ABSTRACT
Defenders of a wide range of ‘new’ philosophies that appeared in the seventeenth century articulated a Janus-faced strategy for reforming natural philosophy. On the one hand, they demanded an end to the false and barren traditional styles of scientifi c enquiry and proof that had lasted for the best part of two millennia and chastised their antecedents for their slavish adherence to a philosophical tyranny. At the same time, in a culture that was profoundly hostile to novelties in a number of different social and intellectual spheres, natural philosophers devised a set of new tools, in the form of methods, institutions, forms of communication and scientifi c instruments. In a period that was structured by notions that the world was decaying, or that the return of Jesus Christ was imminent, the new aids to scientifi c enquiry appeared to herald an exhilarating, unbounded and secular future wholly fashioned by human beings. At the time, carving out the conditions of possibility of such a future based on techno-scientifi c progress was an immensely problematic and daring enterprise. However, the prevalence of science and technology in the modern world is testament to the apparent success of the project, and since the Enlightenment, technical and scientifi c growth has been held to defi ne the very essence of progress.1
