Category Archives: Book Reviews

J.A. Schuster [2019] ‘The Young René Descartes—Lawyer, Military Engineer, Courtier, Diplomat…and, we might add, Ambitious ‘Savant’, essay review of Harold Cook, The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor and War. Chicago, 2018, Annals of Science, 76: 87-95.

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 …

Continue reading “Schuster 2018 Review of Alan Chalmers 100 Years of Pressure”

This review essay of James Marcum’s Thomas Kuhn’s Two Revolutions is a longer and more fully documented version of the review which has appeared in the on-line journal, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

John A Schuster (2012) ‘The European Birth of Modern Science: An Exercise in Macro and Comparative History’ (Essay Review of H.F. Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World), Metascience 21 657-665. Posted here is the extended version, roughly 1000 words longer. Additional passages, not in the Metascience version, appear in blue.

Schuster 2010. Review of Ted McGuire and Peter Machamer on Descartes’ Changing Mind Appeared in Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010) pp. 579-81

Appeared online in Journal of Historical Biography 5 (Spring 2009): 48-83. Extended critique of Clarke on Descartes’ early scientific career foreshadowed arguments in my Descartes-agonistes (2013). This review should be compared with more sympathetic approach to other parts of Des Clarke’s legacy in Schuster paper ‘Did Descartes Teach a Philosophy of Science or Pursue Strategies of Natural …

Continue reading “Essay Review of Desmond Clarke, Descartes A Biography. Schuster 2009”

My remarks at Glebe Books, Sydney, August 2008 to launch Ross Honeywill’s book Lamarck’s Evolution which includes a great deal of material on Australian neo-Lamarckian molecular geneticist Ted Steele’s scientific career and the infamous ‘Steele’ affair at the University of Wollongong (attempted peremptory dismissal for whistleblowing on soft marking of fee paying foreign students)…read on …

Continue reading “Schuster Launch of Honeywill Book on Lamarck and Ted Steele”

J.A. Schuster, Kuhn and Lakatos Revisited, BJHS 12 (1979), 301-317.  Essay review of Kuhn, Essential Tension and Lakatos, Collected Papers vol 1. Very early but characteristic Schuster.