Review Essay: The Netz-Works of Greek Deductions

This is, without contest, the most important book of science studies to appear since Shapin and Schaffer’s (2005) Leviathan and the Air-Pump. I say this even though its author, Reviel Netz, a serious classicist from Stanford, prefers to take his distance from our field (which in all likelihood he considers as somewhat disreputable). From the beginning he asserts, with an added pun on his own title, that ‘This book should not be read as if it were “the Shapin of deduction”’ (p. 3). Instead, he prefers to call his endeavour ‘cognitive history’ – which means exactly what we mean by ‘science studies’, namely an obsessive attention to the material, historical and practical conditions necessary for the discovery of new cognitive skills. Even though Netz is not a card-carrying socio-historian of science, a look at another of his stunning books (Netz, 2004) – this time on the history of barbed wire from the cattle ranches of the Great Plains, through to Pearl Harbor, the trenches of the World War I, and then all the way to Auschwitz – would be enough to reassure any reader of Social Studies of Science that he is one of us, and one of our best. That the field of science studies is much larger (and also, alas, much smaller!) than the list of its official members should not come as any great surprise. I have a vivid memory of Thomas Kuhn accepting the Bernal Prize from our society with more than a slight embarrassment. Netz’s achievements are likewise of such crucial importance for our field that, even though I am neither a classicist nor a philosopher of mathematics, I must take the risk