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John A. Schuster, "The Scientific Revolution"1

Explaining the Scientific Revolution: Historiographical Issues and Problems

The Scientific Revolution is commonly taken to denote the period between I500

and I700, during which time the conceptual and institutional foundations of modern

science were erected upon the discredited ruins of the Medieval world-view, itself a

Christianized elaboration of the scientific and natural philosophical heritage of classical

antiquity. The central element in the Scientific Revolution is universally agreed to be the

overthrow of Aristotelian natural philosophy, entrenched in the universities, along with

its attendant earth-centered Ptolemaic system of astronomy. These were replaced by

the Copernican system of astronomy and the new mechanistic philosophy of nature,

championed by Rene Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Thomas

Hobbes and Robert Boyle. Historians of science agree that by the turn of the

eighteenth century, Isaac Newton's scientific and natural philosophical work had

subsumed and solidified Copernican astronomy, unified the terrestrial and celestial

mechanics deriving respectively from Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, and

transformed the mechanical philosophy by adding to it an ontology of immaterial forces

and ‘ethers' acting on ordinary matter according to mathematically expressed laws. It is

also agreed that conceptual breakthroughs in related areas complemented these major

transformations: Galileo and Newton laid the foundations for classical mathematical

physics; William Harvey established the circulation of the blood, based on the

achievements of the sixteenth-century anatomical tradition; and Descartes, Pierre

Fermat, Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz created the first modern fields of

1 Schuster, John A. "The Scientific Revolution," in Companion to History of Modern Science ,Olby, R.C., G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie, & M.J.S. Hodge, eds. London: Routledge, 1990, (pp.217-242).



mathematics, coordinate geometry and differential and integral calculus. The Scientific

Revolution is also usually seen as having produced unprecedented changes in the

social organization and social role of natural philosophy and the sciences. The Royal

Society of London and the Parisian Académie des Sciences, founded in the 1660s,

were the first successful institutions devoted solely to the promotion of the new science

of the seventeenth century, and they provided the models for such institutions which

proliferated in the eighteenth century. Their organization and publications did much to

shape the scientific community and to create a continuing, stable domain of scientific

debate and communication, although this by no means amounted to the sort of

professionalization of science that was to occur in the nineteenth century. . . . They also

embodied and propagated a triumphant new public rhetoric which praised the

usefulness of science, its putative contributions to social and material progress and its

objective detachment from the value-laden realms of politics and religion. Although the

contributions of science to technological and economic development remained small

until the nineteenth century, this public rhetoric, largely derived from the writings of

Francis Bacon, did play a role in motivating and legitimating subsequent scientific work.

Similarly, despite the fact that the rhetoric of value-neutrality and objectivity was itself an

ideology, occluding the values and aims which the new science embodied, this public

rhetoric had a significant role in shaping the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and in

promoting liberal and revolutionary social and political causes during the next two

centuries.

Although there is general agreement that such major changes occurred in

science and natural philosophy during this period, historians of science have been

unable to achieve consensus about any of the historiographical issues central to

understanding the Scientific Revolution. They cannot agree on what is to be explained.

Was there, for example, a truly revolutionary transformation of the sciences and natural

philosophy, and if so, where precisely in the period was this break located - in the work

of Newton, or perhaps earlier in the generation of Kepler, Bacon and Harvey?

Alternatively, does the period display a slower process of continuous change with

developments starting in the Middle Ages and only gradually evolving toward the



synthesis of Newton? On a deeper level, no consensus has emerged about what would

constitute an adequate explanation of either revolutionary or more continuous change. [

. . . ]

In the last two decades three developments have tended to reduce the

plausibility of attempts to grasp the essence of science. In the first place, recent

research has highlighted the historical contours and interpretative difficulties of the later

periods, making it much more difficult to believe that grasping the putative essence of

the Scientific Revolution provides the key to the nature and course of modern science.

Secondly, there has been an accelerating accumulation of meticulous but piecemeal

studies of seventeenth-century topics, of individual figures and of institutions, schools

and traditions. The detail and nuance of much of this literature further weakens the

credibility of the traditional search for simple defining features and their equally

simplistic causes. Finally, the work of T. S. Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Gaston

Bachelard has cast doubt on the conviction that science is based on a unique,

efficacious and transferable method. Almost all historians of science now question

whether the origin and development of modern science can be explained by means of

the emergence, refinement and application of the “the scientific method”. [ . . . ]

The newer sociology of scientific knowledge [ . . . ]has elucidated how scientists

within a given field or scientific speciality manufacture knowledge claims, negotiate their

status and reinterpret and redeploy them in further cycles of knowledge production.

They have observed that this `social construction' of knowledge is set within the grids of

power and cognition characteristic of the community at a given moment, the grids

themselves being subject to modification as claims are variously established, extended,

reinterpreted or dismantled, and credit is allocated for these accomplishments. Thus

social and cognitive issues cannot be separated at the sites where a scientific

community manufactures knowledge; instead, scientific knowledge is made in and

through social processes that are in turn altered by the changing fabric of knowledge.

