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 3
... political revolutions gestured at the notion of ebbs and flows or cycles—fortune's wheel—in human affairs. The idea of revolution as a radical and irreversible reordering developed together with linear, unidirectional conceptions of ...
... political revolutions gestured at the notion of ebbs and flows or cycles—fortune's wheel—in human affairs. The idea of revolution as a radical and irreversible reordering developed together with linear, unidirectional conceptions of ...
Page 4
... political, and economic patterns. More fundamentally, some historians now wish to understand the concrete human practices by which ideas or concepts are made. What did people do when they made or confirmed an observation, proved a ...
... political, and economic patterns. More fundamentally, some historians now wish to understand the concrete human practices by which ideas or concepts are made. What did people do when they made or confirmed an observation, proved a ...
Page 9
... political and economic influences on science, and social uses or consequences of science. That now seems to many historians, as it does to me, a rather silly demarcation, and I shall not waste readers' time here in reviewing why those ...
... political and economic influences on science, and social uses or consequences of science. That now seems to many historians, as it does to me, a rather silly demarcation, and I shall not waste readers' time here in reviewing why those ...
Page 10
... political, on the one hand, and “scientific truth,” on the other, is partly a cultural product of the period this book discusses. What is commonsensically thought of as science in the late twentieth century is in some measure a product ...
... political, on the one hand, and “scientific truth,” on the other, is partly a cultural product of the period this book discusses. What is commonsensically thought of as science in the late twentieth century is in some measure a product ...
Page 13
... political ends, the condition of which was agreement that the knowledge in question truly was benign, powerful, and above all disinterested. The first and second themes are introduced in chapter I; the third is treated mainly in ...
... political ends, the condition of which was agreement that the knowledge in question truly was benign, powerful, and above all disinterested. The first and second themes are introduced in chapter I; the third is treated mainly in ...
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