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for the benefit of printers, booksellers, licensers and others in what he calls the "Stat ioner 's commonweal th" means that he does not have to pay attention to what the author (in the everyday sense of the term) actually wrote or meant. Johns may be right to assume that this is a useful approach for a history of publishing per se, and there 's no denying that it provides useful background information for a social history of science, but judging by what is presented in this long and demanding study, it has very little to add to a historical sociology of scientific knowledge.

Science Studies Unit , University of Edinburgh,

21 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, UK.

Author's Response By Adrian Johns

O ne of the concerns that an author of a long book has is that people may never read it. John Henry ' s remarks show that he has read The Nature of the Book both closely and critically. I am,

o f course, grateful, both for the reading and for the criticisms he m a k e s - - criticism so carefully mounted should, up to a pointj be counted a com- pliment. It may surprise Henry to realise that I agree with h im in some of his remarks. Even where I disagree, I can generally see why it is that he says what he says. But obviously I do not concur with all his comments . Nor , in other cases, do I agree as to their import .

In general, it seems that Henry is prepared to accord the book a certain respect as an "ant iquarian" piece. But he is not prepared to see in it much more than antiquarianism. It turns out that this in fact boils down to a rather different complaint: that it deserves to have no impact on what is rather a small field, namely the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). T h e grounds for this conclusion are principally two. First, to his eye the book's approach is "materialist", concentrating exclusively on the "bodies" of books and neglecting their "souls"; allegedly, it never tracks how material practices and objects give rise to "the nature of scientific knowledge". Second, Henry asserts that in any case early modern natural philosophers,

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physicians and mathematicians never expressed substantial concern with the kinds of problems identified in the book, so that even if its argument were not materialist it would still be at best inconsequential, and at worst (I don't think this is too much of a stretch) simply false. More than that, Henry then proposes a diagnosis for the condition whose symptoms are displayed at such length by the book. It suffers, apparently, from an extreme case of 'litcrititis'. Infected by literary theory, I have accepted that the author is dead beyond all recovery, and replaced that handy figure with a dry, legalistic auto-icon of no intellectual consequence.

It may be best to deal with the empirical claim first. At its core, Henry's argument here has a rather ex cathedra character: he has read the correspondence of many early-modern naturalists, he assures us, and can say that they never made significant reference to the issues described in The Nature of the Book. In particular, authorship was never questioned to any significant extent "the number of early modern readers who were not sure that they were reading Aristotle . . . even though the book they were reading was supposed to be by Aristotle was negligible". The only admitted exception is the famous tanquam incident. Evidently, at first glance this looks like a troubling criticism. But in reality it amounts to less than it seems. In the first place, Henry has defined what to look for in a carefully restrictive way, such that only very dramatic examples like Newton's mnquam will ever qualify. It seems that nothing short of explicit refusal to credit authorship, and such refusal embedded deep within a canonical debate of the scientific revolution, will do. Since he brings up the contrast with Steven Shapin, it seems appropriate to say that his own charge here has a direct parallel in certain criticisms that have been made of A Social Hiswry of Truth. Some historians of science have responded to Shapin's work by saying that nobody can be found in the Royal Society who directly voiced distrust of another natural philosopher--and that in any case many experimentalists were not gentlemen. In either form the criticism rather misses the point, as it reduces Shapin's nuanced taxonomy of practical conventions characterising degrees and kinds of trust and social status to a simple question of either/or. And I think something similar is being tried here. There is in fact a fine-grained taxonomy of practices relating to print that is painstakingly reconstructed in the book, and it is to this that the claims about natural philosophy relate, not to a simple focus on authorship. Henry thus establishes a crudely unrepre- sentative standard.