Contextualist historians of science have reached analogous conclusions; but they have

attended more closely to the problem of relating scientific sub-cultures to their larger

social, political and economic environments or contexts. They see that although such



subcultures have their own internal social dynamics and are, to various degrees,

insulated from larger social forces, they nevertheless depend for their existence on the

configuration of larger forces, which, additionally, can at any time intervene more

directly in a sub-culture. [ . . . ]

For an adequate historiography of the Scientific Revolution [ . . . ] the challenge is

to describe and explain the processes of change (not necessarily ‘progressive') which

characterized the systematic natural philosophies and the existing and nascent

sciences in the early modern period. This involves forming empirically-based and

historically-sensitive conceptions of these sub-cultures as social and cognitive

enterprises. It also involves the notion that natural philosophy and the sciences, so

conceived, conditioned each other at the same time that they were variously open to,

and affected by, the larger social, political and economic contexts in which they were

practiced or promoted. Finally, this also involves having some working model of the key

moments in the process by which these sub-cultures interacted and changed, both

amongst themselves and in relation to working models of their (equally historically

changeable) contexts. Whether the term ‘Scientific Revolution' is retained to denote the

period is less important than forming these adequate historical categories and a working

description of the processes of change they experienced.

Appropriate Categories: Natural Philosophy, the Sciences and the Practical Arts

The Scientific Revolution consisted of a process of change and displacement

among and within competing systems of natural philosophy. The process involved the

erosion and downfall of the dominant Aristotelian philosophy of nature and its

replacement during the middle third of the seventeenth century by variants of the newly

constructed mechanistic natural philosophy, which, after a period of consolidation and

institutionalization, were modified and partially displaced by the post-mechanist natural

philosophies of Leibniz, and especially Newton, setting the stage for the eighteenth

century. The erosion of Artistotelianism in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries

was connected with the proliferation of alternative natural philosophies of magical,

alchemical and Hermetical colorations, and the mechanical philosophy was as much a



response to the social, political and theological threats seemingly posed by these

competitors as it was a response to Aristotelianism. Consequently, the crucial moment

in this process resides in the first two generations of the seventeenth century, an age of

heightened conflict amongst Aristotelianism, its magical/alchemical challengers and

nascent mechanism. This in turn suggests that Newtonianism was hardly the

teleological goal of the process, but rather a complexly conditioned, contingent (and

surprising) modification of the classical mechanism of the mid-seventeenth century.

Viewed in this way, the Scientific Revolution takes on an interesting rhythm as a

process of change and transformation of an appropriate ‘object' - systematic natural

philosophy. There is a preliminary sixteenth-century stage, which will be termed the

Scientific Renaissance, characterized by the erosion of Aristotelianism in some

quarters, its deepening entrenchment in others and by a ferment of revived alternatives.

There follows a ‘critical' period (c.1590-1650) of natural philosophical conflict marked by

the initial construction of mechanistic philosophies, and then a brief period of relative

consensus about, and institutionalization of, a range of variants of the mechanical

philosophy (c.I650-90), punctuated and complicated by the advent of Newtonianism.

In the period of the Scientific Revolution, every system of natural philosophy,

whether of a generally Aristotelian, mechanistic or Neo-Platonic magical/ alchemical

type, purported to describe and explain the entire universe and the relation of that

universe to God however conceived. The enterprise also involved, explicitly, a concern

with the place of human beings and society in that universe. Each system of natural

philosophy rested on four structural elements whose respective contents and systematic

relations went a considerable way towards defining the content of that system: (1) a

theory of substance (material and immaterial), concerning what the cosmos consists of

and what kinds of bodies or entities it contains; (a) a cosmology, an account of the

macroscopic organization of those bodies; (3) a theory of causation, an account of how

and why change and motion occur; (4) an epistemology and doctrine of method which

purports to show how the discourses under (I), (2) and (3) were arrived at and/or how

they can be justified, and how they constitute a ‘system'.



At the basis of any system of natural philosophy resided one or more privileged

images, metaphors or models, the articulation of which underlay one or more of the

elements and/or their modes of systematic interrelation. Such images and metaphors

could be drawn from a variety of discursive resources: from common discourse about

some phenomenon or craft; from already systematized discourse about politics, society

or theology; or from the presumed guiding concepts of some especially valued field of

scientific research. Because natural philosophers were selective in their choice of

constitutive metaphors and models, the resulting systems embodied and expressed

certain values and interests at the expense of others. However, a natural philosophy

was not a simple metaphor, but a complex system, the parts of which and their

interrelations could be given differential emphases and interpretations. Hence, the

values and goals `belonging' to a given natural philosophy were necessarily open to

some variation and reinterpretation, and no system had an unequivocal, single meaning

impressed upon it by its inventors or by its audience, hostile or receptive. This explains

how natural philosophies could be integrated with political, social or religious systems of

thought, and could be used to illustrate and support varied viewpoints about mankind,

politics, society and God. They were sensitive to historical changes in their social

contexts and helped contribute to them, for they could be focal points in shifts of attitude

and interest amongst the educated elite.

It follows that natural philosophies cannot be reduced and explained away as

‘reflections' of the social structure of early modern Europe. The construction,

modification and purveying of natural philosophies was a rich, sui generis social

enterprise, to which individuals devoted themselves with seriousness and hard-won

skills, just because of the social, intellectual and religious value placed on having the

‘correct' view of nature. Natural philosophies were, in short, context-sensitive and

context-affecting; but they are not reducible to some simplistic reading of the social

context.

