 1986); and Kemp M. , The science of art: Optical themes in Western art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven and London, 1990). For cartography, see Turnbull D. , “Cartography and science in early modern Europe”, Imago mundi, xlviii (1996), 5–14; Harley J. B. Woodward D. , (eds), The history of cartography, i: Cartography in prehistoric, ancient, and medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago, 1987); and Buisseret D. (ed.), Monarchs, ministers and maps: The emergence of cartography as a tool of government in early modern Europe (Chicago, 1992). For a good account of the influence of the Geographia on Paolo Toscanelli and his circle, and Columbus (via the famous letter from Toscanelli of 1474), see Goldstein T. , “Geography in fifteenth century Florence”, in Parker J. (ed.), Merchants and scholars: Essays in the history of exploration and trade (Minneapolis, 1965), 9–32. For Ghiberti see Krautheimer R. Krautheimer-Hess T. , Lorenzo Ghiberti , 3rd edn (Princeton, N.J., 1982); Long , op. cit. (ref. 3), 21–25. For Alberti, see Gadol J. , Leon BattistaAlberti: Universal man of the early Renaissance (Chicago, 1969); and Wright D. , “Alberti's De pictura: Its structure and purpose”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xlvii (1984), 52–71.

SST, i, 461–4, 473–7. See in general Agrimi J. , Tecnica e scienze nella cultura medievale: Inventario dei manuscritti relativi alla scienza e alla tecnica medievale (secc. xi–xv): Biblioteche di Lombardia (Florence, 1976); Keller A. G. , Theatre of machines (New York, 1964) and idem, “A Renaissance humanist looks at ‘new’ inventions: The article ‘Horologium’ in Giovanni Tortelli's De orthographia”, Technology and culture, xi (1970), 345–65. For the impact of new techniques of representation on the depiction of flora, fauna and medical elements, see Bober H. , “An illustrated medieval school-book of Bede's ‘De natura rerum’”, Journal of the Walters Art Gallery , xix–xx (1956–57), 64–97; Herrlinger R. , History of medical illustration from Antiquity to 1600 (New York, 1970); Murdoch J. , Album of science: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York, 1984); and Prinz W. Beyer A. , Die Kunst und das Studium der Natur vom 14. zum 16. Jahrhundert (Weinheim, 1987). For architecture see Smith C. , Architecture in the culture of early humanism: Ethics, aesthetics and eloquence, 1400–1470 (New York, 1992); di Pasquale S. , “Leonardo, Brunelleschi, and the machinery of the construction site”, in Galluzzi P. , (ed.), Prima di Leonardo: Cultura delle macchine a Siena nel Rinascimento (Milan, 1991), 163–81; and Long P. , “The contribution of architectural writers to a ‘scientific’ outlook in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries”, Journal of medieval and Renaissance studies, xv (1985), 265–98. For the representation of machinery see Galluzzi P. , op. cit.; Long , op. cit. (ref. 3); Scaglia G. , “Drawing of Brunelleschi's mechanical inventions for the construction of the cupola”, Marsyas, x (1960–61), 45–67; Ferguson E. S. , Engineering and the mind's eye (London, 1993); and Aiken J. A. , “Truth in images: From the technical drawings of Ibn Al-Razzaz Al-Jazari, Campanus of Novara, and Giovanni de' Dondi to the perspective projection of Leon Battista Alberti”, Viator, xxv (1994), 325–59. For Fontana see Clagett M. , “The life and works of Giovanni Fontana”, Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, i (1976), 5–28; Battisti E. Battisti G. S. , Le macchine cifrate di Giovanni Fontana (Turin, 1984); and for Taccola see Prager F. D. Scaglia G. , Mariano Taccola and his book ‘De Ingeneis’ (Cambridge, Mass., 1972).

SST, i, 477, 483, 484, 487–93, 494.

Ibid., i, 499, 501, 517–21, 523–5, 526, 529.

Ibid., i, 530–43, 553, 563–4, 582–3, 587 and 608. For another view of Galileo's style see Wisan W. , “Galileo and the emergence of a new scientific style”, in Hintikka J. , (eds), Theory change, ancient axiomatics and Galileo's methodology … (Dordrecht, 1981), 311–39. See also Feher M. , “Galileo and the demonstrative ideal of science”, Studies in history and philosophy of science, xiii (1982), 87–110.

SST, i, 626–32, 633, 634–5, 636–7, 651–6, 657–8. See Crombie A. C. (with Carugo A. ), “Galileo and the art of rhetoric”, Nouvelles de la république des lettres, ii (1988), 7–31 (reprinted in SAN, 231–55); Finocchiaro M. , Galileo and the art of reasoning: Rhetorical foundations of logic and scientific method (Dordrecht, 1980); and Vickers B. , “Epideictic rhetoric in Galileo's Dialogo”, Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, viii/2 (1983), 69–102.

SST, ii, 783–4, 786.

Ibid., ii, 801–4, 810–65 (839–50 and 851–65 are a series of citations from Mersenne's work), esp. pp. 817, 818–19, 826, 833; and 865–94, esp. p. 890.

Ibid., ii, 900–1, 926, 1034–75, esp. pp. 1037–8.

Ibid., ii, 1039, 1040–1, 1043, 1055, 1060, 1064–9. See Cohen I. B. , The Newtonian revolution in science, with illustrations of the transformation of scientific ideas (Cambridge, 1980); and de Gandt F. , “Le style mathématique des Principia de Newton”, Revue d'histoire des sciences, xxxix (1986), 195–222.

SST, ii, 1081–105, esp. pp. 1087, 1090, 1092, 1102–3.

Ibid., ii, 1106–66, esp. pp. 1108, 1118–20, 1157–8, 1154. See also Hankins T. L. Silverman R. J. , Instruments and the imagination (Princeton, 1995).

