Title: The Scientific Revolution Jonathan Davies (Powerpoint will be on the website)
1The Scientific RevolutionJonathan
Davies(Powerpoint will be on the website)
2The 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.
3The 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.
4There was no such thing as the Scientific
Revolution, and this is a book about it.
Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution
(Chicago, 1996), p. 1.
5Questions
- What are the traditional views of the Scientific
Revolution? - What are the revisionist views of it?
6Manuscript of Nicolaus Copernicus, De
revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543)
7Andreas Vesalius, De humani corpis fabrica
(1543), Frontispiece
8Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)
9Philosophy 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)
10Johannes Kepler
11William Harvey, De motu cordis (1628)
12Isaac Newton
13Halleys map of the 1715 solar eclipse
14Avicenna
15Rhazes, Book of Medicine for Mansur, colophon
16The 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.