Beyond having a workable conception of natural philosophy, the historian of

science must also consider those narrow scientific disciplines, or traditions of highly

specialized and technical research which either existed or first developed during the



Scientific Revolution. Sixteenth-century Europe possessed two sets of mature scientific

disciplines. T. S. Kuhn termed the first set the `classical physical sciences', including

geometrical astronomy and optics, statics and mechanics (study of the simple

machines), harmonics and geometry itself. To this group of sciences, which were first

constituted in classical antiquity, Kuhn added the mathematical treatment of natural

change, as it had developed in the Aristotelian schools of the Latin West from the

fourteenth century and been enriched in the Renaissance by connection with the statics

and hydrostatics of Archimedes, the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanical Questions, and the

medieval ‘science of weights', thus forming an additional domain of physical inquiry con-

cerned with the quantitative treatment of local motion. These fields shared an essential

reliance on mathematical articulation, and they were sufficiently developed in

conceptual and technical terms to be able, in principle, to support cumulative traditions

of posing and resolving problems about their respective objects of inquiry. Each of them

commanded a body of esoteric conceptual material embedded in classical `textbook'

expositions and linked to exemplary sorts of problem situations and solutions.

Similar, though not identical conditions held in the second set of mature

sciences, those linked to medical practitioners and medical institutions: human

anatomy, physiology and medical theory, the classical medical sciences. These too

embodied esoteric, textbook-grounded bodies of material; but they lacked, of course,

the mathematical articulation and hence the same degree of specification of problems

and modes of solution. However, they did contain outcroppings of a serious and

disciplined concern with observation and even in some cases experiment, which

played only a minor role in the geometrically-based sciences.

Some enterprises not included in Kuhn's schema may well be added. Astrology

was widely considered to be a science because it had a mathematical articulation, a

textbook tradition going back to Claudius Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos and a long traditional

linkage with medicine and with the practitioners of the other mathematically-based

sciences. Alchemy should also be included, although its lineage was not so tightly

bound to the existing cluster of sciences, and its moral-psychological aspirations and its



search for redemption through esoteric knowledge and successful practice, tended to

set its adherents apart from other practitioners.

The sciences existed in relation to the enterprise of natural philosophy. Indeed,

each science was variously considered to be part of, or conditioned by, one or another

system of natural philosophy. [ . . . ] The ‘metaphysics' of a science was often supplied

or enforced by one or another system of natural philosophy. For example, although the

elaborate geometrical tools of Ptolemaic astronomy fell outside any plausible realistic

interpretation, and hence outside any natural philosophical gloss, the main lines of

Ptolemy's astronomy, its ‘metaphysics', was clearly shaped by Aristotelian and Platonic

natural philosophy: the finite earth-centered cosmos, the distinction between the

celestial and terrestrial realms and the primacy of uniform circular motion. When, in the

later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Copernican astronomy became a

critical issue, it was not as a set of new calculational fictions, but rather as a system with

realistic claims implying the need for a framework of non-Aristotelian natural philosophy

adequate to justifying its existence and explaining its physical mechanisms.

The shape of a science, its direction of development, and indeed its very

legitimacy often depended upon the character of its natural philosophically enforced

metaphysics, which itself might have been the outcome of conflict and debate. So, for

example, the mechanical philosophy supplied its spokesmen with metaphysical

machinery which could be used either to marginalize scientific enterprises which were

subsumed by antagonistic natural philosophies; or to co-opt acceptable portions of

otherwise dubious scientific enterprises by reinterpreting them in terms of a mechanistic

metaphysics, . . . Conversely, rapid change in a science and/or a shift in its social

evaluation could lead to the constitution, alteration or abandonment of a natural

philosophy through the borrowing or rejection of privileged images or models. [ . . . ]

All of this suggests that the Scientific Revolution involved more than a process of

change and displacement of natural philosophies. One also needs to attend to the

sciences in the period: to their individual patterns of change (which largely conform to

the three-stage model); to their relations with the existing natural philosophies; and to

the shifting hierarchical patterns imposed on them by the contending systems of nature.



Finally, before the stages in the Scientific Revolution are discussed, one

additional category has to be introduced, that of the practical arts, amongst which were

numbered at the time navigation, cartography, architecture and fortification, surgery,

mining, metallurgy and other chemical arts. In the period of the Scientific Revolution

important questions surrounded the social role of the practical arts and the status of

their methods, tools and results as ‘knowledge'. These questions and the answers they

received on the plane of natural philosophical discourse shaped the aims and contents

of competing systems of nature and some developments in the individual sciences. The

deeper social and economic structures of the age prompted these questions and

therefore they affected natural philosophy and the sciences by this mediated pathway.

Stages in the Process of the Scientific Revolution

We can now return to the working periodization of the process of the Scientific

Revolution, articulating it in the light of the discussion of generic natural philosophy, the

classical sciences and the practical arts. By concentrating on the so-called critical

period as a function of the larger process, we can, on the one hand, prevent

misunderstanding such characteristic `Scientific Renaissance' figures as Nicholas

Copernicus and Andreas Vesalius, and, on the other hand, of the Scientific Revolution

as a series of events destined to culminate in Newton.