SST, ii, 1170–2, 1176–7, 1183, 1184–5, 1194–5, 1231, 1234.

Ibid., ii, 1245, 1252–4, 1256, 1258, 1260–1.

Ibid., ii, 1262, 1268–9, 1281–90, 1292.

Ibid., ii, 1295, 1296–7.

Ibid., ii, 1310, 1313.

Ibid., ii, 1322–66 (esp. p. 1345), 1367–1420, 1421–41 (esp. p. 1421).

Ibid., iii, 1551–86, esp. p. 1554.

Ibid., iii, 1587–633, esp. pp. 1598–1600, 1604, 1607–15, 1605.

Ibid., iii, 1634–721, esp. pp. 1638–58, 1686.

Ibid., iii, 1723–62, esp. pp. 1741, 1761.

Hacking I. , “‘Style’ for historians and philosophers”, Studies in the history and philosophy of science, xxiii (1992), 1–20, pp. 3 and 4. For ‘big picture’ narratives see the special edition of the The British journal for the history of science, 1993, especially Cunningham A. Williams P. , “De-centring the ‘big picture’”, pp. 407–32. For Crombie's view of Koyré's Galileo see his “Alexandre Koyré and Great Britain: Galileo and Mersenne”, History of technology, iv (1987), 81–92 (reprinted in SAN, 263–73). See also Weber Max , The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism , transl. by Parsons T. (London, 1976), 183, and SST, 71 (citing Charles Raven and R. Hooykaas). Crombie argues ( ibid. , 79) that religious belief did influence the motivation and style of scientific enquiry but not the scientific movement per se which for him began long before the Reformation. Koyré was also adamant that specific religious beliefs (like the practical arts) had no impact whatsoever on the Scientific Revolution as a whole. See Koyré Alexandre , The astronomical revolution: Copernicus — Kepler — Borelli (London, 1980), 9, 74, fn 12, 19–20.

Lindberg , op. cit. (ref. 1), 366–8.

For the concept of style in the history of technology and science see Pitt J. C. , ‘“Styles’ and technology”, Technology in society, x (1988), 447–56; Richards J. , “Rigor and clarity: Foundations of mathematics in France and England, 1800–1840”, Science in context, iv (1991), 297–313. For analyses of style in sociology, art and philosophy see Shapiro M. , “Style”, in Kroeber A. L. , (ed.), Anthropology today (Chicago, 1953), 287–312; Gay P. , Style in history (New York, 1974); Rée J. , Philosophical tales: An essay on philosophy and literature (London, 1987); Lang B. , The anatomy of philosophical style (Oxford, 1990); Wollheim R. , “Pictorial style: Two views”, in Lang B. (ed.), The concept of style (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987); Wiesing L. , Stil Statt Wahrheit: Kurt Schwitters und Ludwig Wittgenstein über ästhetische Lebensformen (Munich, 1991); special edition on style, Science in context, iv (1991), 223–231, 233–64; and Van Eck C. (eds), The question of style in philosophy and the arts (Cambridge, 1995).

Fleck L. , The genesis and development of a scientific fact , ed. by Trenn T. J. Merton R. K. (Chicago and London, 1979; originally subtitled Introduction to the theory of the thought style and the thought collective), 27, 31, 37, 38,39, 84 (and cf. 85), 99, 104 (italics in original text). See Mannheim K. , Ideology and Utopia: An introduction to the sociology of knowledge (London, 1936); idem, “Conservative thought”, in idem, Essays in sociology and social psychology (London, 1953), 74–164; and Barnes B. , “Cultural change — The thought-styles of Mannheim and Kuhn”, Common knowledge, iii (1994), 65–78.

See Hacking , op. cit. (ref. 47), 2–3; Kuhn T. S. , The structure of scientific revolutions , 2nd edn (Chicago, 1970), 175, 176–7; Gavroglu K. , “Differences in style as a way of probing the context of discovery”, Philosophia, xlv (1990), 53–75; Cohen, op. cit. (ref. 34); Wisan , op. cit. (ref. 29); and Hong S. , “Styles and credit in early radio engineering: Fleming and Marconi on the first transatlantic wireless telegraphy”, Annals of science, liii (1996), 431–65. For Kuhn's debt to Fleck see Kuhn , op. cit., p. vi and idem, “Foreword” to Fleck , op. cit. (ref. 50).

Kuhn , op. cit. (ref. 51), 187, 189, 208–9; idem, “Comment on the relations of science and art”, reprinted in idem, The essential tension: Selected studies in scientific tradition and change (Chicago, 1977), 351.

Reingold N. , “National style in the sciences: The United States case”, in Forbes E. (ed.), Human implications of scientific advance (Edinburgh, 1978), 163–73; Nicolson M. , “National styles, divergent classifications: A comparative case study from the history of French and American plant ecology”, Knowledge and society, viii (1989), 139–86; Harwood J. , Styles of scientific thought: The German genetic community 1900–1933 (London, 1993), 229, xvii, 15.

Fleck , op. cit. (ref. 50), 108; SST, i, pp. x, xi, xii; Hacking , op. cit. (ref. 47), 3; Kuhn , op. cit. (ref. 52), 29.

Hacking , op. cit. (ref. 47), 10–15; Fleck , op. cit. (ref. 50), 27, 30–31, 48; Pickstone John , “Ways of knowing: Towards a historical sociology of science, technology and medicine”, The British journal for the history of science, xxvi (1993), 433–58, and idem, “Bodies, fields and factories: Technologies and understandings in the age of revolutions”, in Fox R. , (ed.), Technological change: Methods and themes in the history of technology (Amsterdam, 1996), 51–62.