Title: E. J. Dijksterhuis: Mechanization of the World Picture
Abstract: (ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes formula omitted.) E. J. Dijksterhuis: Mechanization of the World Picture THE AUTHORS OF THE BOOKS reviewed in the three essays that follow, E. J. Dijksterhuis, Shmuel Sambursky, and Salomon Bochner, had in common with Halevy and Koyre that they belonged to the last generation of European scientists and scholars to receive a disciplined humanistic education in a pre-1014 lycee, Gymnasium, or the Dutch or Russian equivalent, before going on to a university to specialize in history, philosophy, physics, or mathematics, as the case might be. The last four wrote on history of science in ways which, now that the subject has become a professional subdiscipline, may be considered to combine learning with idiosyncrasy. This is an appropriate place to note, therefore, that many informative works either long antedate or accompany the literature produced by those who professionalized the field in the last half century. To mention only writers further back in time whom I have found invaluable, I think of Henri Daudin on 18th- and 19th-century taxonomy, J. T. Merz on European thought in the nineteenth century, Auguste Comte in the historical passages of Cours de philosophie positive, J. B. Delambre on the history of astronomy, and J. B. Montucla on the history of mathematics. There is no one now, it is safe to say, who would undertake the history of a single discipline from antiquity to modernity as Dijksterhuis does, and no one known to me who would be capable of so nuanced a treatment of the evolution of the mechanistic outlook and treatment of phenomena. I had the privilege of meeting him twice, once at the Madison meeting in 1957, and again in 1962 when the History of Science Society awarded him the Sarton Medal at the close of the International Congress of the History of Science held in Ithaca and Philadelphia. That prompted the following essay, which appeared in the series of published in American Scientist during the editorship of Sir Hugh Taylor. FOURTEEN E. J. Dijksterhuis: Mechanization of the World Picture* The immediate occasion of this Perspectives is the availability of Dijksterhuis's most comprehensive book, The Mechanization of the World Picture, first published in Amsterdam in 1950 and now most skillfully translated into English by C. Dikshoorn and published by Oxford University Press.1 Among those (very few they are) who may properly be called great historians of science, Dijksterhuis has so far been perhaps the least known in the English-reading world. It is difficult to understand why this should be so. He is Professor of the History of Science in the University of Utrecht and has published much in his own country and his own language. His is the admirable tradition of Dutch science and scholarship, however, and his work seems equally at ease in French, in German, and in English. Indeed, he has brought unobtrusively into print within the space of a few years what only a lifetime of the finest scholarship could yield in modest and in full knowledge of a great subject. In 1951, Dijksterhuis followed the first edition of his Mechanization with a documented set of studies on Cartesianism in his native country, Descartes having returned the hospitality of Holland by the philosophy which served in effect as the nursery of its science. In 1955 appeared the first volume of an edition of The Principal Works of Simon Stevin, to whom Dijksterhuis has devoted one of his deepest and most considered studies. In the same year appeared The First Book of Euclid's Elementa edited with a glossary. In his renderings of the mathematics of antiquity, Dijksterhuis follows a policy of his own devising. The Greeks used no symbols in writing mathematics. Their geometry is in words, and modern translations, notably those of T. L. Heath, devoted admirer though he was of the corpus of ancient mathematics, convey rather the results than the style and quality of the reasonings. …
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
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