Chapter 2 will begin by emphasizing the role of elite patrons in the production of educational treatises on the science of music. The chapter will then provide an analysis of the relationship between learning the science of music, and musical practice, including performance, poetic skills, and listening to music. After providing some medieval philosophical arguments regarding the necessity of learning the science of music in order to better appreciate music performance, the chapter pivots toward presenting the sociocultural benefits of learning the science itself, especially among the elite of the city of Baghdad between third/ninth–seventh/thirteenth centuries. Through aphorisms and entertaining anecdotes by famous Baghdadi literati such as Ibn Khurdadhbih, al-Sarakhsi, and al-Tawhidi, I demonstrate how knowledge about music – as opposed to art-music itself – was used by the elite as a social currency to gain access to certain social circles that would have otherwise remained inaccessible to them.

Widely considered to be an art today, music in the medieval Islamic world was categorized as a branch of the mathematical sciences; in fact, some philosophers and scholars of music went as far as linking music with medicine and astrology as part of an interconnected web of cosmological knowledge. Focusing on the science of music this book discusses how a non-European premodern intellectual tradition – in this case, the Islamic philosophical tradition – conceptualized science. Furthermore, it explores how this intellectual tradition produced “correct” scientific statements and how it envisioned science’s relationship with other bodies of knowledge. Finally, it investigates what made music a science in the medieval Islamic world by examining the ontological debates surrounding the nature of music as a scientific discipline as well as the epistemological tools and techniques that contributed to the production of musical knowledge during the medieval period (third/ninth–ninth/fifteenth centuries).

The legacy of Dietterlin’s Architectura is evident in the enduring role of empiricism across seventeenth-century architecture and natural philosophy. The Architectura served as the culmination of a breed of architectural image-making informed by the humanistic philosophy of learned empiricism, which intertwined the iconography of the fantastical and the occult with empirical ideas and practices. The decline of learned empiricism’s influence over architectural images is already anticipated in Dürer’s Melencolia I, which inspired the final etching of Dietterlin’s Architectura as an elegy to that tradition. Dietterlin’s contributions to the consolidation of architectural images as platforms for empirical scientific inquiry, as well as the waning of learned empiricism, resonated in seventeenth-century England and France, where architectural images eschewed symbolic representations for a novel visuality that foregrounded purely empirical evidence. Dietterlin’s Architectura catalyzed the new relationship between architecture and science by exposing the limits of humanist symbolism and the vast potential of architectural images as agents of empirical thinking, philosophy, and practices.

What role is attributed to geological knowledge within the broader whole of the Encyclopaedia? Which perspective is adequate to make philosophical sense of geological knowledge? This chapter’s response to these questions consists in a three-step argument. First, for Hegel, geohistory is irrelevant to philosophy but not the particular ways in which geological regularities are determined. Second, it argues that geology is important for Hegel as it develops the emergence of formations and structures that do not have a strict precedent in the domains of mechanical physics and chemistry, even if they arise from them. These formations and structures have a unique unity of composition and appearance, they form a dynamical but stable entity. Hereby geological notions serve to develop a particular notion of instantiation and self-determination that mediates inanimate matter with organic life. Third, it argues that by means of said emergence of formations and structures and their global arrangement, geology provides us with the basic notion of environment that serves as a precondition for the emergence of organic life. Hereby geology for Hegel mediates inorganic matter with the purposiveness of organisms.

This chapter examines the tension between mysticism and science in Aldous Huxley’s novels of ideas. It deploys the new critical terminology of Rachel Potter and Matthew Taunton and illustrates its utility. Those Barren Leaves (1925) is a good example of the ‘comic novel of ideas’, in that the high seriousness of Cardan and Calamy’s disputations is interspersed with low farce. Point Count Point (1928) exemplifies the ‘serious novel of ideas’: in addition to staging a Hegelian dialectic between the paganism of Rampion and the Manicheanism of Spandrell, the narrative tests their ideas. Eyeless in Gaza (1936) is an ‘asymmetric novel of ideas’: the dialectic between a version of D. H. Lawrence’s philosophy and a broadly Buddhist worldview is enacted in the person of Anthony Beavis, rather than being expounded in ‘character-character dialogue’. Beavis’ metaphor of the ocean and the waves signals the triumph of mysticism over Lawrence’s ‘psychological atomism’.