3.1. The Scientific Renaissance: c.1500-1600

The Scientific Renaissance owes its name to the fact that it displays in the realm

of the classical sciences as well as that of natural philosophy many of the scholarly aims

and practices which already characterized the treatment of classical literature, history

and languages in earlier stages of the Renaissance. In the sixteenth century the

established humanist practices of textual recovery, editing, translation and commentary

were increasingly focused upon the scientific, mathematical and natural philosophical

heritage of classical antiquity. This late maturation of the scientific phase of the

Renaissance was due to several interacting factors. Firstly, there was the increasing

penetration of university curricula by humanist studies which partly shifted the foci of



intellectual interest and increased the pool of able individuals interested in directing

humanist concerns into the sciences, mathematics and natural philosophy. Moreover,

increasing numbers of university-educated men, tinged by humanism and possessing

practical experience in law, administration, the military and even commerce, came to

consider Scholastic Aristotelianism to some degree irrelevant. Such individuals were the

instigators of, and audience for, increased attention to non-Artistotelian natural

philosophies. Printing also appears to have been a critical factor determining the timing

and shaping the outcome. The lure of authorship, authority, prestige, patronage and

business made possible by print helped to focus attention on pursuits such as algebra,

anatomy, surgery, mechanics and fortification, and natural magic. Ferment in these

areas was crucial to some developments in natural philosophy and the sciences. A final

factor is the re-evaluation of the status of the practical arts, their products and

practitioners, which first began to gain momentum in the sixteenth century, and which

catalyzed developments in natural philosophy and the sciences.

The sixteenth century was marked by historically high levels of population

increase and price inflation, and by an expanding commercial capitalist economy, set

against the background of a significant development in the power, and to some degree

the size, of state administrations. Overseas trade, and more importantly, internal trade

within Europe increased, and the Dutch, followed by the English and hesitantly by the

French, began their challenges to the established Spanish and Portuguese overseas

empires. The earlier efflorescence of German mining, manufacture and trade continued

until it was crippled in the Thirty Years War, and throughout the century the centre of

internal European trade began to shift from the Mediterranean basin to the North Sea

and Baltic region.

All of this had important consequences for the role and status of the practical

arts. The number and diversity of potential patrons and clients for their output increased.

At the same time expanded literacy, partly spurred by the Protestant Reformation and

partly by access to print on the part of some master practitioners, their cultural allies and

patrons, created a domain in which practitioners could compete for recognition and

honor, whilst simultaneously contributing to a disparate chorus of claims that the



practical arts and artisans deserved higher status, and that their skills and craft

knowledge warranted the cultural status of ‘science'.

Various groups were touched by this ideological and attitudinal development.

There were, for example, leading literate craftsmen and engineers for whom School

natural philosophy was irrelevant. Their attitudes could range from bald assertions that

facts were better than words and practical action better than verbal disputation, to more

sophisticated calls for the reorganization of education with greater emphasis on the

practical arts. The latter demands were sometimes reinforced by educated gentlemen or

scholars, including anti-Aristotelian humanists seeking a revised curriculum of `useful'

subjects, ranging from improved rhetoric and dialectic, useful for the diplomat and

administrator, to mathematics, useful for the gentleman officer.

Such developments spurred the outcroppings of anti-Aristotelianism which mark

the sixteenth century, expressed as piecemeal challenges to traditional pedagogy, as

well as adherence to non-Aristotelian natural philosophies. This in turn helps to explain

the currency of Platonic themes in the alternative natural philosophies of the sixteenth

century. If a practical mathematician, interested gentleman or scholarly humanist had

some natural philosophical training and interest, a re-evaluation of the practical arts

could support or motivate the advocacy of some philosophical alternative to Aristotle.

Here Platonic modes of thought had considerable appeal, because of the great stress

which was placed upon mathematics. This also allowed the mathematical arts to be

placed in a better light, as, for example, in the work of a figure such as John Dee

(1517-i608), for whom magical, neo-Platonic and mystical elements combined with a

strong interest in the advocacy of the mathematical arts. . . .

Sixteenth-century natural philosophy, which has proved notoriously difficult to

analyze, receives some orientation from the notion of a Scientific Renaissance. The

recovery, assimilation and publication of natural philosophical systems made available a

wide and confusing array of non-Aristotelian approaches. These ranged from

neo-Stoicism and Lucretian atomism, through varieties of neo-Platonism, some more or

less flavored with Hermetic influences and variously amalgamated with alchemy, natural

and demonic magic and cabala; to more eclectic and idiosyncratic alternatives. . .



Nevertheless, it is also crucial to appreciate that throughout the sixteenth century, and

frequently well into the seventeenth century as well, Scholastic Aristotelianism was

officially entrenched and constituted the central element in the education of virtually all

of the men who had any serious concern with natural philosophy. Indeed, the late

sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries represented an `Indian Summer' of Scholastic

Aristotelianism, which, having survived the theological fissions of the Reformation, and

the onslaughts of humanists and Platonists, found new life in the rapidly rigidifying

academic curricula of the Protestant churches and their militant post-Tridentine Catholic

opponents. Nor was Aristotelianism yet moribund as a metaphysics for scientific work. It

was still a guide to the cosmological foundations of astronomy, while in physiology and

anatomy Aristotelian concepts continued to flourish, . . .