Nonetheless, I think that the evidence cited in the book comes very close to meeting Henry's standard. Early modern natural philosophers, mathematicians and physicians did express scepticism about authorship--- and about the legitimacy of specific printed materials--in the course of

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their 'scientific' arguments. They did take such matters to be consequen- tial, and they did think that they related to the world of print in which they lived. Their statements are cited at length in The Nature of the Book. For example, take perhaps the most avidly discussed debate in early-modern experimental philosophy: Gilbert Burner recorded that Robert Boyle attacked Thomas Hobbes only after Hobbes refused Boyle's initial instinct to attribute authorship of offensive errors to Hobbes's printer (19. 127). Boyle also accused the Cartesian Claude Berigard of antedating his books--a commonplace in the trade, that Boyle argued was being used to insinuate priority of discovery, which ever since Merton has been recognised as a canonical theme in sociological accounts of science (19. 507). Henry Oldenburg too worried consistently about this kind of transgression, and when he decried opportunistic booksellers' un- authorised translations of the Philosophical Transactions for this and other reasons, he did so by printing detailed lists of references by page and line (p. 517; Philosophical Transactions, 1671, pp. 2269-70 and 106, 1674, pp. 141-44). John Wallis even warned that booksellers' epitomising prac- tices would "endanger the loss of the author himself". He was speaking specifically about Apollonius, for whose works such practices had already "hazarded the loss of the original", but there was nothing that restricted the peril to the dead: Halley famously cautioned Newton himself not to let his 1%'ncipia be "smothered" by Stationers' conventions (pp. 455, 464). And at the latter end of my period, in 1731, the Royal Society itself drafted advertisements against printed papers reporting "pretended Trans- actions" among its fellows that had never in fact occurred (p. 457; Royal Society, Ms. Dora. 5, No. 23). Finally, even John Beale's allegation that the Society's Printer "left out the heart and Centre of [Beale's] Dis- course", with its accompanying advice to Oldenburg that "wee should have more prudence, than to expose our reputations to the humour of such a sordid man", deserves a little more reservation of judgment than Henry gives it. In fact, the original from which the printed text was taken survives only in part, so it is impossible to judge whether the complaint was justified. The Halls, far from dismissing Beale's words, left the verdict properly open (10. 55). Far from being peripheral, such instances show how scepticism about authorship arose as part of the motivation for creating knowledge, the announcement of knowledge, the attribution of credit for knowledge, the distribution of knowledge, and the preservation of knowledge.

All those examples are cited in the book. Many, many others could be added which were not in the text itself and therefore may count as corroboration. John Dee, for example, complained of enemies proposing that "any Man els, was the Author" of his works, even while others

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hastened to publish as their own ideas that were properly Dee's, "craftily" appropriating his "Credit". He considered himself "dammageably dis- credited" by this "Counterfeting" [sic] of "Forgers. Quite simply, it was common knowledge to "every learned person" that a halfway-decent book would motivate "some progging Bookseller" to hire an "indigent Hackney scribler" to translate it, the result being "dis-reputation and abuse to the worthy Authors" (T. Gibson, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies Epitomized, 1682, p. 2). And in all these cases the charge of violated authorship depended on conduct prevailing in the specific realm of print as it was then constituted--in other words, on the nature of the book. It may be that Henry would respond that such usages were merely conventional; but the conventional is exactly what I was trying to convey. At any rate, far from being accepted as a given, printed authorship was indeed questioned--explicitly, repeatedly, and at length.

