Reviewed by: L'Essai de logique de Mariotte. Archéologie des idées d’un savant ordinaire by Sophie Roux Ursula Goldenbaum Sophie Roux. L’Essai de logique de Mariotte. Archéologie des idées d’un savant ordinaire. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011. Pp. 263. Paper, €29.41. The aim of the author of this fine study on Mariotte’s treatise on logic, or rather on how to do science, is to write an archeology of ideas produced by a “common scholar” who does not belong to the canon of great scientists. She points out that the “enigmatic” character of Mariotte’s views makes this task even more difficult because he had a rather eclectic approach to scientific method, instrumentalizing Aristotelian terminology, though selectively [End Page 320] and critically (87). Likewise, he criticizes Cartesianism, but nevertheless embraces mathematics and mechanical science as well as the modern Galilean understanding of sensory qualities as products of bodies in motion (89). Roux’s approach to this “mixed bag” is fruitful though, as it contrasts Mariotte’s positions on causality, induction, mathematical method, hypotheses, experiment, logic, the relation of reasoning, and sense perception with the competing positions of Arnauld and Malebranche, Bacon and Sforza Pallavicino, Boyle and Newton, and Galileo and Descartes, playing a “game of resemblances” (225). In the case of definitions, she compares Mariotte’s insisting on nominal definitions for natural things to the Port-Royal Logic’s emphasis on real definitions (62–63), categorizing Mariotte’s position as “naturalization.” To me, this rather looks like his turn against Galileo’s and Descartes’s mathematization of nature (151, 153), in which our knowledge of nature is restricted to observation and experiment (66–67)—an empiricist move against disciples of Descartes. His counter-position to Galileo and Descartes becomes obvious when Mariotte surprisingly considers even the principle of inertia to be the result of experience (104). This sort of empiricist inclination is also on display in Mariotte’s emphasis on ‘vrai-semblance,’ a term he probably coined from Augustine’s ‘verisimilitude’ (verisimile, 75)—the same term Leibniz later used in his critical discussion of Locke’s approach to probability. Mariotte’s empiricism also comes to the fore in his stress on verités sensibles (98). Physics can produce certainty, though no natural laws can be stated, only regularities (103), and this by observation alone since principles in physics are impossible (82). Rules are considered with “hostility”; the stress is instead on induction (110–27). Accordingly, Mariotte rejects any metaphysical treatment of physics (130) and actually of metaphysics in general (217—to the dismay of Leibniz). Ironically, even Newton is rejected as someone making hypotheses rather than observations (139). The contrast with Cartesian or Leibnizian rationalism is clear in Mariotte’s view of causality, which admits causes of natural things discovered by observation and experiment (144), but denies the kind of “causality” or logical, necessary coherence with geometry that is supposed to show exclusively whether something is the case, but not why it is the case. Mariotte does not fit very well into the standard picture of the early modern scientist as committed to Galileo’s mathematization of nature, leading to modernity. Roux appeals to an archeology of knowledge to deal with the “enigmatic common scholar” (229). I wonder, though, whether Mariotte should not belong to a broader group of mainstream thinkers who resisted the mathematization of nature while joining the bandwagon of modern science. Roux herself provides the best evidence for this in her instructive presentation of material connecting Mariotte’s with these other scholars. She emphasizes Mariotte’s Jesuit education (221) and his continuing close connections with clerical scholars at Dijon and Paris, among them Lantin and Foucher (200–203; 235–36), the latter being a fierce critic of the Cartesian and Oratorian Malebranche. This is also supported by the interesting material Roux provides in Appendix II. Likewise, she calls our attention to the concept of the “morally possible” as that which is produced in nature (96), including human beings insofar as they are part of nature, and to its relevance for the understanding of sin. The role of Jesuit moral education in Mariotte’s epistemology can also be seen in Appendix...