Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France

Abstract

cal analysis he proposes is ‘as complex and intellectually challenging as a philosophical one’ (p. 139). Third, to view the sciences as conceptual and theoretical structures does not commit one to conceptual or theoretical purity. The epistemic reliability of the sciences, but also their capacity to evolve in time while presenting a certain stability, derives from the way in which the sciences weave together diverse procedures into a coherent whole: mathematical models and computer simulations, observations and experiments, images, narratives andmetaphors, arguments and thought experiments, etc. From this point of view too, it is tempting to compare Mechanism with Thinking with Objects, even though the former concerns the life sciences, while the later deals with mechanics. Both books succeed in showing that at their best the sciences activate all the resources of our cognitive faculties, albeit in different ways according to the scientific fields. Mechanism thus shows that early modern mechanisms involved textual comparisons (for example to textiles, p. 21, or to musical instruments, pp. 57, 60, 68–69, 136, 141), visual illustrations (pp. 25–78), observations and experiments, whether it be the use of microscopes (pp. 21, 67–71, 77–78, 85–93, 119–120), the practice of ligatures (pp. 48–52, 140– 141), dissections and vivisections (pp. 12–15, 39–40, 59, 67) or injections (pp. 54, 60). It is this richness, complexity and flexibility that made the enterprise of searching for mechanisms a fruitful one. It helps correcting any misperception of mechanical philosophy as a grandiose, but somewhat vain, programme of reducing all natural phenomena to the motions of corpuscles endowed with merely quantitative properties. We can be grateful to Bertoloni Meli for having not only clarified the notion of mechanism, but also for having opened new perspectives on the mechanical philosophy. To conclude, I will make two general remarks. First, it is interesting that the same historian worked alternatively on early modern mechanics and on early modern life sciences, whereas today these disciplines are totally separated: Bertoloni Meli makes manifest the strong conceptual links that existed between mechanics and the life sciences in the early modern period, beyond their differences in style. Second,Mechanism is an important book not only for those working on the early modern period: the three methodological commitments I have just outlined form a discourse on method that will be useful to all those, philosophers and historians alike, who wish to make sense of the sciences as conceptual and theoretical structures.