But more significant than such complaints are the actions early- modern natural philosophers took to remedy matters. As The Nature of the Book says "readers did come to trust and use print. Books were, in fact, produced, sold, read, and put to use. The epistemological problems of reading them were, in practice, superable. And this is the key: such problems were soluble in practice" (p. 188). This is the real subject of Chapter 8 of The Nature of the Book. It deals, not so much with the difficulties, as with the practical conventions that the Royal Society developed to deal successfully with a recalcitrant world of print. These included the licensing of particular Stationers under relatively strict conditions, the granting of imprimaturs to qualified books, and the elaboration of a set of reading protocols to be adhered to in the Society's weekly meetings. The laborious development of these conventions allows for a different kind of answer to Henry's conviction that natural philos- ophers were simply unconcerned about the epistemic implications of particular practices of print. The fact is, if Henry were right on this issue then historians of science would have a much bigger problem to address than otherwise, because 'science' would be the only cultural enterprise of the period that did not.agonise about it. Historians of politics, literature, music, and images all accept readily that it was a major problem for the people they write about. The question, then, would have to be: what made 'science' so special? An Eisensteinian would have no conceivable answer to this, since the explanatory resource for such a person is always the printing press, and of itself the printing press makes no distinctions (least of all distinctions based on anachronistic categories like science--- I do not think that the translation from "natural philosophy" is as benign as Henry implies). The Nature of the Book does suggest an answer, however, and it lies in the practical conventions that are its principal subject. The stability,

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reliability, and progressive character of the scientific book in this period rested on such conventions, not on technology as an asocial force imposing its own logic. That , and not an absolute distrust in print, is why Eisenstein was wrong. For the most part (not always), people did trust books. Henry is right about this, of course, and I took all too many pages to show it in The Nature of the Book. But at the same people complained about piracy and lack of trustworthiness. T h e issue is not whether books were or were not trustworthy, but on what grounds they were accepted as trustworthy in particular circumstances.

But the empirical complaint, unwarranted as I think it is, is not really the crux of the matter. Besides, it is by its nature irresolvable. It would always be possible to sustain such a compla in t - - and Henry already finds himself resorting to this tac t ic - -by arguing that examples must be excluded from consideration as exceptional (in the case of Flamsteed, and presumably of Newton ' s tanquam too) or even " tendent ious" (in that of Beale, or more broadly Oldenburg and the Royal Socie ty- - in which case the allegation seems to me particularly unsound, given the mass of evidence). Altogether more important and interesting is the me thodo- logical criticism. Here, I half agree with Henry 's allegation that The Nature of the Book is materialist. Tha t comparison between talk of disembodied personalities and talk of pure textual content is his, not mine, but it is one with which I broadly concur. I f our subject is how the practices of natural philosophy related to those of print, then we will indeed find it less helpful to speak in terms of immaterial ideas and texts than to pay attention to how books were made, distributed and used. But this is a conditional commitment , not a total one. The history of the book, however one pursues it, will not supply answers to different kinds of questions. Fo r example, it alone is unlikely to explain the fine structures of Newton ' s mathematics (see, for example, p. 513). It deserves a p rominent place in any social history of such things, but on its own it does not constitute their social history.

T o that extent, and with that qualification, Henry ' s point is well taken. In a deeper sense, however, The Nature of the Book is not really materialist at all. In fact, it sees machines and products as cultural entities in their own right. It con tends - - in detail and at l eng th- - tha t the early mode rn book was not simply a technological product . The press and its products are alike seen as not the end-points of cultural analysis, but starting- points. The larger part of the book, in fact, could be seen as arguing precisely this point, since Chapters 2 through 6 deal at length with the cultural constitution of both books and printing as a craft. Far from being inconsequential, as Henry implies (because it does not flow immediately and exclusively into an explanation not just o f 'science ' , bu t of scientific

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theories) the analysis presented in these chapters is intended to carry considerable weight because it deals with an important constituent of knowledge in general during the early modem period, be that knowledge political, historical, religious or literary. That is, it deals with matters that every would-be author had to confront. Henry hasn't seen this. Perhaps this is because he is looking for a kind of story that fits readily into the accepted explanatory conventions of SSK, and the narrative in Chapters 2 through 6 does not. But an unfortunate side-effect is to foster his im- pression of the work as neglecting ideas. In fact, Chapters 4 through 6 in particular include sustained textual analyses of works by writers like John Streater, Conyers Middleton, Walter Charleton, Thomas Willis, Ren~ Descartes, Henry More and Ralph Cudworth. Only by deciding before- hand that these chapters are irrelevant can Henry avoid conceding that such analyses represent exactly the kind of attention to 'thinking' that he wants. Indeed, whether or not I myself have done this very well, I would argue that in general reconstructing the practices by which such texts came into being and were put to use involves a greater commitment to understanding thinking--as opposed to thought--than Koyr~ ever showed.

