Blazing New World: Maths, Science, Truth and Probability

Week 9

Tutor: Michael Bycroft

This seminar explores ideas about scientific and mathematical truth. Seventeenth-century England saw ambitious new proposals about how to acquire knowledge about the natural world. These proposals have different names—‘the scientific revolution’, ‘the experimental philosophy,’ ‘the mechanical philosopher’, and more—but the common thread was the conviction that a new and better kind of natural knowledge was possible. We look at some key expressions of this conviction (by John Locke and Robert Hooke), at a critical response to it (by Margaret Cavendish), and at the connections between truth-telling in natural science and truth-telling in the other domains considered so far in this module.

Required preparation

• Read the three primary sources and the three ‘key texts’ listed below.
• Identify one of these readings that you find particularly interesting and come prepared to talk for about 5mins about what makes it interesting.
• Consult the seminar questions below, and think about them in relation to all six readings.

Seminar questions

• What was the new natural philosophy in mid-seventeenth-century England?
• Did this new philosophy make knowledge seem more certain or less certain?
• Is it correct to say that the new philosophy was about facts rather than fictions?
• Why did the new philosophy gain authority (or fail to gain authority) beyond the small circle of experimenters and mathematicians who created it?
• How might insights from the earlier seminars in this module be applied to the case of natural science?

Key texts

• Steven Shapin, ‘Is There a Crisis of Truth?’, in Los Angeles Review of Books, December 2, 2019.
• Steven Shapin, ‘A Social History of Truth-telling: Knowledge, Social Practice, and the Credibility of Gentlemen,’ in A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (1994), pp. 89-144.
• Frédérique Ait-Touati, 'Margaret Cavendish: The Battle of Instruments,' in Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century (2011), pp. 174-190.

Primary sources

• Margaret Cavendish, Blazing New World (1666) [excerpts]

• Optional: trailer for Blazing New World, a 2018 horror film loosely based on Cavendish’s novel.

• John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), book IV, chaps. 14 (Of Judgment) and 15 (Of Probability). Available here in an online edition – you will need to click ‘read now’.

• Robert Hooke, Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (1665). Available online here. Read the dedications, and the preface up to (not including) the paragraph starting ‘Whether also those steams.’ You may also wish to look at the images in the book, which are available here (it helps to expand the ‘contents’ tab).

Further reading

On seventeenth-century natural science

• Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Investigations of Nature: Europe in a Global World, 1450s-1780s (Pittsburgh, 2025), esp. chapters 9 and 10.
• Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (1996).

On probability and uncertainty

• Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (2nd edn 2010).
• H G Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought 1630-90 (1963).
• Douglas Patey, Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (1984).

• Margaret Poovey, The History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998).

• Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in C17th England A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature (1983).

• Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth century (1996).

On Cavendish and women in science

• Anna Batigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the exiles of the mind (1998).

• Michelle Dimeo, Lady Ranelagh – The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle`s Sister (2023)
• Patricia Fara, Pandora's Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment (2004).
• Susan James (ed) Political Writings: Margaret Cavendish (2003)
• Emma Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (2003)
• Lisa Walters and Brandie R. Siegfried, Margaret Cavendish: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (2022).