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The chapter presents a study of one of Descartes' most important works: the Discourse on Method. In many respects, the Discourse contains the outline of modern philosophy. Philosophically speaking, the Discourse even appears to determine the position of modern philosophy with respect to science. Discourse seeks to persuade people in possession of the natural light of reason of the following: there can be a science that is true and certain; this science must be acquired by using a heuristic method which proceeds like the method of analysis in mathematics: one learns the necessary insights through step by step exercise; the method does not stand on its own: through exercise the mind itself develops toward a perfect capacity even for metaphysical knowledge; in the process of development self-consiousness in moral issues will be reached on the basis of true metaphysics; and the Discourse must persuade everybody, because if anything is wrong, the whole architecture collapses.

Discusses various works of Descartes's and their reception, including objections to them and his response to those objections. Météors deals with meteorology, which includes a corpuscular model of light, an account of refraction, and vision, and its links with optical instruments; the Dioptrique is a practical treatise on the construction of these optical instruments; and Géométrie compares arithmetic with geometry and extends Descartes's treatment of the Pappus problem and the classification of curves. The organization of material in the Discours appears arbitrary unless interpreted autobiographically. The Meditationes contains a fuller treatment of scepticism, in comparison with Pyrrhonism, and hyperbolic doubt, a defence of mechanism (which Descartes also saw as a defence of Copernicanism), discussions of the cogito and the transcendence of God, the classification of ideas, a new version of the doctrine of clarity and distinctness, and the nature of the thinking self, the identification of the self with the mind and mind/body dualism.

This chapter discusses Descartes' answers to two questions still being asked today: Can machines fully imitate the functioning and behavior of living things? Can machines think? Descartes answers the first affirmatively and the second negatively. Descartes' two categorical answers are each rooted in the principle of the substantial distinction between body and soul—that is to say, in a metaphysical argument. In the Discourse on Method he asserts that there are two very certain means of distinguishing true men from anthropoid machines intentionally designed to throw us off the track: the first is that they could never use words, or put together other signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. The second is that these machines would inevitably fail in other [things], which would reveal that they were acting not through understanding but only through the composition of their organs. Given this fact, the nature of the machinery a man of his time might have in mind is irrelevant in the chapter's discussion, and the modest development of 17th-century mechanization ought not to invalidate the perhaps exaggerated boldness of the positive answer to the first question, any more than it explains or, a fortiori, justifies the negative answer to the second.

There is a historical trajectory in methods discourse that is worth uncovering, encompassing changes in content, in the ways in which methods discourse is incorporated in experimental reports to establish proper procedure and changes in the ways in which the experimenters utilized statements and reflections about methods to confer epistemic force on the results presented. It is this trajectory that the book captures, and the distinctions among layers of methods discourse and among descriptive and critical perspectives on methodological issues are means to this end. Methodological advancement means increasing awareness of the obstacles and limitations of experimentation: the unknown but suspected contingencies, the countless circumstances, the variations among living beings, the complexity of organic bodies, and the uncertainties related to techniques and instruments for the study of subvisible phenomena. Methodological advancement means increasing efforts to develop strategies for managing and perhaps overcoming these challenges. Methodological advancement also includes the realization that the means through which we make sense of the world might forever remain precarious.

This chapter discusses Rene Descartes as an epistemologist. Descartes has become the villain in the drama of Western epistemology. His epistemological propping of his science became deeply important in the development of epistemology as a central activity of philosophy. He writes of himself as a benefactor of mankind. The Discourse on Method entails a contingent and human way of knowing. Descartes' morality of knowledge comes to depend on a characteristic Enlightenment assumption that the will acts according to what the understanding reveals. Descartes demonstrates the myth that knowledge is attainable only through shucking the senses, verging on what would seem, to the flawed perceptions of common sense, rather like death. In keeping with a Christian sense of the fallen nature of humanity, Descartes worked into his final comments in the Sixth Meditation a recognition of how extraordinarily difficult is the detachment required to know.

The chapter examines the mode of presentation of Descartes’s method in the Discourse. What Descartes exposes in the Discourse is not so much a universal procedure to reach objective truth as himself, insofar as he is the author of his own method. The Discourse is a portrait or a mask, but it would be wrong to think that it serves merely to hide or cover an already existing truth. The hidden ground is only the reverse side that the painted surface makes visible. This mode of presentation of the subject in its truth means that self-appropriation is impossible since it necessitates a detour through a fictive viewer or reader.

