H. Floris Cohen is a Dutch historian who has devoted his career to understanding the rise of modern science in Europe, as well as its failure to appear in China and Islamic civilization. He published a massive tome of his findings in 1994: The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry. This monstrous work, nearly 700 pages long, presents the cumulative results of his massive research effort. It’s not for the faint of heart or those lacking a doctorate in history. Nineteen years later, he took mercy on the rest of us and wrote a condensed version lacking the thirty-three zillion footnotes: The Rise of Modern Science Explained. This essay is my review of that book.
First, I must explain the concept of a construct. This is an intellectual artifice that represents an idea with a lot of baggage. It’s a handy way of putting a big, messy bunch of ideas into a bag and giving the bag a name. Mr. Cohen’s first construct is “nature knowledge”. This is a nice term for the ideas that previous civilizations had before the rise of modern science. It’s not really correct to talk about “Roman science” or “Chinese science” before the Scientific Revolution, because it really wasn’t science in the sense that we think of science. Each of these civilizations had a mass of ideas that helped explain the natural world, but they were not organized in a logical structure that would make any sense to us. There was a structure to them, but it was unlike what we think of as science and unique to each civilization. Mr. Cohen is right to differentiate between the rigorously logical structure we call ‘science’ and the earlier compilations of loosely connected ideas.
Next come two constructs that dominate the rest of the book: the Athenian approach and the Alexandrian approach.