Not only does Henry claim to see how The Nature of the Book has gone wrong; he also has an explanation to offer of why it has gone wrong. This rests on the assertion that I have taken the death of the author to an immoderate extreme. He objects on two grounds. First, he does not see why the author as "justification for the historian's craft" need be done away with at all; and, second, he f'mds its replacement here to be an empty cardboard figure, sociologically ineffectual and historically unrecognis- able. As far as The Nature of the Book goes, he is at least accurate in his first charge. I do indeed think that the author--in the sense of the supreme, individual creator of Romantic myth and too much modem law--is and should be dead. And in thinking that I do, it seems, disagree with him. But I do so on good grounds. Rhetoric aside, if Aristotle is really to be the exemplary case of an author to refute my position, it must be said that he makes a spectacularly bad one. In early modem England, between 1475 and 1700 there were about five printings of the Nicomachean Ethics, and one of the Politics; none at all of the Physics or De Caelo are recorded, though presumably they appeared in university compendia. By compari- son, there were at least sixteen of the largely spurious Problems, and a comparable number of the equally dubious Masterpiece--and since the earliest of these announces itself as the eleventh edition, there were probably many more that have not survived. The competition isn't even close. The vast majority of books purportedly by Aristotle were doubtful, from the Quaestiones Mechanicae that inspired so much Renaissance

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mathemat ical practice, through the Secretum Secretorum that promised political wisdom to wannabe Alexanders, to the Masterpiece that peddled low-level sexual advice to their subjects. N o r is it the case, moreover, that such works were clearly not by Aristotle, particularly in the case of the Problems, which did derive from a Greek peripatetic source. In Henry ' s terms, then, the Philosopher hardly counts as a self-evident archetype of the Author.

Yet thus far Henry is at least accurately attributing to me views on which we differ. Where I think he makes a mistake is in inferring from that view to what is, admittedly, the consequence that is commonly drawn from it by many literature scholars. Henry asserts that in place of the author I would put a mere legalistic mannequin. What he has in mind, I think, is a school of thought about authorship that has developed in the last decade largely out of reflections on Michel Foucaul t ' s "What is an Author?" T h e two leading examples of this school are probably Mark Rose 's Authors and Owners (Harvard, 1993) and Martha Woodmansee ' s "Genius and the Copyright" (Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1984, pp. 425-48). It is easy to see why Henry would rebel at the thought of the model of authorship to be found in this school becoming influential in the history of science. It is indeed limitingly legal is t ic-- though rather more so in Rose than in Woodmansee . Indeed, in essence it is not only law but legal doctrine that is held to explain the author 's cultural history. This being so, it seems to me that the approach is inherently conservative; it effectively amounts to a history of ideas. For that reason, I am in only l imited agreement with it. Its practitioners never stoop to investigating the every- day life of printers, booksellers, writers and readers. T h e difference is that I see authorship as one of a range of things emerging out of the mundane practices of Stationers and their clients, and law, I think, was another such emergent property. Much that is said about authorship in The Nature of the Book is actually intended as a polite rejoinder to these historians of authorship, who put so much onus on doctrinal history and yet enjoy a distinctly raffish reputat ion for radicalism among literary critics.

