Aesthetic Science

"The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. Alexander Wragge-Morley challenges this interpretation by arguing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project. In fact, they practiced a science that depended on harnessing the embodied pleasures and pains that arise from sensory experience. Aesthetic Science reveals how judgments of taste and pleasures played a central role in the formation of consensus in scientific communities and the emergence of what we now understand as scientific objectivity"--