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Science For A Polite Society - Gender, Culture, And The Demonstration Of Enlightenment (Paperback)
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Science For A Polite Society - Gender, Culture, And The Demonstration Of Enlightenment (Paperback)
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Traditional accounts of the scientific revolution focus on such
thinkers as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, and usually portray it
as a process of steady, rational progress. There is another side to
this story, and its protagonists are more likely to be women than
men, dilettante aristocrats than highly educated natural
philosophers. The setting is not the laboratory, but rather the
literary salons of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, and
the action takes place sometime between Europe's last great witch
hunts and the emergence of the modern world.Science for a Polite
Society is an intriguing reexamination of the social, cultural, and
intellectual context of the origins of modern science. The elite of
French society accepted science largely because of their personal
involvement and fascination with the emerging philosophy of nature.
Members of salon society, especially women, were avid readers of
works of natural philosophy and active participants in experiments
for the edification of their peers. Some of these women went on to
champion the new science and played a significant role in securing
its acceptance by polite society.As Geoffrey Sutton points out, the
sheer entertainment value of startling displays of electricity and
chemical explosions would have played an important role in
persuading the skeptical. We can only imagine the effects of such
drawing-room experiments on an audience that lived in a world
illuminated by tallow candles. For many, leaping electrical arcs
and window-rattling detonations must have been as convincing as
Newton's mathematically elegant description of the motions of the
planets.With the acceptance and triumph of the new science came a
prestige that made it a model of what rationality should be. The
Enlightenment adopted the methods of scientific thought as the
model for human progress. To be an ?enlightened? thinker meant
believing that the application of scientific methods could reform
political and economic life, to the lasting benefit of humanity. We
live with the ambiguous results of that legacy even today, although
in our own century we are perhaps more impressed by the ability of
science to frighten, rather than to awe and entertain.
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