Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Values, Norms and Ideologies in Early Modern Inquiry: An Introduction / Tamás Demeter -- 1 Reason and Common Culture in Early Modern Natural Philosophy: Variations on an Epistemic Theme / Peter Dear -- 2 Sixteenth-Century Hydraulic Engineers and the Emergence of Empiricism / Matteo Valleriani -- 3 Visual Perception and the Cartesian Concept of Mind: Descartes and the Camera obscura / Dániel Schmal -- 4 Testimony and Empiricism: John Sergeant, John Locke, and the Social History of Truth / John Henry -- 5 Eight Days of Darkness in 1600: Hume on Whether Testimony Can Establish Miracles / Falk Wunderlich -- 6 Kepler’s Revolutionary Astronomy: Theological Unity as a Comprehensive View of the World / Giora Hon -- 7 Natural Theology as Superstition: David Hume and the Changing Ideology of Natural Inquiry / Tamás Demeter -- 8 The Problem of Parallels as a Protestant Issue in Late Eighteenth-Century Hungary / János Tanács -- 9 Newton’s Strategic Manoeuvring with Simple Colours, Categories, and Descriptions / Gábor Áron Zemplén -- 10 The Birth of Epistemological Controversy from the Spirit of Conflict Avoidance: Hobbes on Science and Geometry / Axel Gelfert -- 11 Analytic and Synthetic Method in the Human Sciences: A Hope that Failed / Thomas Sturm -- 12 The Science of Man and the Invention of Usable Traditions / Eric Schliesser -- 13 Francis Bacon on Charity and the Ends of Knowledge / Sorana Corneanu -- 14 Spinoza’s Ethics: “A Dominion Within a Dominion” / Ruth Lorand -- 15 What was Kant’s Critical Philosophy Critical of? / Catherine Wilson -- Index Nominum.

Available to subscribing member institutions only.

Historical research in previous decades has done a great deal to explore the social and political context of early modern natural and moral inquiries. Particularly since the publication of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) several studies have attributed epistemological stances and debates to clashes of political and theological ideologies. The present volume suggests that with an awareness of this context, it is now worth turning back to questions of the epistemic content itself. The contributors to the present collection were invited to explore how certain non-epistemic values had been turned into epistemic ones, how they had an effect on epistemic content, and eventually how they became ideologies of knowledge playing various roles in inquiry and application throughout early modern Europe.