The 2003 Wilkins Lecture: Dr Wilkins's boy wonders

2004 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Jardine
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Technical Application ◽  
Philosophy Today

In the second half of the seventeenth century in England, a procession of great figures emerged to become the founding figures of modern science (what was then called natural philosophy). Today it is the originality of these ‘men of genius‘ that we are inclined to celebrate. Yet the most innovative aspect of the period's scientific activities was a whole series of collaborative intellectual enterprises, which were unlike any that came before them in their capacity to mobilize and organize original ideas and their technical application.

Theological Foundations for Modern Science?

Dialogue ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 597-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
Theology And Science ◽  
Theological Foundations ◽  
Recent Collection ◽  
Scientific Imagination

It is often said that philosophy in the seventeenth century returned from a Christian otherworldliness to a pagan engagement, theoretically and practically, with material nature. This process is often described as one of secularization, and the splitting off of science from natural philosophy and metaphysics is a traditional figure in accounts of the emergence of the modern. At the same time, the historiographical assumption that early modern science had religious and philosophical foundations has informed such classics as E. A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1932), Gerd Buchdahl's Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (1969), and Amos Funkenstein's Theology and the Scientific Imagination (1986). A recent collection testifies to continuing interest in the theme of a positive relationship between theology and science.

Music and the Origins of Ancient Science

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Pesic
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Arithmetic Geometry ◽  
Web Browsers ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Crucial Element ◽  
Ancient Science

Music entered deeply into the making of modern science because it was a crucial element of ancient natural philosophy, through which it thereafter remained active well into the formation of the “new philosophy” during the seventeenth century. The Pythagorean connection between music, numbers, and the sensual world remained potent in the quadrivium, the four-fold study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music that was the centerpiece of higher education until about the eighteenth century. This chapter surveys the ongoing connection between music and its sister sciences in the quadrivium from Plato and the Pythagoreans to Nicomachus and Boethius. The mythical story of Pythagoras in the blacksmith shop arguably represents the earliest recorded experiment, in the later sense of that word. Ancient Greek distinctions between number and magnitude were crucial elements in the unfolding interaction between arithmetic, geometry, and music. Throughout the book where various sound examples are referenced, please see http://mitpress.mit.edu/musicandmodernscience (please note that the sound examples should be viewed in Chrome or Safari Web browsers).

scholarly journals Was there a Scientific Revolution?

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER HARRISON
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Western History ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Major Discipline

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Scientific Revolution came to be understood as a key period in Western history. Recently, historians have cast doubt upon this category, questioning whether the relevant institutions and practices of the seventeenth century are similar enough to modern science to warrant the label ‘scientific’. A central focus of their criticisms has been the identity of natural philosophy – the major discipline concerned with the study of nature in the early modern period – and its differences from modern science. This paper explores natural philosophy and its relation to philosophy more generally. It concludes that a significant philosophical revolution took place in the seventeenth century, and that this was important for the subsequent emergence of modern science.

LA MUSICA NELLA FILOSOFIA NATURALE DEL SEICENTO IN ITALIA

Nuncius ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-47
Author(s):  
PAOLO GOZZA
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
Present Description ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Recurrent Theme

Abstract<title> SUMMARY </title>The leit-motiv of the present description of the relationship between music and natural philosophy in Italy in the seventeenth century is a recurrent theme: the mathematical or « Pythagorean » approach to music as opposed to the experimental or « Aristoxenian » approach. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this opposition, rendered pertinent by the cultural transformations that accompanied the consolidation of modern science, gained in complexity and took on original forms and meanings. The present paper, in the first instance, outlines the major traditions of classical musical thought and its medieval heritage. Secondly, it provides a survey of the more significant attempts at renewing musical theory that were carried out during the second half of the Cinquecento in the light of the Italian renaissance of mathematics of the XV and XVI centuries. It continues with an examination of the musical ideas of Galileo and offers a primary documentation of the interest displayed by representatives of the Galilean school in the science of sound during the first half of the Seicento.Finally it discusses, for the first time, the theories of sound of F. M. Grimaldi and D. Bartoli and the musical doctrines of P. Mengoli within the framework of the principal philosophical elements of Italian culture between 1660 and 1680.

Reductionist Medicine and Its Cultural Authority

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph E. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Holistic Approaches ◽  
The World ◽  
General Explanation

This chapter considers why, despite important reasons to adopt more integrative approaches, medicine continue on a reductionist course. Davis frames a general explanation by considering the powerful appeal of two enduring legacies. First are the implications of seventeenth-century natural philosophy for the commitments of modern science and medicine. Second are the nineteenth-century changes that joined medicine with the physical and life sciences and gave birth to a particular constellation of ideal-types—the “biomedical model”—that have structured thinking about disease and treatment ever since. As Davis shows, the problem for integrative, holistic approaches arises from these two legacies together. As interwoven with central contemporary values, these legacies have given reductionist medicine a distinct cultural authority: the authority to “name the world.”

The Reception of Descartes in the Seventeenth-Century Scottish Universities: Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy (1650–1680)

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 179-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Gellera
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy

In 1685, during the heyday of Scottish Cartesianism (1670–90), regent Robert Lidderdale from Edinburgh University declared Cartesianism the best philosophy in support of the Reformed faith. It is commonplace that Descartes was ostracised by the Reformed, and his role in pre-Enlightenment Scottish philosophy is not yet fully acknowledged. This paper offers an introduction to Scottish Cartesianism, and argues that the philosophers of the Scottish universities warmed up to Cartesianism because they saw it as a newer, better version of their own traditional Reformed scholasticism, chiefly in metaphysics and natural philosophy.

Empiricisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Allen
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
William James ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Chinese Tradition ◽  
Experimental Practice ◽  
European Philosophy ◽  
History Of

Empiricisms reassesses the values of experience and experiment in European philosophy and comparatively. It traces the history of empirical philosophy from its birth in Greek medicine to its emergence as a philosophy of modern science. A richly detailed account in Part I of history’s empiricisms establishes a context in Part II for reconsidering the work of the so-called radical empiricists—William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze, each treated in a dedicated chapter. What is “radical” about their work is to return empiricism from epistemology to the ontology and natural philosophy where it began. Empiricisms also sets empirical philosophy in conversation with Chinese tradition, considering technological, scientific, medical, and alchemical sources, as well as selected Confucian, Daoist, and Mohist classics. The work shows how philosophical reflection on experience and a profound experimental practice coexist in traditional China with no interaction or even awareness of each other. Empiricism is more multi-textured than philosophers tend to assume when we explain it to ourselves and to students. One purpose of Empiricisms is to recover the neglected context. A complementary purpose is to elucidate the value of experience and arrive at some idea of what is living and dead in philosophical empiricism.

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