Gideon Manning, ed. Matter and Form in Early Modern Science and Philosophy. History of Science and Medicine 28; Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions 6. Leiden: Brill, 2012. x + 248 pp. $144. ISBN: 978-90-04-21870-3.
This volume, mainly intended for historians and philosophers of science, aims at reappraising the traditional definition of the seventeenth-century New Science as excluding the Aristotelian notion of matter and form. At the time of the so-called Scientific Revolution, matter and form were indeed far from being entirely rejected, as they shape the normative framework of early modern natural philosophy and metaphysics.