The Natural and the Human

This book is the third volume of a magnum opus on science and the shaping of modernity - previous volumes have covered the periods 1210 to 1685 and 1680 to 1760 in the case of The Collapse of Mechanism and The Rise of Sensibility. This current book covers the period 1739 to 1841 (Hume to Feuerbach), so we may expect further volumes to appear. The scholarship is prodigious and his main thesis highlights the significance of the fundamental shift in scientific enquiry from the natural to the human realm, involving the naturalisation of the human – a process that has continued since that time. This means attempting to understand human behaviour and motivations in empirical rather than theological or metaphysical terms.

The first part covers the dichotomies of understanding in terms of reason and sensibility as well as the limits of certainty with the introduction of probability theory. This leads on to rethinking the nature of matter more in terms of force than mechanism. The second part covers anthropological medicine, philosophical anthropology, the natural history of man with the emergence of imperative disciplines such as anatomy, geography and history, and then social arithmetic and the rise of quantification. These disciplines formulate their own empirical questions. The third part discusses the naturalisation of religion along with the historicisation of Christianity and dogma and the rise of the idea of the evolution of religion. It is fascinating to read Bayle, Gibbon, Strauss and Feuerbach on these topics and to realise how radical they were in their own time. The reader comes away with a more nuanced understanding of how the sciences have shaped the modern outlook – the book is a real tour de force.