Being Human: Lecture 3
Famous Stories We Tell Ourselves (part II): The ‘Scientific Revolution’
Def. Scientific Revolution:
An term that describes a period in Western
history in which the way people thought about
and investigated nature changed significantly.
The publication of Nicolaus Copernicus's De
revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the
Revolutions of the Heavenly Sphere, 1543s) is
often cited as marking the beginning of the
Scientific Revolution, and its completion is
attributed to the "grand synthesis" of Isaac
Newton's 1687 Principia published in 1687.
The Whig Interpretation of History ( 1931)
The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800
(1948)
Herbert Butterfield, 1900-1979
Dome of Science
‘Since that revolution, overturned the authority in science not only of the middle
ages but of the ancient world – since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic
philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics – it outshines everything
since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and the Reformation to
the rank of mere episodes, mere internal replacements, within the system of
Christendom. Since it changed the character of men’s habitual mental operation
even in the conduct of the non-material sciences, while transforming the whole
diagram of the physical universe and the very texture of human life itself, it looms
so large as the real origin of the modern world and of modern mentality that our
customary periodization of European history has become an anachronism and an
encumbrance. There can hardly be a field in which it is of greater moment to us
to see at somewhat closer range the precise operations that underlay a particularly
historical transition, a particular chapter of intellectual development.’
(Henry Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, p. 7-8)
‘The very strength of our conviction that ours was a
Graeco-Roman civilization – the very way in which
we allowed the art-historians and the philologists
to make us think that this thing which we called
‘the modern world’ was the product of the
Renaissance – the inelasticity of our historical
concepts, the fact – helped to conceal the radical
nature of the changes that had taken place and the
colossal possibilities that lay in the seeds sown in
the seventeenth century.’
(p. 201)
Some of his writings:
On the heavens
On sleep and sleeplessness
On animals
On the soul
Virtues and vices
Meteorology
Metaphysics
On Longlivity and Shortness of Life
Poetics
Generation and Corruption
And many, many more …
Aristotle, 384 BC – 322 BC
Def. 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 centuries
routinely understood as being God’s creation. It therefore
possesses strong theological implications.
Aristotelian cosmos
Micro-Macrocosm – Man as the mirror of the wider cosmos
What do natural philosophers do?
• Collecting and cataloguing the wonders of God’s creation – all the things we
have forgotten due to the fall
• To explain why things were the way they were; they were not about ‘discovery’
But about the question. Why did God make things the way they are?
The method is ‘deductive’ – from what we know to why it is the way it is
Scholasticism; scholastic: Scholasticism is a term applied to the intellectual
and academic style of the medieval universities, a style stressing debate,
disputation, and the effective use of cannonical texts (such as those of
Aristotle) in the making of arguments. A ‘scholastic’ is a practitioner of that
style of thinking.
Syllogism: the central technical device in formal logic in the universities of the
Middle Ages and early modern period, derived from Aristotle’s writings on
logic, and consisting of a ‘major premises’ (all As are B), a ‘minor premise’ (C is A),
And a ‘conclusion’ (therefore C is B)
Example:
All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
Therefore Socrates is mortal
‘Science’ or ‘scientia’ in scholastic understanding:
A true science demonstrated its conclusion from premises that were
accepted as certain or true (in the sense of universally true for all times).
Conlusions would be certain as long as they were deduced correctly from
starting points that were themselves certain or true (in the sense of
Universally true for all times).
(see Dear, p. 5)
‘Experience’ in scholasticism :
Experience for scholastics amounted to knowledge that
be gained by someone who had perceived ‘the same
thing’ countless times, so as to become thoroughly
familiar with it. (e.g the rising of the sun)
When an Aristotelian philosopher claimed to base his
knowledge on experience, he meant that he was familiar
with the behaviours and properties of the things he
discussed. Ideally his audience would be too.(
(Dear, p. 5)