"Here is a well-known story. Before sometime in the early modern period, Europeans believed that knowledge of nature came solely from reading books, above all those of Aristotle. Then the humanist re-discovery and translation of various ancient philosophical works led the number of "authorities" to grow, and alongside a monolithic "Aristotelianism" emerged any number of "-isms": Stoicism, Epicureanism, Platonism, Skepticism, and so on. Gradually, philosophers realized that they need not need rely on authorities at all, and began to use their own reason, coupled with experience and experiment. Scholasticism and humanism were dead, and the "Age of Reason" had begun, with Descartes as its iconoclastic father (perhaps with a little help from Bacon)"--

A collection of cutting-edge scholarship on the close interaction of philosophy with science at the birth of the modern age.

"Here is a well-known story. Before sometime in the early modern period, Europeans believed that knowledge of nature came solely from reading books, above all those of Aristotle. Then the humanist re-discovery and translation of various ancient philosophical works led the number of "authorities" to grow, and alongside a monolithic "Aristotelianism" emerged any number of "-isms": Stoicism, Epicureanism, Platonism, Skepticism, and so on. Gradually, philosophers realized that they need not need rely on authorities at all, and began to use their own reason, coupled with experience and experiment. Scholasticism and humanism were dead, and the "Age of Reason" had begun, with Descartes as its iconoclastic father (perhaps with a little help from Bacon)"--

A comprehensive and authoritative guide to developments in life and earth sciences since 1800.

This book challenges the traditional historiography of the Scientific Revolution, probably the single most important unifying concept in the history of science. Usually referring to the period from Copernicus to Newton (roughly 1500 to 1700), the Scientific Revolution is considered to be the central episode in the history of science, the historical moment at which that unique way of looking at the world that we call 'modern science' and its attendant institutions emerged. It has been taken as the terminus a quo of all that followed. Starting with a dialogue between Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Richard S. Westfall, whose understanding of the Scientific Revolution differed in important ways, the papers in this volume reconsider canonical figures, their areas of study, and the formation of disciplinary boundaries during this seminal period of European intellectual history.

The Scientific Revolution Revisited brings Mikuláš Teich back to the great movement of thought and action that transformed European science and society in the seventeenth century. Drawing on a lifetime of scholarly experience in six penetrating chapters, Teich examines the ways of investigating and understanding nature that matured during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, charting their progress towards science as we now know it and insisting on the essential interpenetration of such inquiry with its changing social environment. The Scientific Revolution was marked by the global expansion of trade by European powers and by interstate rivalries for a stake in the developing world market, in which advanced medieval China, remarkably, did not participate. It is in the wake of these happenings, in Teich's original retelling, that the Thirty Years War and the Scientific Revolution emerge as products of and factors in an uneven transition in European and world history: from natural philosophy to modern science, feudalism to capitalism, the late medieval to the early modern period. ??With a narrative that moves from pre-classical thought to the European institutionalisation of science – and a scope that embraces figures both lionised and neglected, such as Nicole Oresme, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Thaddeus Hagecius, Johann Joachim Becher – The Scientific Revolution Revisited illuminates the social and intellectual sea changes that shaped the modern world.

The 'scientific revolution' of the sixteenth and seventeenth century continues to command attention in historical debate. Controversy still rages about the extent to which it was essentially a 'revolution of the mind', or how far it must also be explained by wider considerations. In this volume, leading scholars of early modern science argue the importance of specifically national contexts for understanding the transformation in natural philosophy between Copernicus and Newton. Distinct political, religious, cultural and linguistic formations shaped scientific interests and concerns differently in each European state and explain different levels of scientific intensity. Questions of institutional development and of the transmission of scientific ideas are also addressed. The emphasis upon national determinants makes this volume an interesting contribution to the study of the Scientific Revolution.