This chapter examines the relation between fable and truth in Descartes’s Discourse as well as in his shorter treatise The World. Once we distinguish the fable from what is merely imaginary or false, it becomes possible to understand how Descartes does not merely propose a fable about truth but introduces feint or fiction within truth itself. Descartes’s fable does not instruct us about a Truth but presents a faithful description of Descartes’s life. It is the fable of frankness. At the same time, this fable does not propose a model to imitate since the uttering of the cogito cannot be imitated. Rather, the fable exposes the cogito as the point where fiction turns into truth.

The first chapter develops the historiographical approach and the analytic tools that are used in the remaining part of the book. Focusing on writings about method by mid-seventeenth-century experimenters, notably Robert Boyle, the chapter examines how methodological questions about “proper experimental procedure” were dealt with in the early modern period. The concept “methods discourse” is introduced. The term refers to all kinds of methods-related statements in scientific writing, including explicit commitments to experimentalism, descriptions of experimental protocols, explanations of methodological concepts, and justifications of strategies of experimentation. Various layers of methods discourse are distinguished: 1) Experimental protocols, i.e. scientists’ (or experimental philosophers’) descriptions of the steps of a particular experiment or observation, as well as of the materials, equipment, and techniques that were used. 2) Methodological views, i.e. scientists’ (or experimental philosophers’) conceptualization of procedures to assess and secure empirical results. 3) Broader commitments to experimentalism, specifically to the imperative that scientific ideas must be confronted with, or based on, empirical findings.

Fontana’s renewed engagement with the subject of viper venom resulted in a massive study of more than 600 pages. Book II of the Treatise on the Venom of the Viper produced a new interpretation of the working of viper venom and turned to the exploration of the “hidden causes” of the observable effects of venom poisoning. The new book is again permeated by methods discourse. Fontana’s methodological statements became much more pointed and elaborate, and he drew them together in a methodological essay. Most early modern texts contained quite detailed and often vivid narratives of concrete experiments. Fontana’s commitment to variations turned the attention from single events to series of experiments and from the uniformity of outcomes to differences. This opened up new questions, both questions of experimental design and related questions of conceptualization, interpretation, and, ultimately, reporting: What are the factors need to be varied? What do the differences between different experiments tell us? How much of this work should be reported? And how should the report be organized? The chapter argues that Fontana’s sprawling account was meant to demonstrate the discoverability of empirical findings.

The physician and literary writer Silas Weir Mitchell had a long-standing interest in venom research, spanning the second half of the nineteenth century. Mitchell’s work showcases the dynamics of medical and methodological thought during a key period in the history of the biomedical sciences, just like Mead’s Mechanical Account of Poisons did for the eighteenth century. Venom research was situated at the intersection of several areas of biomedical investigation—including toxicology, physiology, medical chemistry, and therapeutics. The chapter shows how Mitchell appropriated experimental approaches from various fields to characterize both the cause and the effects of the disease caused by snake venom. The chapter also highlights the shift of emphasis in the methodology of experiments from variations of experimental procedures to comparative tests and checks. At that time, comparative experimentation was explicitly discussed both in the life sciences and in the emerging philosophy of science. However, the scientists’ discussions were driven by pragmatic concerns and thus differed significantly from systematic accounts of comparative experimentation such as Herschel’s and Mill’s philosophies of science.

This chapter presents a conversation that took place by e-mail with Jean-Michel Rabaté on the question of deconstruction and place, initially written to be performed by him and the author at a conference in Paris in 2003. Rabaté is both one of the most eminent and energetic commentators on Jacques Derrida's work, and someone who knew him well over a much longer period than the author did. Derrida seems to provide his own parody of Descartes' Discourse on Method. Literature has always already thought the deconstructive undoing or opening what Derrida started because it contains a hidden, latent, unknown knowledge about itself: the inadequacy of a purely ‘objective’ sociological analysis of the place, and places, of deconstruction; not that they are invalid, but that they leave many questions still in place.

Richard Mead’s Mechanical Account of Poisons includes a study of viper venom as well as a critical commentary on Redi and Charas. The several editions of Mead’s Mechanical Account showcase the state and dynamics of medical thought in the first half of the eighteenth century and its effect on research into poisons, and they illuminate conventions for writing, expectations for medical scholarship, and the different ways in which methods discourse could be integrated in a treatise about experimental research. For the history of methods discourse, Mead’s Mechanical Account of Poisons serves as a proof of concept. The chapter presents Mead’s work an experimentalist treatise, which contains almost no discussion of research techniques, experimental strategies, and criteria for proper procedure.

