The Scientific Revolution

Jonathan Davies

(Powerpoint will be on the website)

The Scientific Revolution was ‘the most profound revolution achieved or suffered by the human mind… [It was a revolution so profound that human culture] for centuries did not grasp its bearing or meaning; which, even now, is often misvalued and misunderstood.’

Alexander Koyré (1943) cited in Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1996), p. 1.

‘[The Scientific Revolution] outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes… [It] looms so large as the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodization of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.’

Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800, rev. ed. (New York, 1965; orig.publ. 1949), p. viii.

‘There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.’

Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1996), p. 1.

Questions

• What are the traditional views of the Scientific Revolution?

• What are the revisionist views of it?

Manuscript of Nicolaus

Copernicus, De revolutionibus

orbium coelestium (1543)

Andreas Vesalius, De humani corpis

fabrica (1543), Frontispiece

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum

(1620)

Philosophy [physics] is written in this grand book - I mean the universe - which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth.

Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore (1623)

Johannes Kepler

William Harvey, De motu cordis (1628)

Isaac Newton

Halley’s map of the 1715 solar eclipse

Avicenna

Rhazes, Book of Medicine for

Mansur, colophon

‘The roots of modern science are “dialogical” – that is, the result of a long-running dialogue between ideas that came to Europe from a wide diversity of cultures through complex historical and geographical routes.’

Arun Bala, The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science (New York, 2006), p. 1.