they knew it or not (and in fact they did not), philosophers continued to operate
by a dialectic of disagreement under the law of small numbers; even as
philosophers took the sureness of scientific knowledge as their topic, they were
bound to create diverging constructions upon this realm. Of course it is
possible for the same person to operate in several attention spaces, as a
practicing scientist or mathematician, and also as philosopher. Descartes was
famous in all three, while Bacon attempted to lead as a naturalist, though
success came only for his general philosophy.
We want to know, then, why the ideology of the scientific revolution came
through in these distinctive forms. By around 1600, many intellectuals were
aware that a revolution was afoot. Bacon’s and Descartes’s versions of the
announcement came to dominate the philosophical attention space; the others
either were too narrowly encapsulated within particular scientific specialties,
or attached themselves to a part of the philosophical field which remained
traditional and non-revolutionary. Galileo, a famous and eloquent expositor
of the new science, embedded his arguments for the new method in the
discussion of specific discoveries in kinematics, which in any case represented
only one style of scientific advance. Kepler expressed an acute understanding
of the methodological points which separated the new astronomy from the old;
but these arguments made little impression at the time (McMullin, 1990: 65,
86). Kepler’s and Galileo’s fame came from the substance of their science; as
philosophers of scientific methodology they were upstaged.
Explicit philosophical claims failed to capture the forefront because they
were not revolutionary enough. Kepler was well known as the follower of a
Neoplatonic cosmology. Servetus had incorporated his argument for the circu-
lation of the blood in a Christocentric pantheism, merging Neoplatonism with
a Cabalistic interpretation of the Bible. Cardano, for all his boastful innovation
in mathematics, regarded Aristotle’s texts as the criterion of truth in other
matters (De Vita Propria; Cardan, [1575] 1962: 46–47). Even Gassendi, with
his championing of Epicurean atomism, was a weak rival to Descartes. What
proved a weakness in capturing the philosophical attention space was the lack
of a clean break with the past. Whereas Bacon and Descartes radically sim-
plified down to what they claimed was a new starting place, prior philosopher-
scientists had continued the muddy and unfocused condition of the late me-
dieval philosophical space, touting one or another selection from the old array
of contending positions.^31 This is not to say that the leaders carried over no
philosophical capital from the past; Descartes drew quite heavily on scholastic
philosophy, but he was at pains to disguise his sources, and presented his
method as a technique for disposing of all accepted knowledge and building
anew.
There is another characteristic of the philosophical break engineered by
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