Felice Fontana’s Treatise on the Venom of the Viper; on the American Poisons; and on the Cherry Laurel, and some other Vegetable Poisons is considered a milestone in venom research. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his research served as a starting point for investigations of snake venom, and his experimental methods were praised as exemplary. Fontana’s methods discourse was both as a creative appropriation of a long tradition and as a product of the challenges he encountered in his own endeavors. Fontana performed countless experiments to explore the effects of viper venom on the animal body, initially to confirm Redi’s (and Mead’s) view that the yellow liquor flowing from the viper’s protruding teeth was the substance that contained the poison. Like Redi and Mead, Fontana was a committed experimentalist. Unlike his predecessors, Fontana offered very detailed discussions of experimental strategies, emphasizing the significance of variations in experimental practice. The treatise describes numerous experiments on the nature and action of venom. As an integral part of the account, it offers detailed comments on proper procedure, describing countless variations and drawing attention to the circumstances of each trial.

In the 1880s, venom served as a means to explore specific body functions, and the changes thus produced were recorded with novel kinds of recording devices. Venom was tested systematically with a battery of common chemical testing procedures. Venom was also being scrutinized for any microorganisms that it might contain, and these microorganisms were studied with the help of novel culturing techniques. There were dramatic changes in the preferred kinds of protocols. The chapter draws attention to the appearance of the concept of control in biomedical experimentation and compares scientists’ notions of control with Mill’s analysis of experimental methods. In the 1880s, increased efforts to control unwieldy experiments were the flipside of the encounters with variations, instability, and complexity. At the same time, there were complaints and expressions of concern about confusing and rambling medical writing. Medical men commenting on scientific writing called, above all, for brevity, conciseness, and telling titles. In the late nineteenth century, the ideal of quick access to information had trumped the late eighteenth-century notion that the narration of journeys of discovery could inspire the reader with confidence.

In the early twentieth century, venom research migrated into the domain of protein and enzyme studies. Venom researchers consciously drew on new analytic techniques and approaches from research on enzymes, proteins, and hormones to understand the composition and biological action of venom. The methodological worries and discussions of venom researchers were fueled by the concerns about complexity—not only by the complex organization of biological substances but also by the intricacy and opacity of instruments and techniques for the investigation of ever more remote things. Early twentieth-century researchers responded to the problem of how to investigate subvisible mechanisms and things by pursuing multiple lines of research, using multiple techniques. Complexity was still the main concern of scientific authors as well. Instruction manuals for scientific writing addressed questions of how to prepare and organize scientific and technical papers and reports and how to handle definitions, descriptions of procedures and machines, and explanations of processes. The modular structure became the recommended format for scientific articles.

The continuation of the dispute between Redi and Charas brought methodological issues to the fore. The chapter shows that while both investigators were experimentalists, they had quite different understandings of certain methodological concepts, particularly of the concept of repetition and of the significance of accidents and contingencies. The dispute about snake venom remained unresolved.

In the mid-seventeenth century, experiments on snake venom were conducted within the larger contexts of discussions about body functions and the nature of disease; about blood, its role in the body, and its circulation; about nerve function and the theory of animal spirits; about chemical and mechanical philosophy; about iatrochemistry; and about the analogy between the actions of poisons and the actions of specific medicines. Francesco Redi’s extended studies of viper venom showed that a substance was responsible for the adverse effects of the bite—namely, the “yellow liquor” that was discharged from the viper’s teeth. Taken by mouth, this substance was innocent. Put in wounds, it was fatal to humans and animals. Moyse Charas, his French adversary, turned against Redi and argued that the rage of the viper was responsible for the fatal effects. These writings on venom exemplify how more concrete methodological views and conceptions of experimentation were integrated in experimental reports to establish proper procedure. Two experimental strategies stand out: comparisons and repetitions. The chapter argues that repetitions, not comparisons, were the new feature in Redi’s experimental project.

The conclusion draws together the book’s major findings through a reading of Descartes’s Discourse on Method, focusing primarily upon the relationship between place and thought in the theorization of the cogito. Against Descartes’s fantasy of disembodied and placeless mind, the conclusion suggests that early modern English drama stages the impossibility of separating thought from its foundation in embodiment and environment, as well as the consequences—alternately tragic and comic—of attempting to do so. Not only do the plays considered in this book show thinking to be an ecological phenomenon; they also reveal that the act of thinking through place can transform the contours of a location.