Invited public talk, concluding the afternoon session of the ‘Nacht van Descartes’ of the University of Utrecht, Descartes Centre for the History of the Natural Sciences and Humanities, 2 October 2008.  Full title Descartes agonistes: The ‘Real’ Descartes Stands Up–How the agendas, identities, rebellions, successes, failures and delusions of ‘youth’ (1618-33) generated the historians’ mature Descartes.

This paper invited by the Centre for the History of Science, University of Ghent, is based in part on work originally pursued with Dr Alan B. H. Taylor. It examines how knowledge claims were manufactured and communicated at the early Royal Society. We examine the Society’s organisationally sedimented patterns of decision-making and action-taking. This cuts across Shapin’s characterization of ‘the new Experimental Science’ in terms of a supposedly new ‘form of life’ which purportedly broke with the previously dominant culture of natural philosophy. Three case studies suggest that the contested culture of natural philosophy continued to play through and be played upon within the Royal Society. These findings are amplified in my monograph in progress dealing with ‘the fate of natural philosophy and the rise of modern sciences in the Scientific Revolution’.