Chapter 23 sets Goethe’s Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours) in context. Colour had been the subject of intensive study, both aesthetic and scientific, in the eighteenth century, and the chapter reconstructs the many influences on Goethe and his contemporaries, from the recent discoveries of Herschel and Ritter, to earlier figures, above all Newton, but even Aristotle and Hippocrates. The chapter also presents the central tenets of Goethe’s Farbenlehre, with a particular focus on the theoretical first part, which offers a physiological theory of colours and deals with the physical nature of light.

This chapter focuses on the figure of the Cyclops and the use of ‘the animal’ in thinking human difference. It presents the animalizing of certain humans (the attribution of animal features to them) as a potent strategy to dehumanize and thus marginalize certain ways of being human. In the ethnographic imagination of Homer’s Odyssey, the margins of the known world are shown to coincide with the margins of the human. The chapter further illustrates that this spatial concept of the human did not remain restricted to the ancient world but carries on into the modern: The figure of the Cyclops, whose problematic humanity is in sharp contrast to the enlightened, educated, and cunning Odysseus, in many ways anticipates that of ‘the savage’ as the quintessential ‘other’ in the modern Western ethnographic literature. And yet the question arises as to whether the ancient story does not already expose the kind of hubris at play when we normalize certain ways of being human while dismissing others.

Two parallel trends prepared scholars for the investigation of the mind–body relationship so that a model of psychological inquiry could evolve. The first trend was methodological, characterized by the triumph of empiricism. Scientific innovations by Francis Bacon and Newton were firmly based on careful observations and quantification of observables. Using inductive methods, moving from observed particulars to cautious generalization, empiricism stood in contrast to the deductive methods of the Scholastic philosophers. The second trend occurred in the attempt to develop conceptions on the nature of humanity and was more a philosophical enterprise. Spinoza taught that mind and body are manifestations of the same unity of the person. Human activity, although unique because of humanity’s higher intellectual powers, is determined by the laws of nature. Descartes stated that the first principle of life is self-awareness of the idea, and all else that we know proceeds from self-reflection. His dualism of the interaction between mind and body distinguishes psychology from physiology. Descartes’ views were developed in the French and British philosophical traditions; Spinoza influenced the German efforts to develop a model of psychology.

This chapter defends Peirce’s conception of science against a pair of current, mutually antagonistic ideas of the difference of modern science from classical and medieval philosophy. The one party celebrates the difference, the other deplores it, but they agree that modern science rejects the classical ideal of theory as knowledge good for itself. Peirce saw that difference more subtly as one in which the classical ideal of knowing is transformed rather than abandoned. This revolution in cognitive aim did not occur arbitrarily. Well-established facts about the defeat of the Aristotelian world-view are cited to support the novel thesis that it depended on an empirical yet normative discovery, that restless, unending, specialist inquiry is more satisfying intellectually than is the dialectic of systems. The history of science reviewed in this chapter provides evidence for the argument of Chapter 9, that there is normative knowledge and that it is empirical.

Chapter 1 examines the relationship between Old and New Mechanism and uses it to illuminate the relations between metaphysical and methodological conceptions of mechanism. This historical examination will directly motivate our new deflationary account of mechanism developed in the subsequent chapters. We start by focusing on the role of mechanistic explanation in seventeenth-century scientific practice, by discussing the views of René Descartes, Christiaan Huygens, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Robert Boyle, and the attempted mechanical explanations of gravity by Descartes and Ηuygens. We thereby illustrate how the metaphysics of Old Mechanism constrained scientific explanation. We then turn our attention to Isaac Newton’s critique of mechanism. The key point is that Newton introduced a new methodology that freed scientific explanation from the metaphysical constraints of the older mechanical philosophy. Last, we draw analogies between Newton’s critique of Old Mechanism and our critique of New Mechanism. The main point is that causal explanation in the sciences is legitimate even if we bracket the issue of the metaphysics of mechanisms.

Chapter 10 briefly comments the influence of Euclid’s theory of magnitude and the Eudoxian theory of proportions on Kant’s thought in light of advances in mathematics from the early seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century. Despite these advances, mathematics was still often viewed as a science of magnitudes and their measure. The chapter also indicates further work to be done to understand Kant’s philosophy of geometry, arithmetic, algebra, and analysis.

