The Origins of the Idea of Scientific Progress: Bernard de Fontenelle and His Contemporaries

This volume offers a new interpretation of the genesis of the idea of scientific progress in early modern science and philosophy. The interpretation argues that the idea of scientific progress was not a historical category, but an epistemological one. The main thesis of the book posits that the idea of scientific progress was a methodological means of dealing with the contingency of nature. To illustrate the novelty of the idea, the individual chapters compare several features of Renaissance natural philosophy with a new regime of knowledge that included time as an inevitable factor of empirical research. The temporal regime of knowledge is illustrated by the work of Bernard de Fontenelle and his colleagues at the Académie des sciences in Paris at the end of the 17th century. The new interpretation remedies a gap in recent scholarship where the idea of scientific progress has been overlooked even though the early modern natural philosophers themselves used it to describe the nature of their research. The book places both well-known texts and less-studied documents in a new light, thus contributing to the lively and rich debate on the origins and nature of early modern science and philosophy. It is of interest to scholars studying the history of early modern philosophy and science.