Back around 2010, the nonprofit library corporation OCLC had as a feature of their WorldCat service the ability to attach a book review to the record of a book in their combined catalog WorldCat. At the time, I liked to write Amazon reviews, but I didn't like giving Jeff Bezos my intellectual property, and there are many books, such as Ph. D. dissertations, which are not in Amazon. Goodreads is also owned by Amazon, and, like Amazon, Goodreads does not contain the entire universe of books.
Over the next ten years, I posted about 250 book reviews on WorldCat. Some of them were brief, but some were as complex as a scholarly review. They centered on my own personal interests: writings about John Kennedy Toole, books on the history and philosophy of science, especially evolution, and other topics. I even started writing reviews of novels from the perspective of evolutionary literary criticism.
All that came crashing down when OCLC eliminated the book review function in 2022. Fortunately, I had saved the reviews, so they were not lost. I created a webpage in HTML and posted it on a personal web space that was provided to me by my university. By the summer of 2025, I had posted 172 book reviews on the page. I also placed a counter on the page run by the company Statcounter.com. One thing I discovered from a couple years worth of data was that very few people were reading my book reviews ( ... and I mean, very few).
The publication of the reviews again came crashing down when my university eliminated personal websites for faculty at the end of 2025. Because no one was viewing them anyway, I do not feel a great rush to repost them. I do eventually want to have them on the web, but eventually.
Since I was a child, I have had an interest in the nature and history of science. I am especially drawn toward its philosophical roots. In my college years in the 1980s, I was drawn to issues surrounding biological evolution. The philosopical details of evolution keep one's attention in part because a large fraction of the American public rejects that science for religious reasons. In this sense, the disagreements over the philosophical foundations of biological evolution have high stakes.
With my lost review collection in mind, I offer below a double book review. I review Horizons by James Poskett and The World As We Know It by Peter Dear. Both were published within the last five years, and they are a study in contrasts.
Horizons: A Global History of Science
Poskett's book Horizons gives the reader a quick tour of the history of science, emphasizing the contributions made by persons who were not from the sphere of European culture. Considering that many accounts of the history of science focus almost exclusively on European culture, Poskett's efforts have the salutary effect of widening the frame.
The book begins after the European discovery of the western Hemisphere. Poskett argues that the discovery of the New World showed Europeans that the Greeks and Romans of the ancient world were not all-knowing. Poskett explains that the Aztecs had a sophisticated culture which featured a thorough study of the animal and plant species of Mexico. When the Spaniards wrote back home about the natural history of Mexico, they consulted both native texts and native scholars.
The second chapter discusses astronomy. Poskett shows that Islamic scientists educated the European thinkers in this subject during the medieval era. He devotes sections to astronomical activities in China, India, and Africa. This history is important, because it is certainly the case that the knowledge collected by researchers in many parts of the world, not just members of European cultures, was important in supplying evidence and ideas to help guide the theories that have shaped our current understanding of the laws governing observable phenomena in our world, including our understanding of our planet and the cosmos. (Notice how carefully I have worded that long sentence.)
Poskett is committed to saying positive things about many different cultures. For some cultures, the task is easy. The Arabs gave western culture al-Gebra and al-Chemie (to say nothing of distilled al-Cohol). The Chinese gave western culture, among many other things, technologies such as paper and the printing press (to say nothing of gunpowder). For other cultures, though, Poskett seems to strain to identify things that could be construed as contributing to the scientific enterprise. Not every non-European culture contributed equally to what we now consider to be scientific knowledge, and some cultures that did contribute are unknown because of the inadequacies of the historical record.
Part two of the book covers the period of the ascendance of European science. Poskett emphasizes the connection between Enlightenment thinking and the vast financial profits that were derived from the building of European empires. The first chapter of this section is entitled "Newton's Slaves." (Isaac Newton didn't personally own slaves, but he did have some of his money invested in a British corporation that did profit from the slave trade, so he did participate directly in the overall economics of empire.) Poskett does not let the reader forget the human cost of the ascendancy of European science.
