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Response to H. Floris Cohen's essay review on Newtonian scholarship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2019

Mordechai Feingold
Mordechai Feingold*
Affiliation:
California Institute of Technology
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Extract

Long ago, George Sarton set down criteria for reviewers. In addition to insisting on the need to compose ‘faithful’ reviews, he cautioned against four types of unfit reviewers: the ‘egoist’, the ‘obscure’ reviewer, the one who is noncommittal, and the pedantic critic. Unfortunately, Cohen's review comes short on several counts. Cohen writes that he intends to examine what is ‘new’ in the three books he reviews, and whether the results therein contained are ‘worth learning’ (p. 687). Cohen denies being given to ‘misplaced hero worship’, insisting that his sole aim is to assess whether ‘scholarly novelty’ (p. 693) has been attained. Nevertheless, given his repeated rebuke of the authors under review for ‘failing to refer back to [Richard] Westfall's work’ on Newton – now nearly half a century old – it seems that he grounded his critique principally on Westfall's interpretation.

Type
Essay Review
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 52 , Special Issue 2: London 1600–1800: Communities of Natural Knowledge and Artificial Practice , June 2019 , pp. 353 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2019 

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References

1 Feingold, Mordechai, ‘The religion of the young Isaac Newton’, Annals of Science (2018), pp. 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2018.1549686CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Newman, William R., ‘Newton's reputation as an alchemist and the tradition of chymiatria’, in Boran, Elizabethanne and Feingold, Mordechai (eds.), Reading Newton in Early Modern Europe, Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp. 313–327Google Scholar.

3 Cohen, H. Floris, How Modern Science Came into the World, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010, p. 716Google Scholar.

4 Westfall, Richard S., Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, p. viiiGoogle Scholar.

5 Westfall, op. cit. (4), p. 815.

6 Buchwald, Jed Z. and Feingold, Mordechai, Newton and the Origin of Civilization, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013, pp. 127–128Google Scholar.