Finding Oneself in the Other

the activity in question. Natural philosophy, for example, should not be viewed simply as an early version of our modern science, but an activity that served specific purposes. The broader implications of these insights are explored in explicitly historiographical works such as ‘Decentering the “Big Picture”: The Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science’. Highlighting the differences between pre-modern and modern science, Cunningham shows, holds profound implications for older narratives of the history of science. It complicates – if not dismantles – progressive stories that draw clear lines of descent between the science of, say, Newton and Einstein. Cunningham’s approach has been hugely productive, and these essays deserve to be widely read. It may be going too far to say that ‘[t]he general enterprise that most people in the past would have usually described themselves as engaged in when they produced what we normally take to be their “scientific” findings, was either Philosophy or Natural Philosophy’ (I, p. 379). Although philosophy and natural philosophy certainly must be taken seriously, these categories do not always describe all of the activities that could be categorized as early modern ‘scientific’ investigation or practice. Contemporaries were engaged in a wide range of disciplines and arts that either sought to create knowledge about the natural world or to manipulate it. These included but were not limited to various mathematical arts, various occult or magical arts. By no means all contemporaries regarded these forms of knowledge-making or practices as philosophy or necessarily subordinated them to philosophy. In order to gain a fuller picture of early modern science and medicine, one conceived in the historicist terms articulated by Cunningham, all of these activities also need to be taken seriously. Only then is it possible to delineate the various ways in which contemporaries viewed – and in many cases disputed – their identities. These essays by Cunningham are an excellent example of this historically sensitive approach to the history of science.