Koyre was one of the first historians to study the history of science philosophically, and he applies Husserl's insights on the "geometrization of space" to Galileo, supplying an historical supplement to Husserl's intuitive history. The transition of science from the "closed world to the infinite universe" is fascinating, and in the treatment of Galileo Koyre tells the story from the vantage of sublunar motion, artillery and bricks and bows and arrows. The supplanting of the distinction between "natural" and "violent" motion by motion per se and the geometrization of space is the destruction of the universe with a center circled by the visible divinities. The history of science is usually told as a story of idle theory replaced by experimentation, but Koyre shows that because the new science is based on an undemonstrable principle (inertia) and action at a distance, experimentation is superfluous: Galileo already knows the answers to the questions he puts to nature. Moreover, the introduction of force, which can only be demonstrated by equations (I've seen motion and distance, but never force), is not the triumph of observation but its supplanting. Koyre, by the way, was a teacher of Kuhn and Kojeve, who both turned Koyre's ideas into slogans and became world famous.

Readers of this book beware, its themes are huge! It contains lucid narrative of the competition from Cartesians to Newtonians for the best model of the universe and the nature of time and space. There are scarcely any baggy corners into which the reader will turn unwillingly. However, there is not terribly much about the science or the methods of discovery employed by these thinkers in their shared pursuit of important results. Koyre has written a classic study of intellectual history. Discussion of divinity and its aspects is abundant because this presence was one that the scientists were working diligently to situate without offending the authorities and employers of the age. The universe is a source whose study has profoundly metaphysical and ontological implications. Koyre brings these alive for the reader and shares the tumult of ideas that produced much of what we consider now to be a satisfactory vision of the universe.

Korye's decades-old book is still a pleasure and a marvel to read. The ideas developed in this first-rate work are lucidly and extensively developed and contain such subtle gems of thought that one could not possibly discover all of them with a single reading. Anyone with even but a passing interest in the history and philosophy of science should add this book to his library. A true classic!