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Scientific Revolution: Sciences
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Like most revolutions, the Scientific Revolution drew on the resources of the past as much as it broke with them. Early modern scientists often presented themselves as restorers of past wisdom. The new science built on the old, on the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Arab astronomers and mathematicians, the Aristotelian professors of medieval Europe's universities and the humanist scholars of the Renaissance.
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Why has the Scientific Revolution persisted as a periodization? In the end, there are several reasons. Not least is the simple utility of the phrase. However unfortunate and potentially misleading, it continues to serve as a convenient division for textbooks and curricula. Second, some historians believe there is fair evidence that something very dramatic unfolded during this complex and disputed period, call it the New Science or the New Philosophy (they argue) the name hardly impinges on the thing that happened. Third, and perhaps not least, the periodization called the 'Scientific Revolution' has been useful in drawing together very disparate disciplines.
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Recent scholarship on the origins of the Scientific Revolution has included discussion of intercultural exchange as a precondition and binding element of the period, a debate that has led to a reexamination of the essential nature of this transformation. But how would one know what is essential? Historians make these judgments all the time in their acts of selection and emphasis, but these decisions are often implicit rather than explicit. This conference will be devoted to trying to determine what historians (both of science and of other disciplines) believe to be essential to the scientific revolution as a way of exploring the relative importance of other cultural contributions to modern science.
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[M]ost of the evidence from the scientific revolution points the other way, showing a strong alliance at this period between science and religious belief. The end of the sixteenth century saw the beginnings of atheism in Europe, arising at least partly out of a skeptical crisis among intellectuals as a result of the newly discovered alternatives to Aristotle from ancient thought, including ancient skeptical writings. It seems clear that early atheists (for the most part they covered their tracks well—atheism was, after all, a capital offense) used their interpretations of natural philosophy (at first Aristotelianism and subsequently the mechanical philosophy) to promote irreligion. Nevertheless, all the major contributors to the development of the scientific revolution seem to have seen themselves as "priests of the Book of Nature," to use Kepler's phrase. The starting point of Descartes's system of natural philosophy was an argument he saw as undermining any skeptical position, his famous argument, "I think, therefore I exist." And his next move was to prove the existence of God before going on to build up his rational system of nature.
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The vast literature on the scientific revolution is surveyed in H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (1994). Allen G. Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (1978); and Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (1996), are the best short overviews. Additional surveys include Margaret C. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (1988, reissued 1993), strong on comparative and social issues; David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (eds.), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (1990), a cross section of current scholarship; and A. Rupert Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude, 2nd ed. (1962, reissued 1972), a classic intellectual history. The relationship between science, politics, and society in early modern England has been the subject of numerous important studies, including Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology & Society in Seventeenth Century England (1938, reissued 1993), which argues for a “Puritan spur to science”; while Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660 (1975), presents a case for more radical interest in science in England. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985); and Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (1994), trace the development of the experimental method. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Heritage of Giotto's Geometry (1991), explores the relationship between art and science in the Renaissance.
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Until recently, historians of the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries treated it as a kind of rebellion against the authority of ancient books and humanist scholarship. In fact... it began with the revival of several tremendously important and formidably difficult works of Greek science.
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