Introduction

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Preface xi
4. Introduction 1
5. I. The Project for Mastery
6. Chapter 1. Machiavelli and the Discovery of Fact 15
7. Chapter 2. The Place of the Treatment of the Conquest of Nature in Francis Bacon’s On the Wisdom of the Ancients 30
8. Chapter 3. Hobbes on Nature and Its Conquest 43
9. Chapter 4. Devising Nature: An Essay on Descartes’s Discourse on Method 54
10. Chapter 5. Montesquieu, Commerce, and Science 73
11. Chapter 6. Bacon and Franklin on Religion and Mastery of Nature 85
12. II. Ancient Alternatives and Anticipations
13. Chapter 7. On the Supremacy of Contemplation in Aristotle and Plato 99
14. Chapter 8. Xenophon and the Conquest of Nature 111
15. Chapter 9. Lucretius on Rebelling Against the “Laws” of Nature 122
16. III. Consequences, Critiques, and Corrections
17. Chapter 10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Return to Nature vs. Conquest of Nature 137
18. Chapter 11. Kant on Organism and History: Ambiguous Endings 155
19. Chapter 12. Beyond the Island of Truth: Hegel and the Shipwreck of Science 171
20. Chapter 13. Separating the Moral and Theological Prejudices and Taking Hold of Human Evolution 183
21. Chapter 14. Mastery of Nature and Its Limits: The Question of Heidegger 193
22. Chapter 15. What Is Natural Philosophy? The Perspective of Contemporary Science 206
23. Chapter 16. Quantum Mechanics and Political Philosophy 220
24. Notes 233
25. List of Contributors 261
26. Index 263
27. Acknowledgments 269