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“The Intelligibility of Nature is a very impressive and compelling book about the relationship between instrumentalism and realism in the sciences from 1600 to 1950. Peter Dear argues for a fascinating reinterpretation of the Scientific Revolution and its aftermath, showing how between the time of Descartes and that of Lavoisier, natural philosophy and practical techniques merged: that process, this book shows, was decisive for the emergence of modern science. This is a lucid and intelligent history.”
Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge

“The Intelligibility of Nature considers the nature of science as it has developed and evolved in the modern West. Peter Dear explores what intelligibility and instrumentality have meant to scientists since Newton's day, and how their changing and conflicting conceptions have affected the fortunes of specific scientific claims, from the advent of the scientific revolution to the development of quantum mechanics. This is an interesting, enjoyable, and rewarding read.”
Adrian Johns, University of Chicago

The Intelligibility of Nature

How Science Makes Sense of the World

Peter Dear

Despite recent controversies surrounding evolution and intelligent design, the ethics and utility of stem cell research, and the integrity of clinical trials in medicine, science still possesses an enormous amount of cultural authority and prestige. When we want to know anything about how the natural world works, we ask a scientist. For this reason, such figures as Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Mendel, and Einstein have been admired and revered throughout history because of the profound and sustaining insights they provided into the meaning of the universe.

But as Peter Dear shows in The Intelligibility of Nature, that is only one face of science. Just as important is science's role as applied knowledge, a function that turns theories into vaccines, observations into inventions. The creative tension between those two aspects of science—knowing and doing—has shaped attitudes toward science since the ancient Greeks.

Using well-known episodes from the history of science, such as mechanical philosophy and Newtonian gravitation, elective affinities and the chemical revolution, natural history and taxonomy, and quantum theory, Dear here reveals how the very different principles of knowing and doing were brought together as a new enterprise, science, which would be practiced by a new kind of person, the scientist.

Elegant and nuanced, The Intelligibility of Nature will help readers understand how science became what it is today—and how it shapes our very experience of the world.

Peter Dear is President Andrew D. White Professor of the History of Science at Cornell University. He is the author of Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700 and Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

 

Peter Dear is available for interviews. For more information please contact Mark Heineke
at (773) 702-3714
mah@press.uchicago.edu