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 xiii
... sense in which this is as much their book as mine, yet the interpretations I put on their work and the way in which I organize their disparate findings and claims reflect my own point of view. To enable this book to most effectively ...
... sense in which this is as much their book as mine, yet the interpretations I put on their work and the way in which I organize their disparate findings and claims reflect my own point of view. To enable this book to most effectively ...
Page 2
... sense, to denote the period ending about 1700–1730. Later I will use the terms “modern” and “modernist” to designate some specific reforms of knowledge and practice set on foot in the seventeenth century. 2. In the 1930s the French ...
... sense, to denote the period ending about 1700–1730. Later I will use the terms “modern” and “modernist” to designate some specific reforms of knowledge and practice set on foot in the seventeenth century. 2. In the 1930s the French ...
Page 3
... sense, the first revolutions may have been scientific, and the “American,” “French,” and “Russian Revolutions” are its progeny. As our understanding of science in the seventeenth century has changed in recent years, so historians have ...
... sense, the first revolutions may have been scientific, and the “American,” “French,” and “Russian Revolutions” are its progeny. As our understanding of science in the seventeenth century has changed in recent years, so historians have ...
Page 5
... sense, if at all, can we speak of the Scientific Revolution as effecting massive changes in how “we” view the world, as the moment when modernity was made, for “us”? The cogency of such questions makes for problems in writing as ...
... sense, if at all, can we speak of the Scientific Revolution as effecting massive changes in how “we” view the world, as the moment when modernity was made, for “us”? The cogency of such questions makes for problems in writing as ...
Page 6
... sense in which “people's” thought about the world was revolutionized at that time is very limited. There should be no doubt whatever that one could write a convincing history of seventeenth-century thought about nature without even ...
... sense in which “people's” thought about the world was revolutionized at that time is very limited. There should be no doubt whatever that one could write a convincing history of seventeenth-century thought about nature without even ...
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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Common terms and phrases
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