scholarly journals Early Modern Jesuit Science. A Historiographical Essay

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila J. Rabin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
The Earth ◽  
New Instruments ◽  
Mathematics And Science ◽  
The Catholic Church

The traditional narrative of early modern science, or the scientific revolution, made the Catholic church appear anti-scientific. However, as scholars during the last three decades have reconstructed science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they have found that members of the Catholic church and the Jesuits in particular, despite their rejection of Copernican astronomy, contributed significantly to the advancement of science in those centuries. Many members of the Society of Jesus were both practitioners of mathematics and science and teachers of these subjects. They were trained in mathematics and open to the use of new instruments. As a result they made improvements in mathematics, astronomy, and physics. They kept work alive on magnetism and electricity; they corrected the calendar; they improved maps both of the earth and the sky. As teachers they influenced others, and their method of argumentation encouraged rigorous logic and the use of experiment in the pursuit of science. They also used mathematics and science in their missions in Asia and the Americas, which aided their successes in these missions. Historians of science now realize that detailing the progress of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries requires the inclusion of Jesuit science.

Not Dead Yet

Teleology ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 150-179
Author(s):  
Jeffrey K. McDonough
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Mathematical Physics ◽  
Main Section ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Teleological Reasoning ◽  
New Science ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

It is often maintained that teleology was undermined in the early modern era by the scientific revolution. Hoping to correct this misperception, this essay looks at three areas in which teleology was upheld and developed by three pioneers of early modern science. The first main section argues that teleological reasoning is woven into the very fabric of William Harvey’s revolutionary work in biology. The second main section takes up Robert Boyle’s explicit and systematic defense of teleology and especially his effort to reconcile the methods and views of the new science with a deep-seated commitment to divine teleology. Finally, the last main section explores Pierre Maupertuis’s bold attempt to find a place for teleology in the heart of modern, mathematical physics.

scholarly journals Paying Attention: Early Modern Science Beyond Genealogy

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 459-470
Author(s):  
Carla Nappi
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Early Modern Science

Abstract To move away from histories of early modern science that are shaped by the notion of a Scientific Revolution, the essay proposes a historiographical methodology that moves away from genealogy and toward juxtaposition as a principle of storytelling. It briefly discusses the study of sound in early modern Manchu texts as an example of this #hashtag (or juxtapositional) history.

scholarly journals Making History: Identity, Progress and the Modern-Science Archive

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 433-444
Author(s):  
Ahmed Ragab
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Global South ◽  
Colonial Education ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
History Of

Abstract The history of pre- and early-modern science, medicine, and technology in the Islamicate world has been traditionally charted around certain signposts: Translation, Golden Age, and Decline. These signposts tethered the history of Islamic sciences to a European story that culminates in the Scientific Revolution and that links European colonial expansion (causally and chronologically) to modernity. This article looks at the roots of the classical narrative of the history of Islamic sciences and explores its connections to the production of colonial sciences and the proliferation of colonial education. Moving beyond the validity or accuracy of the Golden-Age/Decline narrative, it asks about the archives that such a narrative constructs and the viability of categories and chronologies, such as the “early modern,” in thinking about histories of the Global South, in general, and of the Islamicate “world” in particular.

Was Galileo Right and the Catholic Church Wrong?

2021 ◽  
pp. 36-49
Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Deductive Reasoning ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Catholic Church

Galileo is an iconic founder of modern science, but his career and his contributions were far more complex than his reputation. He, too, championed a scientific method, but his thinking differed greatly from Bacon’s and Descartes’. Galileo’s method was based on Archimedes’ combination of experiment, mathematics, and deduction. This method allowed Galileo to claim certain knowledge of reality derived from mathematical accounts of natural phenomena. But he also claimed certain knowledge of reality derived directly from observation, as in his assertion that the Earth moved around the sun. While Galileo’s predictions were sometimes correct, he had no criterion for distinguishing between correct and incorrect inferences or for connecting his mathematical deductive reasoning about phenomena to the way they really were.

Paradoxes: Baroque Science

2019 ◽  
pp. 712-733 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ofer Gal
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Causal Process ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Cognitive Value ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Bernard Mandeville

From Copernicus’s claim that the earth is engaged in three different motions—none of which we can experience—to Newton’s claim that the planetary motions are disorderly—and it is the philosopher’s task to enforce a pattern on them—early modern science made paradoxes the core of its inquiry. Rather than marking the limits of reason or laying foundations for playful skepticism, paradoxes were explicitly sought, carefully elaborated and seriously inquired into, scientifically and philosophically. This entry will string together the most crucial of these paradoxes, one often leading to the other: Tycho demonstrated that the heavens are changing; Kepler showed that vision is a causal process with no inherent cognitive value; Descartes concluded that the passions are the conduits of knowledge; and Bernard Mandeville, already a proud disciple of a self-confident Newtonian science, argued that public virtue arises for private vice. The acknowledged, reflective, and fertile paradoxical nature of its claims and techniques turns the New Science into a representative and a shaping force of Baroque culture.

scholarly journals Alchemy and the Transgendering of Mercury

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (1 and 2) ◽  
pp. 99-113
Author(s):  
M. E. Warlick
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Printed Books

Within late medieval alchemical texts, Latin authors adopted both classical and Arabic concepts of physical matter. They assumed that metals were composed of two polarized substances – hot, dry and masculine Philosophic Sulphur, and cool, wet and feminine Philosophic Mercury – whose ‘Chemical Wedding’ within the laboratory produced the Philosophers’ Stone. As visual illustrations developed in alchemical manuscripts and early printed books from the late fourteenth century onward, artists represented these substances with a variety of male and female characters, with Philosophic Mercury almost always depicted as a woman. At the same time, the planet Mercury, which oversaw the ripening of the metal Quicksilver within the earth, also played an important role within alchemical illustrations. This paper will examine how artists navigated this confusion by examining gendered images of the philosophical concept Mercury, the metal Mercury, and the planet Mercury, in light of shifting attitudes towards women in early modern science.

Spectacular Science, Technology and Superstition in the Age of Shakespeare

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Science And Literature ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Dialectical Approach ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Modern Perspective

Back in the late 1950s, C.P. Snow famously defined science negatively by separating it from what it was not, namely literature. Such polarization, however, creates more problems than it solves. By contrast, the two co-editors of the book have adopted a dialectical approach to the subject, and to the numerous readers who keep asking themselves “what is science?”, we provide an answer from an early modern perspective, whereby “science” actually includes such various intellectual pursuits as history, poetry, occultism, or philosophy. Each essay illustrates one particular aspect of Shakespeare’s works and links science with the promise of the spectacular. This volume aims at bridging the gap between Renaissance literature and early modern science, focusing as it does on a complex intellectual territory, situated at the point of juncture between humanism, natural magic and craftsmanship. We assume that science and literature constantly interacted with one another, making clear the fact that what we now call “literature” and what we choose to see as “science” were not clearly separated in Shakespeare’s days but rather part of a common intellectual territory.

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