Reason and the Good Life

Reviews the book, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue by Matthew L. Jones (see record 2006-12470-000). The reviewer states that superb book transports us back to a period when brilliant thinkers such as Descartes (1596-1650), Pascal (1623-1662), and Leibniz (1646-1716) began to articulate what they took to be the proper relation between scientific reasoning and the good life. To be sure, there were those who worried that science, particularly in the form of mathematical reasoning, was a distraction from life's proper pursuits, which were thought to include subjects such as history and theology. However, it was through the work of the triumvirate discussed in Jones's book, and others like them, that science and mathematics began to be seen as much more than a frivolous pastime. Rather, those who developed their understanding of mathematical reasoning in particular could as a consequence become better people. Jones concludes by observing that "natural philosophy and mathematics" have "lost their perceived power to cultivate the moral person" and that we now face "the stark separation of the moral from the natural" (p. 269). To see the truth of this observation, one need only attend to current attempts to represent science and religion as either having nothing to do with one another (e.g., Gould, 1999) or as irretrievably opposed to one another (e.g., Dawkins, 2006). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)