Robert Hooke’s Experimental Philosophy

A critical biography of the seventeenth-century scientist’s expansive life and work.

Robert Hooke was England’s first professional scientist and a pioneer of science communication. He was also one of the earliest to write a guide for how others might become ＂experimental philosophers＂ like himself. In this new biography, Felicity Henderson takes Hooke’s scientific method as a starting point for an expedition into what Hooke himself saw as key aspects of a scientific life.

Tracing this expansive life, the story draws readers through marketplaces, bookshops, construction sites, and coffee houses--even into the King’s royal presence at Whitehall Palace. Henderson explains how Hooke’s observations and conversations with the workmen, colleagues, craftsmen, and patrons he met through his work underpinned Hooke’s research in significant ways. The result is a fresh portrait of the scientist as a champion of the mundane, whose greatest gift was to help the world see even the smallest parts of everyday life with new eyes.

Felicity Henderson is a senior lecturer in archives and material culture at the University of Exeter. She has written widely about Robert Hooke.