Welcome to Relaunched Site

The site ‘Descartes-agonistes’ has moved. All previous articles are present, along with a few new items such as: my recent review of Alan Chalmers’ One Hundred Years of Pressure, and my invited ‘Focus Section’ piece in Isis June 2019 on explanation in the history of science. Contact: john.schuster@sydney.edu.au

Schuster. The Real Descartes Stands Up, Nacht van Descartes, University of Utrecht, October 2008

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.

Schuster Organizing the Experimental Life at the Early Royal Society, Ghent 2008

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 …

Schuster 2018 Review of Alan Chalmers 100 Years of Pressure

John Schuster (2018) Review of Alan Chalmers, One Hundred Years of Pressure: Hydrostatics from Stevin to Newton. Dordrecht: Springer, 2017 Annals of Science 78: 145-148. On the issues raised here about the rise of experimental sciences and roles of natural philosophy in the Scientific Revolution, see also Schuster and Watchirs 1990 in research section, as …