My problem is that, while Poskett is focused on the colonial economy that helped finance European science, he doesn't delve into what it was about the theories or methods of modern science made them so revolutionary. There have been many empires throughout human history that have oppressed and exploited conquered populations but which failed to produce advances in our scientific understanding of the universe. (The Spanish Empire that was contemporary to the British and French Empires of the modern era comes immediately to mind.)
What made the European Enlightenment different? We know that Newton made some money in ways that are today considered unethical, but we don't learn from Poskett why so many eighteenth century philosophes were desperate to imitate his intellectual accomplishments.
The World As We Know It
Peter Dear's book is focused on how the European intellectual discipline of natural philosophy was transformed into modern science. He digs into exactly what it was about Newton's approach that was revolutionary and caused would-be scientists across Europe for the next hundred and fifty years to follow his example. Lavoisier wanted to be the Newton of chemistry. Buffon saw himself as Newtonian. Cuvier wanted to be the Newton of anatomy.
With regard to Newton, Dear points out that there are two major parts of his legacy. First, the Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was an enormous achievement, building a branch of mathematics and using it to explain universal gravitation and the movement of both the planets and terrestrial objects. It showed how a handful of mathematical laws could accurately explain a wide range of phenomena, everything from the path of a comet to the plop of a turd in the toilet.
For this system of mechanics and gravitation, Newton did not begin with experimental methods; instead, he began with a first principle, that God had created universal laws of motion and gravity that were obeyed by all objects equally. He used observational data from Kepler (who got it from Brahe) as well as from sources outside the sphere of European culture (as Poskett explains). But the overall framework is a theoretical principle—that all objects with mass attract each other with gravitational force.
However, in Newton's own day, his second legacy was just as important as his laws of motion and gravity. His book Opticks showed how to conduct effective empirical experiments. It ended with a series of speculations about other areas of potential investigation, such as chemistry. His many followers in the eighteenth century were inspired as much by the experimental model and speculations from his second book as by the universal laws of motion from his first book.
To jump to the end of Dear's book, Dear shows the parallels in the thinking of Newton and Einstein with regard to gravity. Einstein did not take the steps of the traditional scientific method: first looking at experimental data, then forming a hypothesis, and finally testing it. He began with a strong conviction in a philosophical principle, that there is an ultimate simplicity to the universe. His theories were not driven by evidence; instead, they came from first principles and the thought experiments that followed from those principles.
Just as Newton believed that God had established laws for motion and gravity that are universal, Einstein believed that the laws of physics had to be invariant. When it was confirmed that light would bend in a gravitational field—a prediction of general relativity—someone asked Einstein what he would have thought if the observations had not confirmed the prediction. Einstein said that, if that had happened, he would have felt sorry for God, because the universe would have been less beautiful. As Dear writes, "the elegance, simplicity, and economy of the foundations of a theory acted for Einstein as the hallmarks of its truth."
To Poskett's credit, it is certainly true that knowledge gathered for all parts of the world informed the scientific revolution of the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. And the military and economic hegemony of European culture helped maintain support for that culture's privileging of scientific investigation. Dear's book, by focusing on the fine-grained philosophical debates, passes over that economic foundation.
Poskett's book, however, seems to overlook the critical role of the new theoretical and philosophical approaches that led to profound breakthroughs in many areas of knowledge nearly all at once. That new theoretical approach took place almost exclusively in the sphere of European culture.
These two books view science from very different angles. Both books are valuable in their own right, and each supplies an important part of the story missing from the other. Together they add to a more complete picture of the history of science.
Bibliography
Dear, Peter. The World as We Know It: From Natural Philosophy to Modern Science. Princeton UP, 2025.
Poskett, James. Horizons: A Global History of Science. Viking/Mariner Books, 2022.