Aristotelianism was, however, under fire from many directions. The central

scientific challenge came from a Copernicanism construed in some very limited quarters

as cosmologically true; but this challenge was largely latent until the last generation of

the sixteenth century, . . .On a more subtle level Aristotelianism was dismissed as

irrelevant by elements of the avant-garde literati and by some scientific specialists, as

well as by exponents of the practical arts. In seeking to establish the scientific

credentials of their fields and their claims to higher status, . . .Anti-Aristotelian rhetoric

was repeatedly heard outside the universities, in princely courts, print houses and

workshops of master artisans; indeed anywhere the practice of a science or art fell

outside the scope of Aristotelianism. Such rhetoric, often accompanied by articulation of

alternative systems of natural philosophy, indicates that Aristotelianism was losing

credibility and relevance within certain social groupings. However, the range of

alternatives against Aristotle (and within Aristotelianism) was wide, eclectic and

confused. Natural philosophical initiatives subserved a wide variety of social,

educational and religious interests and no clear pattern is discernible. . . .

Turning to the existing classical sciences, one finds a marked increase in their

recovery, reconstruction and extension in the Scientific Renaissance. The timing and

the pace of recovery, revision and extension differed from field to field. In mathematical

astronomy, the Renaissance phase is discernible from the late fifteenth century, whilst



in mathematics and geometrical optics the pace of the Renaissance phase only

accelerated a century later. Anatomy and medical theory followed more closely upon

astronomy, the programme of editing and publishing the body of Galen's works

culminating in the 152os and 30s. In each case there was an initial stage of recovery,

improvement and, if necessary, translation of texts. This could lead to positive extension

in some cases, even if the advance was imagined to consist in a purification of sources

or a return to lost ancient wisdom. The entire process took place amid the catalyzing

influence of the pedagogical and philosophical assault on Scholastic philosophy; the

reassertion of Platonizing modes of thought which helped revalue mathematics as the

key to knowledge; and the more general trend towards recasting the ideal of knowledge

in the image of the ideals of practice, use and progress, rather than contemplation,

commentary and conservation.

By the mid- or later-sixteenth century, European scholars were offered a much

enriched opportunity for work in each of the classical sciences. In astronomy

Copernicus could enter into the highly technical tradition of planetary astronomy, basing

himself on the prior labors of Regiomontanus Uohann Miiller) and Georg Puerbach, the

late-fifteenth-century renovators of the field, who themselves had tried to appropriate

and perfect the tradition as it had emerged from the later Middle Ages. In geometry the

process of assimilation and purification is even easier to discern, for the century saw not

only improved texts and commentaries on Euclid's Elements, but the recovery,

translation and edition of the texts of higher Greek mathematics.. . .

[T]he work of Vesalius and its standing in the anatomical tradition of the sixteenth

century is highly typical of the dynamic of the Scientific Renaissance. Vesalius, like

Copernicus, stood roughly in the second generation of the Renaissance of his field. He

was heir to, and contributed towards the establishment of, the corpus of Galenic

writings. Like Copernicus, he was trying to grapple with newly available or improved

classical texts, and in so doing made certain initiatives, all the while claiming that he

was clarifying, purifying or recapturing the classical intent and achievement of the field.

He stood near the beginning of a critical and cumulative tradition, grounded in the



availability of the printed word and the high quality woodcut, and prompted by the

rhetoric of the re-evaluation of practice (doing the surgeon's work oneself). . . .

3.2. The Critical Period: c.1590-1650

The critical period is characterized by a conjuncture between an unprecedented

burst of conceptual transformation in the classical sciences, and a heightened, often

desperate, competition amongst systematic natural philosophies . . .which issued in the

construction and initially successful dissemination of the mechanical philosophy. The

Renaissance themes of the re-evaluation of practical knowledge and desire for

command over nature continued to be sounded, and all of this occurred within a context

of apparently heightening political, religious and intellectual turmoil.

The two generations after 1590 saw dramatic developments in mathematical

astronomy and the emergence with new urgency of the question of the cosmological

status of the Copernican system. The last working years of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601)

open the critical period. His attempt to fashion a mathematical and cosmological

compromise between Ptolemy and Copernicus raised the issue of cosmology more

clearly than had Copernicus, and largely unintentionally did much to undermine the

more rigidly Scholastic versions of the Aristotelian basis of the accepted cosmology.

Kepler (1571-1630) was certainly the key figure, his active career virtually spanning the

period in question. His laws of planetary motion, although not widely recognized during

the period, marked the decisive technical break with the tradition of mathematical

astronomy and posed the mathematical and physical problem of the motion of the

planets in a new light. As he himself recognized, this work marked the birth of a new

physico-mathematical field, celestial mechanics, although a sustained tradition of

practice did not emerge from it, and Newton's later celestial mechanics was not entirely

continuous with it in conceptual terms. More generally, Kepler contributed to the

ripening of a cosmological crisis in the minds of early-seventeenth century thinkers by

vigorously asserting, in the light of his overriding philosophy of nature, that empirically

determinable simple mathematical harmonies expressed and governed the motions and

structure of the heavens and that their existence established the truth of his brand of



Copernicanism. The crisis was brought to a head by the telescopic discoveries of

Galileo and his polemical agitation starting with his writings of the 1610s.

