Thinking with Objects

"The revival of extensive discourses makes this a unique, invaluable resource for any study of the history of science."—Choice

"Fascinating reading for anyone interested in the history of science . . . incredibly thorough."—David Nuttall, Physics Education

"An important contribution . . . and his book should find a welcome place on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the history of the Scientific Revolution."—William R. Shea, American Historical Review

"A very interesting book . . . I have no doubt that it is destined to find a pivotal place in the study of the history of science."—Michael Box, Australian Physics

"The most important contribution to the history of mechanics of the last decade, likely to become a standard reference and without any doubt a must for every historian of physics."—Jurgen Renn, Renaissance Quarterly

"A superb, if difficult book, that belongs as basic to the curriculum of early modern history of science."—Margaret Jacob, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences

"Meli's stress on the importance of engagements with materiality in the development of seventeenth-century mechanics thus achieves a spectacular vindication in demonstrating the full meaning of Newton's pretensions to be contributing not just to 'mathematics' in the Principia, but to natural philosophy itself."—Peter Dear, British Journal for the History of Science

"[Meli's] approach is new and convincing . . . a groundbreaking change of focus."—Sophie Roux, Metascience

"Full of pertinent detail in the text itself, Thinking with Objects cleverly uses the captions of figures to provide more extended samples of seventeenth–century arguments, thus demonstrating in practice how helpful it is to think with visual or geometric representations."—Edith Dudley Sylla, Isis

"Thinking with Objects is a significant book. Its success lies in reformulating our ideas of the methods and practices of early modern sciences. . . No serious future study of early modern physics and its transformations will be able to ignore the analyses and conclusions of this work."—Craig Martin, Huntington Library Quarterly

"A brilliant study that is sure to become a classic in its field. Here, the author radically shifts the focus of traditional scholarship and that of historiographic inquiry. He effectively challenges many presuppositions that have been brought to the history of the scientific revolution, including the one that assumes the separation of experimental and mathematical traditions, showing that modern distinctions between theory and practice are just that, modern, and not necessarily applicable to early modern categories. An erudite, profoundly learned, and important work."—Pamela O. Long, author of Openness, Secrecy, Authorship