Abiding, Fruitful (and Never ‘Vehement’): Forty Years of Historiographical Dialogue with Steve Gaukroger

This paper is an homage to Stephen Gaukroger, grounded in reminiscences of key moments in our forty-six year professional relationship and illustrated by some manuscript documents bearing on our interactions. Starting from our membership of the Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy of Science in the mid and late 1970s, it moves through more than forty years in Australia as sometime colleagues, collaborators, mutual critics and supporters, as well as organizers of various conferences and symposia in Australia, Europe, China and North America. Emphasis is placed on our joint lifelong concern with Descartes ‘the Natural Philosopher’, the history of early modern physical sciences and with Scientific Revolution historiography. It also signals a rare, late–appearing difference of opinion about the nature of experiment and so-called ‘experimental philosophy’, despite our early joint and consensual interest in Bachelard’s view of experiment in physics and in the role of experiment in the constitution of Galileo’s mechanics.