The relationship concerning a scientific theory and the development of machinery by non-scientists using practical trial-and-error physics and geometry between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is an interesting matter. At the time of these developments, the concept of perpetual motion in machinery was an integral part of shared knowledge but it had yet to be realized. How did science and technique progress during the mechanical developments of this time? What kind of science was used for projecting machines and machineries? When the first simple machines were being developed, was scientific thought/theory – such as Aristotelian, Euclidean and Archimedean theories – a necessary condition to project and build these machines that were to be used in society? In this book, Stephen Gaukroger has done an impressive amount of research to consider the complex paradigm of this period in history by observing the theology, anthropology and shared knowledge of the time, the latter of which was not always scientific. An intellectual historical investigation correlated to the changes in scientific ideas is necessary in order to answer some of questions cited above. Therefore, over the last two decades, the author has intensively studied the emergence of these new ideas during two periods, the first between 1210 and 1685, and the second between 1680 and 1760. He focused particularly on the history of the philosophy of science regarding the relationship between the development of the empirical sciences and the impact of their results on human behaviour. The third book of the series, which I have the privilege to review, The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841, is his latest work that completes his fruitful Oxfordian trilogy aiming to convey ‘how the values of a scientific culture came to predominate in the West, something that was part of a transformation of Western culture that began in the thirteenth century’ (p. v).

The book is composed of the preface and three main parts in seven chapters. The Bibliography and Index end the book. It has three main themes strictly investigated in empirical terms: rethinking the nature of matter (Chapter 2), the problem of classification within the natural history of man (Chapter 5), the naturalization of morality (Chapter 6) and the limits of reason (Chapter 7). The first part contains two chapters. In Chapter 1, Gaukgroger presents an interesting panoramic view of knowledge and reason so that the reader is prepared for the next passage on rationality and its impact on human behaviour. Chapter 2, called ‘Rethinking the nature of matter’, correlates to the emergence of the natural process of scientific knowledge which is key to inquiring and understanding the philosophical frameworks of the empirical laws of nature.

The second part is composed of four chapters that accurately introduce the reader to the naturalization of the human being by means of four main categories of inquiring, which the author calls ‘forms of naturalization’ or ‘naturalization of the human’. The author calls the first form of naturalization anthropological medicine, which is related to Locke's reflections and is the main argument of Chapter 3. Here the author insists on the difference between anthropological medicine and the naturalization of the organic at the beginning of the eighteenth century:

Therefore the reader realizes an interesting connection between matter (previously addressed in Chapter 2) and sensitivity (pp. 127–140) as a sort of historical model, within the history of the philosophy of science, to understand human behaviour during a certain epoch. Chapter 4 describes the second form of naturalization, which is called philosophical anthropology. The author proposes a study between metaphysics and psychology on the one side, and language and art on the other. I recommend reading the last two sections carefully (pp. 200–216).

The chapter called ‘The natural history of man’ (Chapter 5) represents the third form of naturalization. It is connected, but in certain aspects dissimilar to, Chapter 4, and presents a physical anthropology in order to understand, by a comparative natural history, human nature and its correlated relationship between anthropology and naturalization. Here the author points out a crucial problem, which is the uncertainty of the methods of classification within natural studies of minerals, plants and animals. The fourth form of naturalization is called social arithmetic and is presented in Chapter 6. This form discusses human behaviour by means of combined properties, which are different from metaphysical–religious/teaching features. The author rethinks the development of human behaviour related to morality in terms of a collective account. Chapter 7, which alone constitutes Part Three, looks at religious and aesthetic–humanistic procedures of examining a non-formalized relationship, with respect to the science that the author has proposed in the previous sections, between human being and the world. The author describes the difficulty of historically realizing the passage from speculative reasoning to empirical reasoning.

The Natural and the Human is an outstanding book which considers in great detail the reasons behind an empirical and a non-theological account related to the complex binomial between human behaviour/experiential sciences and the intellectual history of philosophy in context. I applaud Stephen Gaukroger for writing this distinguished essay on the naturalization of humanity, which is of interest to scientists and historians of science and philosophy, as well as PhD candidates occupied with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.