Measures of Science

James Barry, Jr. is a Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University Southeast.

Part 1 Descartes's rectification of natural appearance - thinking over perception: Platonic and Aristotelian anticipations of Descartes's God of infinite productivity; the destruction of the cosmos in the homogeneity of things; the measure of space and the rectification of natural appearance. Part 2 Modern science as technical intervention - Bacon's Promethean measure: mythical truth, the weak tradition and the power of scientific hope; the question of technical creation and the second nature of Baconian science; the new authority of technical intervention - from "natural history" to "experimental nature". Part 3 Newton's perceptual authority and the decisiveness of technical appearance: the merger of the corpuscular and the mathematical - Newton's empirical science; the divine propriety of spirit and the insufficient space of nature; theoretical embodiment - the technical authority of Newtonian time and space.