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To understand the radical transformations brought about by modern science concerning the order of nature, it is necessary first to mention the significance of the traditional sciences of the cosmos and the fact that they shared, in contrast to modern science, the same universe of discourse with the religion or religions of the civilization in whose bosom they were cultivated. In fact, modern science not only eclipsed the religious and traditional philosophical understanding of the order of nature in the West, but it also all but destroyed the traditional sciences. The divorce of the meaning of order in nature from its traditional sense and the substitution for it of laws governing the running of a machine—an idea so central to the rise of the Scientific Revolution and the eclipse of the traditional religious understanding of nature—is closely related to the modern idea of “laws of nature” that appeared at this time and became widely held in the 17th century.

This chapter describes the discovery, perfection, and application of the scientific method as the Scientific Revolution happens. Bacon, Galileo, Harvey, Huygens, and Newton were singularly successful in persuading posterity that they contributed to the invention of a single, transferable, and efficacious scientific method. The treatment of Descartes' method by historians of science and historians of philosophy has been no exception to this pattern. The Discours de la methode has been seen as one of the most important methodological treatises in the Western intellectual tradition, and the Cartesian method has been viewed as doubly successful and significant within that tradition. First, Descartes' method has been taken to mark an early stage in that long maturation of the scientific method resulting from interaction between application of method in scientific work and critical reflection about method carried out by great methodologists, from Bacon and Descartes down to Popper and Lakatos. Second, Descartes' considerable achievements in the sciences and in mathematics during a crucial stage of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century have been taken to have depended upon his method. This chapter discusses the tendency of historians and philosophers to create a cult of the thoughts of thinkers and revive the link between theorizing about the purported scientific method and requiring a method-centric history of science. It explains further that in all cults, there is a doctrine of truth and it informs us of what we already know and that there is an open ended set of rules.

This chapter highlights key moments in which science emerges and separates from other types of intellectual inquiry. In particular, it focuses on three periods of history that are critical to the development of the law/science relationship: ancient Greece, the Scientific Revolution in Europe, and 20th-century reevaluations of the meaning of science. In highly simplified form, what we think of as science today begins its history deeply entwined with philosophy and theology.

This chapter examines Petty's early life and apprenticeship in England, education at a Jesuit collège in Normandy, and studies in philosophy and medicine in Utrecht, Leiden, Amsterdam and Paris during the early and mid‐1640s. It was during these years that Petty first came into contact with several important influences on his later work: among the Jesuits, pure and mixed (applied) mathematics; in the Low Countries, Cartesianism, Harveian mechanistic physiology, and iatrochemistry (alchemical medicine); in Paris, such natural philosophers as Pierre Gassendi, Marin Mersenne and, most importantly, Thomas Hobbes. While still just developing his own philosophical persona, Petty was exposed in these years to some of the main currents of the new natural philosophy, and some of the major participants in the Scientific Revolution.

This chapter describes the significant role played by the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution in the coming of the modern age. It discusses the consequences of the Reformation and the ways in which modernisation and modernity have been traditionally linked to religious tolerance, printing, and Scientific Revolution. During the Reformation, printing facilitated the exchange of information and enhanced possibilities for systematisation and dissemination of new knowledge.

‘Big Science’ as a notion was coined in 1960 by physicist Alvin Weinberg and physicist-turned-historian Derek de Solla Price, and immediately became the center of heated discussions in the U.S. Simultaneously, in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, a counterpart of the American discussion of Big Science was epitomized in the concept of Scientific-Technological Revolution, which became the center of a theoretically significant discussions focused on the conditions and consequences of scientific-technical, social and economic change in different political systems. Throughout the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union advocated their ability to offer and display different visions of a modern industrial society, and Big Science played major role in these powerful Cold War imageries. This chapter examines different ways in which Big Science was deployed as a resource to debate, negotiate, and rationalize the concerns and anxieties of the Cold War, on the opposite sides of the political divide. In both political settings, scientists, as well as social theorists, promoted the view that Big Science needs what might be called “Big Science Studies” – an independent expertise, which would provide a systematic assessment and characterization of Big Science, and advise governments accordingly.

Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions attempts to interpret scientific change on the model of a political revolution: a period of normalcy, followed by a crisis, that is resolved by a new regime, a new paradigm. This essay explores the appropriateness of this model for the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. When we examine the eclipse of Aristotelian natural philosophy, for a long while, if ever, it was not replaced by a single new paradigm. Rather, the “new” non-Aristotelian philosophy was actually a diverse group of thinkers, the “novatores” or “innovators” who agreed only in the rejection of Aristotelian natural philosophy but otherwise were quite diverse. This is important not only for understanding the historical period, but also because it reveals a flaw in Kuhn’s framework. It is important for political revolutions to be resolved: the stability of the life depends on it. But there is no reason why a scientific revolution needs to result in the adoption of a single new paradigm: in the scientific world, a diversity of competing alternatives, and not Kuhnian normal science may turn out to be the norm.

