ABSTRACT
Why did Jacques Rohault, the foremost Cartesian natural philosopher in Paris in the decades immediately following Descartes’ death, choose to give experiments pride of place in his work? Why, for that matter, did he emphasise the probabilistic nature of scientific explanation? Cartesian science as exemplified by Rohault’s system of natural philosophy was empirically oriented – not the a priori, purely rationalist enterprise which philosophy text-books and first-year university philosophy courses would have us believe.1