The critical significance of the period needs little comment in the domain of

mechanics and the mathematical study of local motion. With Simon Stevin (1548-1620)

and Galileo, the two main trends of sixteenth-century studies of mechanics reached a

climax and pointed towards qualitatively different concerns. Through a subtle mixture of

practical, theoretical and pedagogical interests, Stevin enriched mechanics with novel

insights, for example, a generalized notion of the parallelogram of forces, and a

conception of hydrostatic pressure. But his insistence upon strict adherence to

Archimedean methods, tied to conditions of equilibrium, led him to deny the possibility

of a mathematical science of motion. Galileo's early work also brought him to the point

of transcending the sixteenth-century tradition, . . .and throughout his career he sought

in various ways to exploit geometrical-mechanical exemplars in the formulation of a new

mathematical science of local motion. The mathematical account of falling bodies and

projectile motion in his Discorsi (Discourses . . . Concerning Two New Sciences, 1638)

capped the sixteenth-century agitation for a mathematical and anti-Aristotelian science

of motion somehow grounded in ‘mechanics'. It constituted a radical innovation, the first

version of a classical mechanics . . .

It can be argued that mathematics revealed the most profound conceptual shifts

in the period. With the recovery of the texts of higher Greek mathematics, interest was

aroused in the precise manner in which the ancient mathematicians had produced their

results. The synthetic and axiomatic style of the extant texts masked the procedures by

which the results had first been discovered, although Pappus and other classical writers

had hinted at the existence of general methods of discovery for solving problems and

finding proofs of theorems. The search for the secret of Greek geometrical analysis

became associated with and drew rhetorical force from the broader and very fluid

contemporary interest in ‘method' as a tool of discovery, proof and teaching, on the part

of humanists and Aristotelians alike. In this intellectual environment it was easy for

some to construe the hints in Pappus as implying that the Greeks had possessed a

method of analysis. The humanist pedagogue and methodologist Petrus Ramus



(1515-72) suggested that the traces of this unified analytical method might be found in

the problem-solving techniques of the contemporary practical mathematical art of

algebra, which itself was profiting from the prevailing re-evaluation of practical pursuits.

Franqois Viète (1540-1603) realized this insight, although in fact he drew more

inspiration from the revised logistical art of Diophantus than from the procedures of

contemporary ‘cossic' algebra.

Viète envisioned the extension of his symbolic algebra or ‘logistic of species'

through the reconstruction of the texts of Greek geometrical analysis and their

translation into his improved algebraic syntax. In the early seventeenth century

Alexander Anderson, Willebrord Snel and Marino Ghetaldi, as well as the giants

Descartes and Fermat, worked within this tradition, drawing into it more of the resources

of algebra, which they simultaneously developed further. With the appearance of

Descartes' Geometrie (1637) and the mature work of Fermat, the analytical enterprise

emerged as a self-conscious new approach to mathematics in which an improved

algebra and emergent analytical theory of equations assimilated the field of analysis as

previously conceived. New vistas emerged which led, amongst other things, to the

invention of calculus later in the century. Greek geometry—synthetic, essentialist and

tied to spatial intuition—began to be replaced by an abstract, relational, symbolic and

analytical view of mathematics. This was the conceptual transformation of the age,

grounded in the attempt to recover and master the classical heritage in an environment

colored by changing views of the aims and bases of mathematical work, as embodied in

the up-grading of algebra. . . .

In natural philosophy, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries

witnessed a proliferation of and climactic struggle amongst, competing systems. The

period is critical, because out of the conflict and confusion of the natural philosophies of

the Baroque age, there emerged the mechanical philosophy, which was

self-consciously designed and constructed by a handful of innovators, notably

Descartes and Pierre Gassendi, . . .

In the critical period, the most obvious threat to Aristotelian natural philosophy

came from a variety of often Hermetically-tinged, neo-Platonically-based natural



philosophies orientated towards alchemy and natural (or even demonic) magic. . . . The

seventeenth century had opened with the burning in Rome of Giordano Bruno

(1548-I600), whose teaching combined appeals to a prisca theologia pre-dating Moses,

astrology, cabala and magic of the natural and demonic sort. These elements yielded a

magical gnosis of distinctly non-Christian temper and misplaced eirenic ambitions.

Bruno had not been condemned for his natural philosophy per se, of course;

nevertheless, his thought marks one extreme point of development of Hermetically- and

magically-orientated alternative natural philosophies, and it haunted advanced but

orthodox thinkers of the next generation . . .Quite apart from the religious issues raised

by the teaching and career of Bruno, cognitively avant garde but religiously orthodox

thinkers had to contend with the ideological pall which Bruno's work cast upon novelties

in natural philosophy, especially those linked to atomism or Copernicanism, or which

embodied a high evaluation of mathematics as a key to practical, operative knowledge

of nature.

. . . Natural philosophies tinctured with Hermeticism were vehicles, but not the

exclusive vehicles, of those sixteenth-century currents of opinion which had placed a

premium on operative knowledge, on the search for command over the powers of

nature. Such systems could marshal powerful sentiments in favor of the combined

practical and spiritual value of mathematics. To the extent, which was considerable, that

the founders of mechanism resonated similar sentiments, they had to design the

mechanical philosophy so that the values were maintained, but the perceived moral,

theological and political dangers and associations were held at bay.