This chapter argues that Hegel’s aim in his philosophy of nature is not to compete with natural science but to show that there is reason in nature – reason that science cannot see but that works through the causal processes discovered by science. It considers first the transition from Hegel’s logic to his philosophy of nature and argues that the latter continues the project of the former, starting with reason, or the “absolute idea”, as nature, as sheer externality. It then argues that Hegel derives nature’s categories logically – a priori – from the idea-as-externality, and subsequently matches them with empirical phenomena (rather than constructing categories to fit the latter). It provides an abridged account of Hegel’s physics in order to show how the categories of physical (as opposed to mechanical or organic) nature are derived from one another and how they are embodied in physical phenomena, such as sound, heat, and magnetism. It then concludes by arguing that, contrary to appearances, Hegel’s conception of light complements, and is not simply at odds with, that presented by quantum physics.

Focusing on Menippus’ description of his celestial journey and the great cosmic distances he has travelled, I argue that Icaromenippus is a playful point of reception for mathematical astronomy. Through his acerbic satire, Lucian intervenes in the traditions of cosmology and astronomy to expose how the authority of the most technical of scientific hypotheses can be every bit as precarious as the assertions of philosophy, historiography, or even fiction itself. Provocatively, he draws mathematical astronomy – the work of practitioners such as Archimedes and Aristarchus – into the realm of discourse analysis and pits the authority of science against myth. Icaromenippus therefore warrants a place alongside Plutarch’s On the Face of the Moon and the Aetna poem, other works of the imperial era that explore scientific and mythical explanations in differing ways, and Apuleius’ Apology, which examines the relationship between science and magic. More particularly, Icaromenippus reveals how astronomy could ignite the literary imagination, and how literary works can, in turn, enrich our understanding of scientific thought, inviting us to think about scientific method and communication, the scientific viewpoint, and the role of the body in the domain of perhaps the most incorporeal of the natural sciences, astronomy itself.

In science, to be ‘conservative’ is to understate your findings. In insurance, it means the opposite: erring on the side of overstatement of risks. For a clear assessment of the risks of climate change, we need these two cultures to meet in the middle. This requires a separation of tasks: between those who gather information, and those who assess risk.

Neither scientists, nor economists, nor insurers, nor military planners have assessed the risks of climate change in full. Heads of government are left to guess. A clear understanding of the scale of the risks will not on its own guarantee a proportionate response. But unless we have such an understanding, we can hardly be surprised if our response is inadequate.

People often assume that to give ourselves a fighting chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, we need either inspired political leadership, or a moral revolution in society. Both would be nice to have, but there are more plausible ways to make faster progress. They involve thinking differently. We need science that gives us risk assessment instead of prediction; economics that understands change instead of assuming stability; and diplomacy that focusses on international collaboration instead of unilateral national action.

This chapter aims to redescribe the IPCC through the analytical framework of the book by identifying the actors, activities and forms of authority that shape the organisation and its assessment practice. Reviewing existing studies of the IPCC, the chapter begins by identifying two central concerns within this scholarship: first, the relationship between science and politics and second, the asymmetries between developed and developing country participation. The chapter contributes to this literature by using the framework of the book to identify the IPCC as five distinct units: the panel, the bureau, the technical support units (TSUs), the secretariat and the authors. This identifies other forms of authority that matter alongside scientific and political forms, most importantly the administrative, as found within the TSUs. Describing the historical emergence of the social order over thirty years and six assessment cycles reveals the relationship between economic capital and meaningful participation. It requires economic and human resources to undertake IPCC activities, and it through this investment individual actors and member government becomes meaningful and authoritative participants, with knowledge of and the symbolic power to write the meaning of climate change.

I open the book with the political struggle that took place between parties at COP24, over whether the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C should be noted or welcomed. This provides the context for exploring the IPCC as a central site in and producer of climate politics. In the chapter, I take the reader back to where this study began, with the question, who has the power to define climate change for collective response and what constitutes this power? The answer the book offers is the practice of writing. The actors, activities and forms of authority framework provides the analytical framework for exploring the asymmetries in power to effect how climate change is written. This approach has developed from interviews, observation and extensive data collection from IPCC documentation. The resulting book takes the reader on a journey into the intricate details of writing an assessment, the social order through which it is written and how climate change is known and acted upon through the process.