The Scientific Revolution And The Origins Of Modern Science

This is a concise but wide-ranging account of all aspects of the Scientific Revolution from astronomy to zoology. The third edition has been thoroughly updated, and some sections revised and extended, to take into account the latest scholarship and research and new developments in historiography.

"This book attempts to introduce to its readers major chapters in the history of science. It tries to present science as a human endeavor - a great achievement, and all the more human for it. In place of the story of progress and its obstacles or a parade of truths revealed, this book stresses the contingent and historical nature of scientific knowledge. Knowledge, science included, is always developed by real people, within communities, answering immediate needs and challenges shaped by place, culture, and historical events with resources drawn from their present and past. Chronologically, this book spans from Pythagorean mathematics to Newton's Principle. The book starts in the high Middle Ages and proceeds to introduce the readers to the historian's way of inquiry. At the center of this introduction is the Gothic Cathedral - a grand achievement of human knowledge, rooted in a complex cultural context, and a powerful metaphor for science. The book alternates thematic chapters with chapters concentrating on an era. Yet it attempts to integrate discussion of all different aspects of the making of knowledge: social and cultural settings, challenges and opportunities; intellectual motivations and worries; epistemological assumptions and technical ideas; instruments and procedures. The cathedral metaphor is evoked intermittently throughout, to tie the many themes discussed to the main lesson: that the complex set of beliefs, practices, and institutions we call science is a particular, contingent human phenomenon"--

From Simon & Schuster, Herbert Butterfield's The Origins of Modern Science chronicles the history of contemporary scientific theory. In The Origins of Modern Science Professor Herbert Butterfield argues that past scientific achievements cannot be viewed through the filter of 20th century eyes, but can be understood only in the historical and political context of an era.

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

The birth of modern science was linked to the rise in Western Europe of a new sensibility, that of the scientific intellectual. Such a person was no more technician, looking at science as just a job to be done, but one for whom the scientific stand-point is a philosophy in the fullest sense. In The Scientific Intellectual, Lewis S. Feuer traces the evolution of this new human type, seeking to define what ethic inspired him and the underlying emotions that created him.Under the influence of Max Weber, the rise of the scientific spirit has been viewed by sociologists as an offspring of the Protestant revolution, with its asceticism and sense of guilt acting as causative agents in the rise of capitalism and the growth of the scientific movement. Feuer takes strong issue with this view, pointing out how it is at odds with what we know of the psychological conditions of modern societies making for human curiosity and its expression in the observation of and experiment with nature.Feuer shows that wherever a scientific movement has begun, it has been based on emotions that issue in what might be called a hedonist-libertarian ethic. The scientific intellectual was a person for whom science was a 'new philosophy,' a third force rising above religious and political hatreds, seeking in the world of nature liberated vision, a intending to use and enjoy its knowledge. In his new introduction to this brilliantly readable volume, Professor Feuer reviews the book's critical reception and expands the scope of the original edition to include fascinating discussions of Francis Bacon, Thomas Edison, Charles Darwin, Thomas Hardy, and others. The Scientific Intellectual will be of interest to scientists and intellectual historians.

In this first book-length historiographical study of the Scientific Revolution, H. Floris Cohen examines the body of work on the intellectual, social, and cultural origins of early modern science. Cohen critically surveys a wide range of scholarship since the nineteenth century, offering new perspectives on how the Scientific Revolution changed forever the way we understand the natural world and our place in it. Cohen's discussions range from scholarly interpretations of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, to the question of why the Scientific Revolution took place in seventeenth-century Western Europe, rather than in ancient Greece, China, or the Islamic world. Cohen contends that the emergence of early modern science was essential to the rise of the modern world, in the way it fostered advances in technology. A valuable entrée to the literature on the Scientific Revolution, this book assesses both a controversial body of scholarship, and contributes to understanding how modern science came into the world.

"This book attempts to introduce to its readers major chapters in the history of science. It tries to present science as a human endeavor - a great achievement, and all the more human for it. In place of the story of progress and its obstacles or a parade of truths revealed, this book stresses the contingent and historical nature of scientific knowledge. Knowledge, science included, is always developed by real people, within communities, answering immediate needs and challenges shaped by place, culture, and historical events with resources drawn from their present and past. Chronologically, this book spans from Pythagorean mathematics to Newton's Principle. The book starts in the high Middle Ages and proceeds to introduce the readers to the historian's way of inquiry. At the center of this introduction is the Gothic Cathedral - a grand achievement of human knowledge, rooted in a complex cultural context, and a powerful metaphor for science. The book alternates thematic chapters with chapters concentrating on an era. Yet it attempts to integrate discussion of all different aspects of the making of knowledge: social and cultural settings, challenges and opportunities; intellectual motivations and worries; epistemological assumptions and technical ideas; instruments and procedures. The cathedral metaphor is evoked intermittently throughout, to tie the many themes discussed to the main lesson: that the complex set of beliefs, practices, and institutions we call science is a particular, contingent human phenomenon"--

Once upon a time 'The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century' was an innovative concept that inspired a stimulating narrative of how modern science came into the world. Half a century later, what we now know as 'the master narrative' serves rather as a strait-jacket - so often events and contexts just fail to fit in. No attempt has been made so far to replace the master narrative. H. Floris Cohen now comes up with precisely such a replacement. Key to his path-breaking analysis-cum-narrative is a vision of the Scientific Revolution as made up of six distinct yet narrowly interconnected, revolutionary transformations, each of some twenty-five to thirty years' duration. This vision enables him to explain how modern science could come about in Europe rather than in Greece, China, or the Islamic world. It also enables him to explain how half-way into the 17th century a vast crisis of legitimacy could arise and, in the end, be overcome.