The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue

by Matthew L. Jones

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 mind—guidance for living a good life. The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution presents a triptych showing how three key early modern scientists, René 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.

Genres: History Of Science, History, Philosophy

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Matthew L. Jones is the James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization in the Department of History at Columbia University. He studies the history of science and technology, focused on early modern Europe and on recent information technologies. A Guggenheim Fellow for 2012-13 and a Mellon New Directions fellow for 2012-15, he is writing on book on computing and state surveillance of communications, and is working on Data Mining: The Critique of Artificial Reason, 1963-2005, a historical and ethnographic account of “big data,” its relation to statistics and machine learning, and its growth as a fundamental new form of technical expertise in business and scientific research.

Reviews

[Joseph Yue · Rating 4 out of 5]

I still vividly remember the shock I experienced when I first discovered that the scientific heroes mentioned in my high-school physics textbook were, on top of being scientists, also prominent philosophers. But that shock was ill-informed and inaccurate, for they were no scientists at all; in fact, there was no such occupation as 'scientist' until the early 19th century. They were, according to their own identification, natural philosophers. But what is philosophy, if not the art of living a good life? And this is the main thesis of this book; i.e., Descartes, Pascal, and Leibniz, despite their diverging visions of what a good life looks like, were all pursuing such an end through their scientific practices.

Fast forward to the 21st century: we have a replication crisis; various scientific disciplines are fragmented almost beyond repair; most importantly, no one seems to have any clue about what's going on in GR and QM, and how on earth to reconcile them. No wonder the stress and depression amongst scientists have gone through the roof. Is this situation, however, really a coincidence, taking place after science has been so thoroughly de-philosophised? Until scientists can begin to answer the Leibnizian question 'cur hic', they seem to be stuck between the misery of fund-writing and the mire of incomprehension, while facing the incessant temptation of violating intellectual integrity for selfish utilitarian reasons. 'It should please us that we must work hard to imagine a historical period when ethics needed science, rather than science needing ethics. We should not let the need for such imagination slip away' (p. 269).