Introduction
I. Experience and Argumentative Forms.
1. “Totius in verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society,” Isis 76 (1985), pp. 145- 161.
2. “Miracles, Experiments, and the Ordinary Course of Nature,” Isis 81 (1990), pp. 663-683.
3. “From Truth to Disinterestedness in the Seventeenth Century,” Social Studies of Science 22 (1992), pp. 619-631.
4. “The Meanings of Experience,” in Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science, vol.3, Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 106-131.
II. The Authority of Mathematics.
5. “Mersenne’s Suggestion: Cartesian Meditation and the Mathematical Model of Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century,” in Marjorie Grene and Roger Ariew (eds.), Descartes and His Contemporaries: Meditations, Objections, and Replies (University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 44-62.
6. “A Mechanical Microcosm: Bodily Passions, Good Manners, and Cartesian Mechanism,” in Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (eds.), Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 51- 82.
7. “Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature: Authority, Knowledge and Expertise in the Seventeenth Century,” in Sheila Jasanoff (ed.), States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 206-224.
III. The Ineffability of Reason.
8. “Divine Illumination, Mechanical Calculators, and the Roots of Modern Reason,” Science in Context 23 (2010), pp. 351-366.
9. Essay-review of Robert S. Westman, The Copernican Question (University of California Press, 2011), for a review symposium in Metascience 23 (2014), pp. 208-212.
10. “Reason and Common Culture in Early Modern Natural Philosophy: Variations on an Epistemic Theme,” in Tamàs Demeter, Kathryn Murphy, and Klaus Zittel (eds.), Conflicting Values of Inquiry: Ideologies of Epistemology in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2015), pp. 10-38.
IV. The Roots of Modern Science.
11. “What is the History of Science the History of? Early Modern Roots of the Ideology of Modern Science,” Isis 96 (2005), pp. 390-406.
12. “Science is Dead; Long Live Science,” Osiris 27 (2012), pp. 37-55.
Biography
Peter Dear is emeritus professor of history at Cornell University. The recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, he is the author of several books, including Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution I1995), Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700 (first edition 2001), and The World as we Know It: From Natural Philosophy to Modern Science (2025).