The founders of classical mechanism hoped to resolve the conflict of natural

philosophies in a way which was cognitively progressive, but religiously and politically

conservative; that is, by exploiting and co-opting the achievements of the classical

sciences, including the Copernican initiative in astronomy, by amplifying the premium

placed upon mathematics and operative knowledge by sections of Renaissance

opinion, whilst avoiding the perceived religious, political and moral pitfalls of the

alchemical, magical, Hermetic and eclectic atomistic systems then bidding to displace

Scholastic Aristotelianism. The mechanical philosophy was constructed so as to



embody an arguably orthodox `voluntarist' vision of God's relation to nature and to

mankind, without threatening to collapse the divine into nature and/or to elevate man, as

seeker of operative knowledge as well as wisdom, to the level of a `magus', a status

morally and cognitively unacceptable to mainline Catholic and Protestant thought alike.

Accordingly, the selection and molding of conceptual resources to form the mechanistic

systems was a nice and dangerous task, firstly because it involved endorsing some

values and aims characteristic of magical-alchemical systems, whilst explicitly opposing

them as such, and, secondly, because the resulting product was itself intended to

displace Aristotelianism in the institutional centers of natural philosophy, a task delayed

in the event by one or two generations in virtually all instances.

The rise of mechanism paralleled the final triumph of Copernicanism; indeed an

‘elective affinity' existed between the two. Not all realist Copernicans were mechanists;

but all mechanists were realist Copernicans. Cause and effect cannot easily be

disentangled here. The infinite universe of the mechanists, and the search for a

mathematical-mechanical account of order and change, could prompt or reinforce

anti-Aristotelianism; or could be selected in order to express such a pre-existing

sentiment. On balance it seems that the acceptance of mechanism - for its many

perceived cognitive, ethical, political and religious virtues - played a larger role in the

widespread acceptance of Copernicanism by the educated public than vice versa.

. . .In order to understand the critical period, it is not sufficient to pay attention

only to the victors, the founders of mechanism . . . Francis Bacon (1561-1626), can be

seen as a brilliant bricoleur of disparate sixteenth-century value re-orientations and

natural philosophical attitudes, whose discourse defeats attempts to conjure away his

enterprise under the simple rubrics of Aristotelian, alchemical, Puritan or Ramist

‘influence'. He was a filter and refiner of the disparate polemics and attitudinal shifts

characteristic of the sixteenth century, addressing on the level of natural philosophical

culture the debates over the status of practical knowledge, the aims and method of

‘useful' education of gentlemen, and the Protestant stress on cultivating socially useful,

secular vocations. Bacon did not construct a system of natural philosophy; rather, he

emphasized institutional programmatics, the ethical/valuational position of the natural



philosopher, and, of course, method, a crucial but not exhaustive dimension of natural

philosophy. An unsystematized and often implicit ontology was present in his work,

however, and, like the more systematic and explicit elements of his thought, it was open

to selective adoption and reinterpretation by mechanists and a rump of Hermeticists in

the succeeding generation.

In sum, all of the major innovators in natural philosophy, whether mechanists or

not, were shaped by and responded to the context of the critical stage of the Scientific

Revolution. They all aimed to fill a perceived void of natural philosophical authority; they

all overtly rejected Scholastic Aristotelianism whilst remaining to varying degrees

dependent upon its vocabulary and conceptual resources; they all resonated on the

plane of natural philosophical discourse with some positive interpretation of the

sixteenth-century revaluation of the practical arts; and they all drew models and

exemplars from the accrued catalogue of achievements in the practical arts and

classical sciences of that century, although the choice and weighting of privileged items

did vary greatly. In addition, most of the innovators stressed proper method and

pedagogy as the salient feature of a new natural philosophy. Their strivings grew in all

cases from sensitivity to the apparently irreconcilable divisions within religion and

natural philosophy. Beyond all this there was the suspicion that natural philosophical

dissention was a conditioning cause of the larger political and religious conflicts, which,

accordingly, could be wholly or partially cured by the installation of a true philosophy.

3.3. The stage of Consensus and Consolidation: c.1650-1690

The third stage in the process of the Scientific Revolution is characterized by the

dissemination and widespread acceptance of varieties of the mechanical philosophy,

and by the progressive melding of mechanism with a doctrine of method, loosely

attributable to Bacon, emphasizing experimental grounding, tentative theorizing,

exploitation of instruments and possible technological benefits. A consensus formed

around an experimentally-orientated corpuscular-mechanical natural philosophy

[hereafter ECM]. It was a loose consensus, to be sure, but none the less real, especially



when compared with the conflict of natural philosophies characteristic of the two earlier

stages. A further consequence and symptom of the existence of this consensus was the

founding of the new permanent scientific societies and the establishment of the newly

proclaimed social role and public rhetoric of science. The Scientific Revolution,

conceived as a process emerging from the previous two stages and centered on the

career of natural philosophy and the transformation and reordering of the sciences,

ends at this stage.

The dominant natural philosophy of the third stage of the Scientific Revolution

was not one definitive system, . . . Rather, ECM was a loose template from which were

derived specific variants. There was, however, broad agreement about the

methodological component of ECM, and it was not at all like the simplistic inductivism

sometimes credited to Bacon and later forcefully proclaimed by Newton. . . .[T]he

methodological discourse of ECM asserted that the fundamental commitment to the

metaphysics of corpuscular mechanism was not, in fact, a metaphysical dogma at all,

but rather a modest, albeit highly likely hypothesis. The method further dictated that any

particular class of phenomena was to be explained by first devising a specific

corpuscular mechanical model, consistent with, but not deducible from, the deep

ontology of `matter in motion' and the fundamental laws of collision and motion, and

then deducing from the model the phenomena in question. Considerations of the range

of phenomena explained, the accuracy of the explanations and the absence of any

obvious counter-instances, all served as criteria of the heightened probability of the

model and explanation. Beyond this, the method stressed, in the manner of Bacon,

`experience' as the outcome of experimentation grounded in the use of instruments, a

robust approach to nature promising deeper and more accurate indications of what

there was and how it worked, a form of knowledge convertible to power over nature as

its test and fruit.

