The Setting for the “Scientific Revolution” of the 17th Century

The meanings of modernism and science:

1. cultural changes and goals in the 1400s-1600s

   • urban life and capitalism: an expanded class of the prosperous and educated

   • a social community with the traits to produce scientific interest and advance

   • technical needs: new techniques of warfare, fortification & building, mining, water management

   • exploration, new trade, and colonies: new needs, challenges, questions

   • new knowledge: humanist works, printed books and pamphlets, New World, technology (Nova Reperta), problems with traditional scholarship

2. the shift to a larger meaning and role for science in society

3. consideration of scientific practice raises questions:

   • what problems are considered proper and important?

   • what is the method of finding answers to questions of causation and pattern?

   • what counts as evidence?

   • what counts as a satisfying answer?

   • who does science, and where?

   • defining “modern” science

Intellectual traditions in the origins of modern science:

1. the Scholastic tradition of the universities and the Church [from 1300s – 1600s]

   • methods:

     • emphasis on text, criticism, disputation (Aristotle’s works)

     • the sciences of geometry, music, astronomy, arithmetic

     • Scholastic explanation: the use of logic and geometry

   • principles of knowledge and explanation:

     • first (formal), material, efficient, and final causes

     • balance of the 4 “elements” or “qualities”

     • the organic connection of change = growth = motion

   • science of motion:

     • unnatural and natural motion

     • the earthly and celestial realms

     • the place of perfect circular motion

   • ties to theology & questions of heresy: causation, substance

2. the Humanist reformers [1400s – 1600s]

   • promoting concern with human and practical affairs

   • opposed to excessive dependence on logical disputation (Scholasticism)

   • new critical tradition to purify ancient texts, find more texts

   • promoting new empiricism

   • ties to magical philosophy and neo-Platonism

3. the magical tradition

   • parallels and correspondences as explanatory of causation

   • the dream of technological manipulation

   • mathematical skills for astrology

   • revival of Hermetic texts (Corpus hermeticum) [mid-1400s]

   • practical investigations and technology of alchemy

   • controversial new drug therapies of the Paracelsians [mid-1500s]

   • critiques of the occult and witchcraft

4. artisan-technologist practitioners of the technological arts (engineering)

   • practical arts and engineering

   • unschooled

   • unpublished knowledge

   • empirical discoveries and developments

5. New philosophies and methods in the early 1600s

   • interest in both theoretical and practical questions

   • new non-classical approaches to problems

   • empiricist and quantitative methods

   • mathematical relationships and rules

   • analogies of nature and machinery

   • utopian hopes for the progress of knowledge and technology

© 2018 Dr. William Kimler