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94 Klaas Van Berkel for Early Modern Scholars, Isaac Beeckman Is 94 Early Science and Medicine 21 (2016) 94-96 book reviews Klaas van Berkel Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion. Mechanical Philosophy in the Making (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 265 pp., $39.95, ISBN 978 1 421 409 368. For early modern scholars, Isaac Beeckman is mostly known as Descartes’ friend, and as the one who renewed Descartes’ interest in natural philosophy through a fortuitous encounter in the Dutch city of Breda in 1618. But, most of the time, Beeckman is not considered as a very thoughtful and original phi- losopher or scientist, but rather as the match that lit the genius of the French philosopher. With this book, Klaas van Berkel successfully manages to change this picture. This publication is a translation into English and a revised version of Van Berkel’s 1983 PhD dissertation, which was initially written in Dutch (Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637) en de mechanisering van het wereldbeeld, Amster- dam, Rodopi, 1983). It makes the ideas and precise information on the Dutch philosopher that Van Berkel had uncovered more than 30 years ago accessible to a wider readership. The first three chapters compose a biography of Beeckman, the last four are a more systematic study of Beeckman’s ideas from the perspective of the his- tory of philosophy and science, with a particular focus on his mechanism. The first part offers a wonderfully lively biography, which is so rich in detail that it would be impossible to fully do justice to it here. One follows Isaac Beeckman from his birth in 1588 in Zeeland, through the various steps of his education (including mathematics with the Leiden Professor Rudolph Snelli- us, theology, philosophy, and medicine) in the Low Countries and France, to his appointments as school teacher and his exchanges with Descartes, Gas- sendi, and Mersenne, eventually to his death in 1637 in Dordrecht. It is an ex- tremely enjoyable contextual portrait of the Dutch natural philosopher, offering a pleasurable read for the interested reader and a mine of information about the Dutch context of the first half of the seventeenth century for early modern scholars. Van Berkel has indeed managed to convey, in a way similar to seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, an animated portrait that articulates the profusion of details of everyday life in small cities of the Low Countries, the intellectual endeavors and emotional episodes of Isaac Beeckman’s life, and its institutional setting. It is remarkable that Van Berkel never falls into mere anecdote, but this biography supports the historical and philosophical account he intends to give of Beeckman’s thought. Therefore the book’s subtitle (“Me- chanical Philosophy in the Making”) does not only refer to a conceptual genetic reconstruction of Beeckman’s philosophy. Rather the making of mech- anism implies that natural philosophy is also an activity with social, cultural, ISSN 1383-7427 (print version) ISSN 1573-3823 (online version) ESM 1 © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi Early10.1163/15733823-00211p10 Science and Medicine 21 (2016) 94-96 book reviews 95 religious, and technical dimensions. Klaas van Berkel has fully succeeded in accounting for all those dimensions through Beeckman’s biography. Mechani- cal philosophy here results from the integration of diverse experiences made through a lifetime, and especially from the conjunction of artisanal skills and speculative knowledge. The second part of the book is devoted to the study of Beeckman’s mechan- ical philosophy. The principles of Beeckman’s mechanism derive from a theory of matter grounded in atomism and a theory of motion based on inertia (for circular as well as rectilinear motion). Contrary to other atomists of the period like Giordano Bruno or Pierre Gassendi, Beeckman conceived a purely mecha- nist atomism in which all physical processes occur by contact of passive chunks of matter. However groundbreaking his approach was in this respect, Beeck- man never tried to account for the phenomena in an experimental way or to confirm the corpuscular explanations he had devised. Instead he was content with producing corpuscular explanations that could account for phenomena and were faithful to his methodological principles, namely the appeal to “a combination of mathematics and physics” (77), and the possibility for the hu- man mind to visually represent those explanations. But Beeckman’s physico- mathematics did not amount to a “mathematization of nature” in the Galilean way, but rather to the application of mechanical properties to bodies repre- sented according to their geometrical figures. Even if he did make numerous observations, when it came to account for phenomena, his mechanical expla- nations remained mostly speculative. Since, according to Van Berkel, Beeckman was the first to propose an en- tirely mechanical philosophy (developed mainly from 1612 to 1618) and had no model to follow on that path, it remains to explain how Beeckman came to formulate this conception of nature and causation. In chapter 6, Van Berkel offers a synthesis of Beeckman’s sources, that is, first of all, his readings, in particular Lucretius, who may have offered some confirmation for Beeckman’s own atomist ideas, Simon Stevin for his works on mechanics and his use of il- lustrations, and Peter Ramus for the visual dimension involved in thinking; but secondly, his religious convictions, according to which God had created nature in such a way that it was entirely understandable; and thirdly, his background as a craftsman, which led him to see the world as a machine. Regarding the latter, Beeckman, a teacher at a Latin school with significant bookish erudition, was also trained in candle and water conduit making. Van Berkel’s interpretation of the genesis of Beeckman’s ideas is therefore a con- vincing paradigm of what scholars like Edgar Zilsel, Pamela Smith, or Pamela Long have tried to demonstrate, namely that the Scientific Revolution might be seen as arising from a conjunction of craftsmanship and more abstract Early Science and Medicine 21 (2016) 94-96.
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