It is commonly said in the early modern period that elusive qualities draw natural bodies together. This chapter offers a critical history of attempts to explain such preternatural forces in natural philosophy. It argues that the je-ne-sais-quoi appears as a key term in the vernacular debate about occult qualities and other secrets of nature, and that it becomes a site of lexical conflict between traditionalists (especially Jesuit natural philosophers) and so-called ‘new’ philosophers (Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton). Its appearance in this context is best understood as a symptom of the crisis that besets scholastic natural philosophy in the 17th century. The je-ne-sais-quoi offers in this way a point of entry into central debates of the period known as the ‘Scientific Revolution’. Not only does the word help articulate philosophical discussions about preternatural phenomena, but those discussions also offer access to the nature of the je-ne-sais-quoi itself.

This chapter discusses the Scientific Revolution that is dated from the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543, the work that put the sun rather than the earth at the center of the universe to Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687, the work that gave the causal underpinnings of the whole system as developed over the previous one hundred and fifty years. Historian Rupert Hall put his finger precisely on the real change that occurred in the revolution. It was not so much the physical theories, although these were massive and important. It was rather a change of metaphors or models—from that of an organism to that of a machine. By the sixteenth century, machines were becoming ever more common and ever more sophisticated. It was natural therefore for people to start thinking of the world—the universe—as a machine, especially since some of the most elaborate of the new machines were astronomical clocks that had the planets and the sun and moon moving through the heavens, not by human force but by predestined contraptions. In a word, by clockwork!

“Nobel Prizes: Asian Scientists Set to Topple America's Run of Wins”: This 2011 Manchester Guardian's headline may seem premature, but it no longer sounds implausible. In fact, its discursive presence reflects a recent dramatic shift in the transnational geography of technoscience. Although this shift offers an opportunity to move beyond Euro/West-centric constructions, such a move requires a radical reorientation of our technoscientific imaginary. The conclusion highlights the role of two Eurocentric constructions that have played crucial roles in obscuring, if not erasing, the complex and vibrant genealogies of transnational technosciences. The first one conflates two different regimes of invention in Europe and the West and thereby presents a homogeneous and exclusive framing of the European/Western inventive spirit and, indeed, of European/Western exceptionalism as well. Transnational genealogies of technoscience have also been obscured because of Eurocentric framing of the Scientific Revolution. If we are able to move beyond such Eurocentric constructions, the conclusion argues, a very different picture will emerge of not only present-day transformations, but also of the much longer and influential genealogy of transnational technoscience.

In this chapter, the process of professionalization of naval constructors that started in several countries of Europe, including France, Spain, and Denmark in 1700s and then spread to other countries of the world, is discussed. Naval constructors began to be seen as socially elite professionals in the late 1600s, as the enactment of greater control and oversight of the design and construction of ships was initiated by the governments of those countries during that period. The chapter emphasizes the initiation and evolution of professional corps of engineers in France, and also examines the impact of the French Revolution on the development of ship theory and the professionalization of constructors. It further states how French models were adopted for the professionalization of naval constructors by Spain, along with other European countries including Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Britain. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the closing of the French Academy of Sciences and the transition of naval architecture from the beginning of the Scientific Revolution to the dawn of the Industrial Age.

This introductory chapter explores the Scientific Revolution and its relationship with the supernatural, as well as the significance of atheism. It identifies two developments in the Scientific Revolution which have left an impact on magic. The first was the rise of the inductive philosophy which gave a methodological structure to the inchoate empiricism that had already begun to flourish in the Middle Ages and more notably in the sixteenth century. The second was the rise of the mechanical philosophy, the claim that everything in nature could be explained in terms of the interaction of matter and motion. In addition to this relation between science and the supernatural, the chapter delves into the question of atheism and why so much effort was invested in opposing it during this period.

This chapter outlines the views about physical or natural responses from ancient Greek philosophers until the revolutionary medical theories that were introduced by Giorgio Baglivi and Francis Glisson. It studies Baglivi's claim that fibers composing the organs—particularly the muscles—are directly responsive to irritation. It shows that the Scientific Revolution that occurred during the Renaissance had deeply affected the understanding of living matter in a deep and very basic way: Organs were all composed of fibers, despite their differences in form and function. Gottfried Leibniz is credited as being the first one to have held this view.

This chapter traces the triumph of the Kantian perspective. From the time of the Scientific Revolution to the present, vocal representatives are characterized as the Platonic approach or tradition and of the Aristotelian approach or tradition. Before the Origin, there were those like William Whewell and Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology at Cambridge, who simply put down the origins of new species to divine intervention. The fossil record shows that there has been a turnover of forms, and extinction is almost certainly due to natural causes. But when it comes to new forms, God intervenes miraculously. After the Origin, there were those who felt the same way. Louis Agassiz, Swiss-born ichthyologist and professor at Harvard, could never accept evolution, even though his students stepped over the line pretty sharpishly. The preferred option though, for those who were Christians believing in a Creator God, was some form of guided evolution. God puts direction into new variations and hence natural selection has at most a kind of garbage disposal function—it gets rid of the bad forms but does little or nothing to create new, good forms.