Roger Hahn is Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley.
Roger Hahn has been studying this career for half a century. He has
located letters and papers thought to be lost, written on the tough
problems of Laplace’s religious beliefs and his relation with
Newtonian cosmology, and at last written a new biography, first
released under the title Le Système du monde in France a couple of
years ago… Hahn’s aim here is to give the stern mechanisms of
Laplacian science a human face… Hahn is at his best in his
exposition of the materials with which he has been working since
the 1950s: Laplace’s reflections on probability and religion, which
include a striking group of manuscripts, preserved in relative
secrecy in a black envelope in the library of the Académie des
Sciences, where the great analyst set down his views on power,
causation and the authority of scripture.
*London Review of Books*
A compelling portrait…[and a] trim and accessible biography of
Laplace… Previous biographies…have focused on Laplace’s scientific
achievements. Hahn’s admirable goal is to integrate his science
with his personal and public life. To do so, Hahn has painstakingly
assembled the manuscript sources that make possible such
speculation from the outside.
*Times Higher Education Supplement*
The book reflects a lifetime of thinking and research by a
distinguished historian about the life and work of a singularly
important figure in the history of Enlightenment science. It is
really the first full-fledged biography of Laplace. While other
authors have restricted themselves to offering accounts of his
scientific work alone, Hahn, by connecting Laplace’s lived
experience as a figure in Old Regime French society with the
science he produced, does indeed give us a fully human Laplace.
*J. B. Shank, Assistant Professor, Department of History, and
McKnight Land-Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota*
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