Handout
Scientific Revolution
1. The Scientific Revolution: Term and definitions
Def. Scientific Revolution: term ‘Scientific Revolution usually refers to the period from
Nicolaus Copernicus to Isaac Newton (that is roughly between 1500 and the closing of
the seventeenth century). It is the period in which modern ideas about nature and how
it is best investigated emerge.
The term “Scientific Revolution” was only minted in 1940s. In fact, the idea of a
“Scientific Revolution” was initially a brain-child of a group of historians such as
Herbert Butterfield, The origin of modern science (1949):
“…that revolution…outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and
reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes.”
Stereotypes about the natural sciences:
1. the somhow romantic image that science proceeds by “geniuses” making
“discoveries” at totally unexpected moments.
2. the “great scientist” himself/herself is an autonomous agent without any
connection to the social, political or economic circumstances surrounding him.
3. Science in itself value free.
Current historians of science see the natural sciences as a cultural production and
scientists as cultural beings. Therefore science can never be value –free.
But the term is still useful because something DOES change in that period.
1. First of all the use of mathematics and measurements to give precise
determinations of how the world and its parts work.
2. And second, the use of observation, experience, and where necessary artificially
constructed experiments, to gain understanding of nature.
Natural philosophy: a category, also known as ‘physics’. It refers to systematic
knowledge of all aspects of the physical world, including living things, and in the
sixteenth and seventeenth century routinely understood that world as being God’s
Creation. It therefore possessed strong theological implications.
Scholasticism, scholastic: A term applied to the intellectual and academic style of the
medieval universities, a style stressing debate, disputation, and the effective use of
canonical texts (such as Aristotle) in the making of arguments. A scholastic is a
practitioner of that style.
What was there to know for a natural philosopher in 1500?
Aristotelian natural philosophers aimed at true, universal and God-given knowledge and
therefore taken for granted. The important question for them to ask was why something
was the way it was. It was not about discovery. In a sense, therefore, an Aristotelian
world was not one in which there were countless new things to be discovered; instead,
it was one in which there were countless already known things left to be explained.
2. Scientific Renaissance in the Sixteenth Century: Renewing Ancient Wisdom
Nicolaus Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium colestium (On the revolution of
the Celestial Spheres), 1543
Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body)
The Scientific Revolution: establishing new systems of thinking and practice to
deal with the natural world
1. 1633 trial against Galileo Galilei and his , Dialogue concerning two Chief World
Systems. He claims his observation is no longer a hypothesis but truths.
2. René Descartes, ‘I know therefore I am’ – mechanistic philosophy, mind-body
split. All phenomena could in his view be explained in terms of mathematical
and mechanical concepts such as shape, size, quantity and motion. He and other
mechanical philosophers saw the workings of the natural world by analogy with
machinery.
3. William Harvey, Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in
Animals’, 1628. The rise of experimental philosophy. Nature can be explored and
explained by experiment.
4. Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (Mathematical
principles of natural philosophy) (1687)
Conclusion:
Although the investigation of nature, called natural philosophy did change beyond
recognition there is one component which stayed remarkably the same: From the
beginning to the end, natural philosophy involved God. Newton himself saw his
endeavour as being a service to the Almighty. There were very few atheists among the
natural philosophers in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. They all saw themselves
as part of God governed universe that changed its structure but did not doubt its
creator.