De chemist. De geschiedenis van een verdwenen beroepsgroep, 1600–1800

Abstract

ground the intersubjectivity of the new science. A few suggestions for further development come to mind. Christian Aristotelians did not think that final causation in non-intelligent things was due to an “indwelling intelligence” (p. 40), but that God directed them to their ends as an archer does an arrow (see Laurence Carlin’s recent work). Similarly, well before Ray, Galen’s De usu partium set out in exhaustive detail how one could make the structures, actions, and uses or functions of body parts into “objects of empirical knowledge” (p. 36). Galen’s texts also separated the descriptions of structures and actions from discussions of their uses (and Galenic anatomy texts often used mundane analogies for parts). Royal Society writers on anatomy almost certainly followed this genre tradition, and not treatises on navigational instruments, as claimed (pp. 93, 202 n. 48). Finally, Aesthetic Science could have found a productive conversation partner in Marieke Hendriksen’s excellent history of the material culture, epistemology, and aesthetics of Leiden’s eighteenth-century anatomical collections, Elegant Anatomy (2015). In sum, this is a beautiful, concise study that will be of interest to historians of science, aesthetics, and communication. The central argument, that aesthetic sensibilities, or at least theories or discourse about them, shaped some investigative and communicative practices in the Royal Society and addressed the problem of intersubjectivity, is striking in its weaving of different sources and fields into a coherent vision.