Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 193–202, 2001 Pergamon Printed in Great Britain www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa Essay Review We Have Always Been Mixed Up: Aristotle at the Heart of the ‘Composite Age’ He ´le `ne Mialet* Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, E ´ loge du Mixte: Mate ´riaux Nouveaux et Philosophie Ancienne (Paris: Hachette Litte ´ratures, 1998), 358 pp., ISBN 2-01-235413-0 Hard- back FF130.00. On one side we find Aristotle, the untamed shores of the Mediterranean, the dense blue of the Aegean Sea, a world without machines. On the other side stands an engineer of today’s solid materials confronted by the technological mutations of the late twentieth century. Between the two more than two thousand years have passed. The scientific revolution, which began in the seventeenth century and finds its incarnation in the engineer, relegated the physics of Aristotle to a pre-scientific age. The wager of Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent’s E ´ loge du Mixte is to draw out the tension between these two cultures, considered to be incommensurable. Heidegger already carried out such a comparison, but did so to emphasize the gap between ancient, poetic, productive-techne ˆ which reveals being, and modern provocative- technology, which gathers and examines nature so as to place being at its disposal. Bensaude-Vincent attempts to show the contrary, that new technologies reactivate ancient techne ˆ and that the concepts forged by Aristotle in antiquity can shed light on the technical practices of modern material science. Just as Hume awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumber, so Bensaude-Vincent invites her readers to open their eyes to the familiar objects that surround them. Why, she asks, do commodities that serve us everyday suddenly change in texture * Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University, 726 University Avenue, Ithaca, NY 14850, U.S.A. PII: S0039-3681(00)00028-5 193