Laura J. Snyder

On a summer day in 1674, in the small Dutch city of Delft, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek a cloth salesman, local bureaucrat, and self-taught natural philosopher gazed through a tiny lens set into a brass holder and discovered a never-before imagined world of microscopic life. At the same time, in a nearby attic, the painter Johannes Vermeer was using another optical device, a camera obscura, to experiment with light and create the most luminous pictures ever beheld. See for yourself! was the clarion call of the 1600s. Scientists peered at nature through microscopes and telescopes, making the discoveries in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and anatomy that ignited the Scientific Revolution. Artists investigated nature with lenses, mirrors, and camera obscuras, creating extraordinarily detailed paintings of flowers and insects, and scenes filled with realistic effects of light, shadow, and color. By extending the reach of sight the new optical instruments prompted the realization that there is more than meets the eye. But they also raised questions about how we see and what it means to see. In answering these questions, scientists and artists in Delft changed how we perceive the world. In Eye of the Beholder, Laura J. Snyder transports us to the streets, inns, and guildhalls of seventeenth-century Holland, where artists and scientists gathered, and to their studios and laboratories, where they mixed paints and prepared canvases, ground and polished lenses, examined and dissected insects and other animals, and invented the modern notion of seeing. With charm and narrative flair Snyder brings Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek and the men and women around them vividly to life. The story of these two geniuses and the transformation they engendered shows us why we see the world and our place within it as we do today."

The Victorian period in Britain was an "age of reform." It is therefore not surprising that two of the era's most eminent intellects described themselves as reformers. John Stuart Mill - philosopher, political economist, and Parliamentarian - remains a canonical author of Anglo-American philosophy, while William Whewell - Anglican cleric, scientist, and educator - is now often overlooked, though in his day he was renowned as an authority on science. Both Mill and Whewell believed that by reforming philosophy - including the philosophy of science - they could effect social and political change. But their divergent visions of this societal transformation led to a sustained and spirited controversy that covered motality, politics, science, and economics. Situating their debate within the larger context of Victorian society and its concerns, Reforming Philosophy shows how two very different men captured the intellectual spirit of the day and engaged the attention of other scientists and philosophers, including the young Charles Darwin.

A philosophically and historically sensitive account of the engagement of the major protagonists of Victorian British philosophy, "Reforming Philosophy" considers the controversies between William Whewell and John Stuart Mill on the topics of science, morality, politics, and economics. By situating their debate within the larger context of Victorian society and its concerns, Laura J. Snyder shows how two very different men - Whewell, an educator, Anglican priest, and critic of science; and Mill, a philosopher, political economist, and parliamentarian - reacted to the challenges of their times, each seeking to reform science as a means of reforming society as a whole. The first book-length examination of the dispute between Mill and Whewell in its entirety, "Reforming Philosophy" provides a rich and nuanced understanding of the intellectual spirit of Victorian Britain and will be welcomed by philosophers and historians of science, scholars of Victorian studies, and students of the history of philosophy and political economy.