The Scientific Revolution

The Scholar-craftsman thesis, one of the most critical problems in the study of science and technology history in early modern Europe, aims to reveal the mutual learning between scholars and artisans and therefore to interpret how this reciprocity influenced or even caused the birth of the new science. In Edgar Zilsel’s point of view, the emergence of the scientists as a new social group was the symbol of the fusion of scholars and artisans, for these two groups of people had been separating since the ancient times. Modern science was born when scholars absorbed experimentation, causal interest, and quantitative method from craftsmen. Panofsky emphasizes the interaction of science and art as a defining characteristic of Renaissance science. The numerous collaborations between humanists and artisans triggered a revolution in the realm of visual representation, which then became an essential step toward modern science. A. R. Hall, however, argues that the Scientific Revolution in nature was no more than to offer new answers to the questions left by medieval natural philosophers, was a movement only within the sphere of the intellectuals. Scholars did learn from artisans, but the merits were limited. Indeed, the mutually beneficial reaction between the two groups had not formed yet during the Scientific Revolution. Pamela O. Long eliminates the dualism of scholars and craftsmen by introducing a new concept, trading zone, which is to describe a concrete or virtual meeting place in which people from different background exchange their substantive knowledge and expertise during the fifteenth and sixteenth-century​ Europe. The identity of scholars and craftsmen blurred and the value of experience study promoted in the trading zones, that paved the way for the birth of modern science.

Course description: "There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution and this is a book about it." So says Steven Shapin in the opening line of his book that is also the title of our course: The Scientific Revolution. This course explores scientific developments in Western Europe from the sixteenth-century Renaissance to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. During this period, European understandings of the natural world-and ways of achieving such understandingsunderwent a series of radical and far-reaching transformations that are often called the Scientific Revolution.

By most accounts, December 31, 2000 ended a century of unbelievable and breathtaking scientific progress. That is, it would be unbelievable if we had not experienced and documented all the advances that the century held. Yet the new millennium which began on January 1, 2001 seems to offer even greater promise than the last century, especially in the field of physics which is considered the most fundamental of the sciences of nature. But if we instead look at the long term trends in the history of the previous two centuries, some of the advances in physics during the twentieth century do not look so convincingly spectacular. So we actually began our third millennium bogged down by unanswered questions and growing concerns regarding the scope and range of validity of 'normal' physics. These questions have kindled doubts as to the fundamental nature of the quantum in understanding physical reality, just as they have raised the hope of finding a more fundamental understanding of nature and thus portend a new revolution in how we interpret and understand physical reality. At this point in time, the concept of consciousness reared its intellectually ugly head once again. The scientific community lost consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth century when psychology was based on behavior instead of mind. Yet consciousness is necessary within physics for many different reasons and the  consequences of developing a physical concept of consciousness are revolutionary to say the least. So it is suggested that a new look be taken at the field of paraphysics and toward this end a call is put out to develop a new academic organization supporting paraphysics.

Course description: This course explores scientific developments in Western Europe from the sixteenth-century Scientific Revolution to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. During this period, European understandings of the natural world—and ways of achieving such understandings—underwent a series of radical and far-reaching transformations that are often called the Scientific Revolution.

Through the Scientific Revolution, the authoritative knowledge of the ancients, including the Greek natural philosopher Aristotle and the Greek physician Galen, was increasingly called into question. The ancients held that the earth sat at the centre of the universe, that everything beneath the moon was composed of four elements and was subject to constant change, and that the best way to understand natural changes was qualitatively, in terms of four 'causes.' Human health and disease were understood to be the resulting im/balance of the four humors: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. These views of both the macrocosm and the microcosm persisted from Greco-Roman Antiquity through to the rise of the universities in the Middle Ages.

This course grapples with the two "sides" of the Scientific Revolution, represented by two key works published in 1543: Nicolaus Copernicus's On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres and Andreas Vesalius' On the Fabric of the Human Body. Through these radical works, as well those of other investigators (Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, Newton, Emilie du Châtelet), we see how new views about the celestial and human worlds proliferated across Western Europe. From the very large to the very small, existing conceptions were challenged, transformed, and finally repudiated wholesale.

Our goal in this course is to build a picture of such revolutionary changes, by focusing as much on canonical thinkers and their new models of and approaches to nature, as the material, spatial, and social contexts in and through which new ideas developed. To that end, this course adopts a roughly chronological theme-based approach that gives special place to the new research tools and spaces of the Scientific Revolution. We chart the development of instruments of science, including telescopes, microscopes, and surgical tools, as well as emerging spaces, including astronomical observatories, (al)chemical laboratories, and anatomical amphitheatres. We also explore the relationship between "high" and "low" scientific cultures, by looking at the dawn of the printing press, theories of the "plurality of worlds," and the shifting meanings of comets and other stellar activity within the popular imaginary.

Assessment: 1. Participation 15% 2. Reading responses 5 x 3% = 15% 3. Take-home midterm & final essays 2 X 20% = 40%

(Excerpt) In the Scholium to the Definitions of the Principia, Newton concentrates on abolishing some prejudices that commonly arise from considering space, time and movement with respect to mobile reference systems, and therefore contingent. This is in contrast to Descartes who defines movement as “the action by which a body passes from one place to another”. Such a relational notion is considered by Newton as vulgar and not true. It is therefore suitable, in his opinion, to carry out the destruction of these prejudices by making a distinction both of space, time and motion between absolute and relative, true and apparent, and mathematical and vulgar. In such a way, he then defines absolute and relative time, space and motion, in the following terms…

Sébastien Le Clerc (1637–1714) was the most renowned engraver of Louis XIV's France. For the history of scientific publishing, however, Le Clerc represents a telling paradox. Even though he followed a traditional route based on classic artisanal training, he also published extensively on scientific topics such as cosmology and mathematics. While contemporary scholarship usually stresses the importance of artisanal writing as a direct expression of artisanal experience and know-how, Le Clerc's publications, and specifically the work on cosmology in his Système du monde (1706–1708), go far beyond this. By reconstructing the debate between Le Clerc and the professor Mallemant de Messange on the authorship of this ‘system of the world’, this article argues that Le Clerc's involvement in publishing ventures shaped his identity both as an artisan and as a scientific author. Whereas the Scientific Revolution supposedly heralded a change from the world of ‘more or less’ to the ‘world of precision’, this article shows how an artisan could be more ‘precise’ than the learned scholar whose claims he disputed, and points to the importance of the literary field as a useful lens for observing the careers of early modern scientific practitioners.

C’est au XXe siècle, alors que l’Europe est affaiblie sur le plan international, que la Révolution scientifique des XVIe et XVIIe siècles est placée au centre d’un discours sur la primauté européenne. Après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, États-uniens et Britanniques vont se servir de ce nouveau levier pour ancrer dans les mémoires la supériorité de l’Europe en matière scientifique.