The Scientific RevolutionUniversity of Chicago Press, 2018 M11 5 - 256 pages This scholarly and accessible study presents “a provocative new reading” of the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century advances in scientific inquiry (Kirkus Reviews). In The Scientific Revolution, historian Steven Shapin challenges the very idea that any such a “revolution” ever took place. Rejecting the narrative that a new and unifying paradigm suddenly took hold, he demonstrates how the conduct of science emerged from a wide array of early modern philosophical agendas, political commitments, and religious beliefs. In this analysis, early modern science is shown not as a set of disembodied ideas, but as historically situated ways of knowing and doing. Shapin shows that every principle identified as the modernizing essence of science—whether it’s experimentalism, mathematical methodology, or a mechanical conception of nature—was in fact contested by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century practitioners with equal claims to modernity. Shapin argues that this contested legacy is nevertheless rightly understood as the origin of modern science, its problems as well as its acknowledged achievements. This updated edition includes a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship. “An excellent book.” —Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review |
From inside the book
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Page x
... mathematics in the seventeenth century 128 A scene from the Paris Academy of Sciences 131 A scene from the Florentine Accademia del Cimento 132 Hooke's microscopic magnification of the eyes of a drone fly 145 Grew's microscopic ...
... mathematics in the seventeenth century 128 A scene from the Paris Academy of Sciences 131 A scene from the Florentine Accademia del Cimento 132 Hooke's microscopic magnification of the eyes of a drone fly 145 Grew's microscopic ...
Page 5
... Mathematical physics was, for example, a very different sort of practice from botany. 3. In the seventeenth century the word “science” (from the Latin scientia, meaning knowledge or wisdom) tended to designate any body of properly ...
... Mathematical physics was, for example, a very different sort of practice from botany. 3. In the seventeenth century the word “science” (from the Latin scientia, meaning knowledge or wisdom) tended to designate any body of properly ...
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... mathematical physics and Continental settings.” This concentration was justified by the view that what was “really new” and “really important” in the seventeenth century was the mathematization of the study of motion and the destruction ...
... mathematical physics and Continental settings.” This concentration was justified by the view that what was “really new” and “really important” in the seventeenth century was the mathematization of the study of motion and the destruction ...
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... mathematical means of understanding nature, and the “mathematization of qualities” manifested in the pervasive contrast between “primary” and “secondary” qualities. The second chapter begins to depart from traditional ways of talking ...
... mathematical means of understanding nature, and the “mathematization of qualities” manifested in the pervasive contrast between “primary” and “secondary” qualities. The second chapter begins to depart from traditional ways of talking ...
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... mathematical optics, that they were “not at all distant from its surface, but are either contiguous to it or separated by an interval so small as to be quite imperceptible.” Not Galileo's observations of sunspots but his particular ...
... mathematical optics, that they were “not at all distant from its surface, but are either contiguous to it or separated by an interval so small as to be quite imperceptible.” Not Galileo's observations of sunspots but his particular ...
Contents
1 | |
15 | |
Two How Was It Known? | 65 |
Three What Was the Knowledge For? | 119 |
Bibliographic Essay | 167 |
Index | 235 |
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air pump Alchemy Alexandre Koyré ancient Aristotelian astronomy Bacon belief bodies Book of Nature Boyle's Cambridge University Press causal causes century certainty changes chaps chapter Chicago Press claims clock conception Copernican culture Descartes Descartes's disciplines Early Modern Europe early modern period early modern science earth effects English especially essay example experience experimental fact factual Galileo historians History of Science Hobbes human idea intellectual intelligible Isaac Newton Johannes Hevelius mathematical matter mechanical accounts mechanical explanation mechanical philosophers Medicine mercury Merton Thesis metaphor microscope modern natural philosophers motion natural history natural knowledge natural philosophy natural world Newton objects observed occult orig Oxford phenomena philoso physical practice practitioners Princeton principles produced proper publ relation reliable religious Renaissance Robert Boyle Robert Hooke role Roy Porter Royal Society Scientific Revolution secure sense sensibilities seventeenth Shapin sixteenth social sources structure telescope texts theory things tion traditional ture University of Chicago York