This doctrine of method hardly sufficed to guide the development of ECM

or the sciences subordinate to it. Yet, like any such otherwise ineffective and vague

method doctrine, it did help to shape the way knowledge claims were assembled,

negotiated and entrenched or rejected. It also functioned at the institutional level in



providing some of the rhetorical resources for solidifying and delimiting legitimate

practitioners and practices, as in the apologetics and programmatic rhetoric of the Royal

Society. Under its loose label as `Baconianism' this method doctrine also helped to

solidify the new public rhetoric of science.

Experimental corpuscular-mechanism drew great strength from the policy,

adopted by the earliest of the mechanists, of co-opting and reinterpreting the scientific

triumphs of the critical period, so that they appeared to support or to be derived from the

mechanical philosophy and its proclaimed method. Kepler's work was winnowed of its

unacceptable neo-Platonism; Harvey was made out to have been a mechanist; and

Galileo was, erroneously, turned into a full-blooded systematic mechanical philosopher.

Bacon's eclectic ontology and implicit natural philosophy were repressed, and his

method, or rather strategic chunks of it, were grafted onto mechanism. Large parts of

alchemy, astrology and natural magic were pushed to the periphery of orthodox natural

philosophy and culture; yet, in a sanitized form, ‘rationalized' by ECM, surprisingly

substantial slices of them remained to be pursued.

The impact of ECM upon the existing sciences was correspondingly complex. It

would be a mistake simply to assume that the sciences all thoroughly succumbed to the

metaphysical determination of ECM; or, in cases where that did happen, to assume that

it was necessarily a good thing. Medicine and physiology came rather fully under the

sway of ECM, a view which persisted well into the eighteenth century. The body was

seen as a machine, both in gross macroscopic terms and on the level of

mircro-structure and function. Much was learned in a fairly trivial way about the

mechanics of the body; but the really basic problems of biology - those centering on the

functional interrelation of the organs and systems and the self-regulation of the body -

were systematically occluded by the mechanical model. In celestial mechanics, the

domain opened by Kepler's work, the picture was more equivocal. Descartes had

attempted a completely mechanistic, if qualitative and verbal, account of the causes of

the heavenly motions in the Copernican system. Newton, who, for the time being,

solved the main problems of celestial mechanics, had to break with strict mechanism

and reintroduce into natural philosophy immaterial forces and agencies of neo-Platonic,



Keplerian, or, some argue, Hermetic derivation. And even in the period leading up to the

work of Newton, non-mechanical forces had entered the celestial mechanical

speculations of Giovanni Alfonso Borelli and Robert Hooke.

It is possible, however, to misunderstand the rhythm of the development of

modern science by focusing too intently upon Newtonian celestial mechanics. It is

arguable that experimental corpuscular-mechanism and its attendant sciences, in their

conceptual, institutional and rhetorical garb of the third stage, might have proceeded

qualitatively rather undeterred for some considerable time had not something odd and

unexpected happened in the form of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Newton, it is true,

redefined the consensus of the third stage whilst building upon it, with his

post-mechanical philosophy of nature, reintroducing immaterial forces and powers, and

with his dazzling re-working of the existing mathematical sciences - optics, mathematics

and celestial and terrestrial mechanics - which he unified. But the fact of Newton does

not in itself prove that he was the teleological goal of the Scientific Revolution. To see

things that way truncates our view of the process leading to the third stage, that of

consensus and consolidation. Moreover, historians of science increasingly acknowledge

that the eighteenth century was not simply the age of Newton, in natural philosophy,

rational mechanics or the emerging fields of experimental science, such as electricity

and magnetism, and heat. One can now see, for example, that much of

eighteenth-century mechanics and mathematics followed from Continental

developments deriving from the work of Huygens, Leibniz, Jakob and Johann Bernoulli,

Nicolas Malebranche and others; that early and mid-eighteenth-century natural

philosophers often espoused a fairly strict. mechanistic ontology, rather than believe in

Newtonian forces or ethers; and that the emergent experimental fields of the eighteenth

century are not usefully viewed as the straightforward products of some inevitably

fruitful Newtonian metaphysics. It is also generally agreed that Newtonianism was

institutionalized and popularized in Britain and later on the Continent through

institutional, social and political manoeuvrings which in turn point up the contingency

rather than inevitability of the Newtonian dispensation.



Our periodization of the history of modern European science should take all this

into account, starting by seeing the Scientific Revolution in terms of its three stages or

moments, punctuated - contingently - by Newton. His work, superimposed upon and

partially redefining the third stage of the Scientific Revolution, should then be seen as

setting, to a considerable degree, the boundaries of possibility in natural philosophy and

the sciences in the eighteenth century, which in turn led to that period of accelerated

development of the sciences and their institutional and professional structures between

about 1770 and 1830, termed in some quarters ‘the second scientific revolution'.

*preliminary draft for student use only. not for citation or...

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