ABSTRACT
Carolyn Iltis tells a fascinating story of how that—shall we say for short, “Newtonian”—metaphysics and ontology got established, for it was not without its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opponents, as Dr. Iltis recounts sometimes in mind-numbing detail. It is the work of Carolyn Iltis that laid the foundation for Carolyn Merchant’s own great work beginning with the publication of The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (TDN) in 1980 right through to the publication of Autonomous Nature: Problems of Prediction and Control From Ancient Times to the Scientific Revolution. The first paper by Carolyn Iltis, “D’Alembert and the Vis Viva Controversy,” was published in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. It’s a straightforward history-of-science paper all about very technical questions—how to measure the “living force” and what nomenclature to use regarding what measurement—all embellished with some mathematical formulae.
