This book focuses on the shift in the perception of music by educated classes, from the Greek view as an essentially rational enterprise to the modern view as an essentially artistic enterprise. One of the main parties responsible for the decline of the Greek view was Joseph Sauveur. Although historians universally acknowledge his foundational contributions to the evolution of music, there is a paucity of comprehensive scholarship on his life and work. This book aims to address this gap.

This book documents the process of transformation from natural philosophy, which was considered the most important of the sciences until the early modern era, into modern disciplines such as mathematics, physics, natural history, chemistry, medicine and engineering. It focuses on the 18th century, which has often been considered uninteresting for the history of science, representing the transition from the age of genius and the birth of modern science (the 17th century) to the age of prodi...