One reason why this matters is that Henry ' s broadest criticism is essentially a disciplinary one. He argues that, whatever other virtues or vices it may have, The Nature of the Book is not a viable contr ibution to the sociology of scientific knowledge. This argument rests entirely on its alleged failure to address issues of "conten t" , and the route to content, he thinks, is through authorship. Or rather, since Henry takes pains to stress this, the book fails to be a contender because it does not address questions of scientific content, and do so immediately, shoving aside lesser matters. I can see why Henry makes this case, and, up to a point, am content to go along with it. T h e book does make avowed use of some impor tant S S K

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work; but it is true that its idiom is markedly different from most SSK, and it is also true that it does not deliver a neat SSK "bo t tom line" about scientific knowledge sub specie aeternitatis. This may well seem a failure to a reader expecting a certain kind of work. But a considerable reason for it is that in i t se l f the book is not really a work of SSK at all. In other words, S S K is not its principal identity. It is a work of history first and foremost. T h e SSK materials that the book uses are employed as tools with which to construct an interpretation; they are not elements of the interpretation itself. They are deployed to investigate not a general epistemological principle, which is what SSK usually does (it tends to have a remarkably philosophical tone for such an avowedly antiphilosophical enterprise), but a particular historical problem. Tha t problem is the character of "pr int cul ture" and its relation to knowledge-product ion in early m o d e m England. Now, that does not mean that the book fights shy of formulat ing general problems, questions, and approaches that may have application in other contexts. On the contrary, it advances several such general proposals - - n o t the least of which is that one must see print as a thoroughly historical phenomenon, just as much as science. N o r does it mean tha t I don ' t want a readership among SSK practitioners. On the contrary, again, from my limited reading in that field I presume to hope that such practitioners may find the book interesting and rather useful. Simply put, The Nature of th e Book "follows scientists a round" to places where they spent a lot of t ime and worked very hard in activities that they clearly perceived to be very important for establishing their claims as knowledge. Places, too, where sociologists have not followed them before. This is surely something that may reasonably be expected to appeal to sociologists of knowledge. But it is not something that only sociologists of knowledge do.

In this regard, Henry ' s remarks reflect what I take to be a general issue about the identity of historical "science studies" at present. Practit ioners of our enterprise complain fairly frequently of other historians regarding them as marginal. But the fault is not all on the side of the large history faculties. Our own field seems to me less than ever convinced of the need to engage with that broader historical community . In early m o d e m studies, a major reason for this is admittedly that the political historians' revisionism has threatened to discredit all sociological contributions in the eyes of that communi ty (D. Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, Princeton, 2000, pp. 35-9) . But still more important is the approach of historians of science themselves. T o o many political, social, and cultural historians have read excessively narrow works in our field, and, quite justifiably, seen no need to engage further with it. This seems to me unfortunate and damaging for both parties. With this in mind, I should like The Nature of the Book to be a work not only that historians of science can respect, but

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also that the vastly greater number of political, social and literary historians simply cannot ignore because it speaks directly to their concerns and in an idiom that they recognise. That is why the book seeks a degree of evidential richness that virtually no SSK writer would bother with, and that Henry, seeking an SSK work, can perceive only as antiquarianisrn. It does so in a bid to convince historians of the importance, not just of its own arguments, but of the enterprise of history of science itself. In that light, what strikes me most about Henry's critique is that it expresses as a virtue what I think is a real weakness in today's sociological history of science. The discipline---and its SSK branch in particular--has become parochial. It has become more and more technically adept, dealing with smaller issues, less historically, for a shrinking audience of specialists. As it does so, it effectively abandons the historical field to popular-science writers. Henry's complaint, ultimately, is that The Nature of the Book does not restrict itself to the questions of SSK. True enough. But if we concentrate so exclusively on our own questions, then who will we end up talking to but ourselves?

Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology,

Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.

Kabbalistic Philosophy of Science?

M a r k S t e i n e r , The Applicability of Mathematics as a

Philosophical Problem. C a m b r i d g e , M a s s a c h u s e t t s : H a r v a r d

U n i v e r s i t y P res s , 1998 . P p . vii i + 2 1 5 . U S $ 3 9 . 9 5 H B .

By Sarah J. Kattau

I n the mythology of the golem, a rabbi creates a man-like creature out of clay. Inscribed on its brow is EMETH (truth), which brings the creature to life. To put it back to lifelessness, the first 'E' is removed,

leaving the word METH (death). As with the Frankenstein story, many

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