Can we 'see' photons, black holes, curved spacetime, quantum jumps, the expansion of the universe, or quanta of space? Physics challenges appearances, showing convincingly that our everyday vision of reality is limited, approximate and badly incomplete. Established theories such as quantum theory and general relativity and investigations like loop quantum gravity have a reputation of obscurity. Many suggest that science is forcing us into a counterintuitive and purely mathematical understanding of reality. I disagree. I think that there is a visionary core at the root of the best science. Where 'visionary' truly means formed by visual images. Our mind, even when dealing with abstract and difficult notions, relies on images, metaphors and, ultimately, vision. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, science is not just about making predictions: it is about understanding, and, for this, developing new eyes to see. I shall illustrate this point with some concrete cases, including the birth of quantum theory in Einstein’s intuition, curved spacetimes and quanta of space.

This introductory chapter gives a brief survey of some of the phenomena for which classical general relativity is important, primarily at the largest scales, in astrophysics and cosmology. The origins of general relativity can be traced to the conceptual revolution that followed Einstein’s introduction of special relativity in 1905. Newton’s centuries-old gravitational force law is inconsistent with special relativity. Einstein’s quest for a relativistic theory of gravity resulted not in a new force law or a new theory of a relativistic gravitational field, but in a profound conceptual revolution in our views of space and time. Four facts explain a great deal about the role gravity plays in physical phenomena. Gravity is a universal interaction, in Newtonian theory, between all mass, and, in relativistic gravity, between all forms of energy. Gravity is always attractive. Gravity is a long-range interaction, with no scale length. Gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental interactions acting between individual elementary particles at accessible energy scales.

Historians consider the “Scientific Revolution” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the period in which the foundations of modern scientific practice and methodology first took shape. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), sometimes known today as the creator of the scientific method, inspired the formation of the first scientific societies, including the Royal Society of London and the French Académie Royale des Sciences, and their members made experiment and empiricism central to the study of nature. More recently, however, historians have had to wrestle with an interesting conundrum: some of those long hailed as pioneers of scientific experimentalism, such as Robert Boyle (1627-1691) and Isaac Newton (1643-1727), were also committed alchemists. Their dedication to this mysterious and misunderstood art led some modern biographers to deny or even suppress evidence of their alchemical pursuits. Yet, alchemical ideas were central to how Boyle, Newton, and others understood nature. In fact, Newton’s groundbreaking scientific achievements owe a particular debt to alchemical theories, without which his revolutionary vision of the cosmos would not have existed.

The chapter presents concepts of space as developed by Hobbes and Leibniz respectively. It highlights commonalities and differences in their respective concepts of space. For Hobbes, the concept of space is articulated through ideas of imaginary and real space. Hobbesian space emerges as determined by the measurment of bodies, material and thus controllable. This view of space strongly resonates with the uses of space is contemporary spatial justice studies. For Leibniz, space is a logical grounding against which the materiality of the world unfolds but also the outcome of the activity of monads as simple substances. For Leibniz, space as an order of relationships is not controllable but knowable.

This chapter argues that William Cowper aligned various faiths against atheism and the moral degeneration that, in his mind, atheism necessarily produced. Examining poems from all phases of Cowper’s career – including his 1782 moral satires, the Olney Hymns (1779), The Task (1785), and “The Castaway” (1799; 1803) – I elucidate his belief that, unlike insensible atheists, Christians should extend their sympathy to all parts of God’s creation: to the Indians oppressed by British colonialism, to the poor inhabitants of the British countryside, even to the hares Cowper kept as pets in Olney. The only figure unworthy of such sympathy in Cowper’s thinking was the atheist. Thus, for Cowper, non-Christians from abroad were excusable, and even respectable, as long as they believed in a deity and did their best with the portion of divine light they had been granted. Cowper rejected all faiths but evangelical Christianity as false, yet he aspired to a form of sociability that was available to all theists. Although there were clear limits to Cowper’s ecumenical impulses, they reveal the imaginative multifaith alliances eighteenth-century atheism was capable of engendering.

Newton codified the laws of motion and gravity, their primitive forms being enunciated in 1665-66. Using Kepler's laws, he discovered the inverse square law of gravity and went on to show that gravity is the same force which holds the planets in their orbits, as well as that which causes apples to fall to the ground. Newton was a brilliant experimentalist who invented the Newtonian, reflecting telescope which eliminated the aberrations of refracting telescopes such as those built by Galileo. Newton's researches culminated in the publication of his revolutionary Principia Mathematica of 1687. He devoted as much effort to chemical (or alchemical) analyses and to the interpretation of ancient texts and the scriptures. He was also the inventor of differential and integral calculus.