The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution

by Jones, Matthew L.

• ISBN13: 9780226409559
• ISBN10: 0226409554
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Amid the unrest, dislocation, and uncertainty of seventeenth-century Europe, readers seeking consolation and assurance turned to philosophical and scientific books that offered ways of conquering fears and training the mindguidance for living a good life. The Good Life in the Scientific Revolutionpresents a triptych showing how three key early modern scientists, Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried Leibniz, envisioned their new work as useful for cultivating virtue and for pursuing a good life. Their scientific and philosophical innovations stemmed in part from their understanding of mathematics and science as cognitive and spiritual exercises that could create a truer mental and spiritual nobility. In portraying the rich contexts surrounding Descartes' geometry, Pascal's arithmetical triangle, and Leibniz's calculus, Matthew L. Jones argues that this drive for moral therapeutics guided important developments of early modern philosophy and the Scientific Revolution.

Author Biography

Matthew L. Jones is associate professor of history at Columbia University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
List of Abbreviations	xv
A Note on Conventions	xvii
Introduction	1	(14)
PART 1: DESCARTES
1 Geometry as Spiritual Exercise	15	(40)
2 A Rhetorical History of Truth	55	(34)
PART 2: PASCAL
3 Mathematical Liaisons	89	(42)
4 The Anthropology of Disproportion	131	(38)
PART 3: LEIBNIZ
5 Forms of Expression	169	(60)
6 Seeing All at Once	229	(38)
Epilogue	267	(4)
Notes	271	(58)
Bibliography	329	(34)
Index	363