The Project of Enlightenment (Master Systems)

System ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford Siskin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scale Up ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Advance Knowledge

This chapter offers a new take on the history of science by detailing how the turn from Scholasticism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took the form of a gradual turn to system as the “firmer” form of what the physicist, and Enlightenment scholar, David Deutsch calls “guesswork.” That turn was completed in grand fashion with Newton’s decision to communicate his principles and laws philosophically by adding a “System of the World” to his treatise. I explain how and why Newton came very close—repeatedly—to sending the Principia into the world without any “System” at all. Why was system such a vexed issue in the late seventeenth century? What was at stake for Newton in choosing to write a system over competitors such as “hypothesis”? And why, once it did make it onto the printed page, did system become so successful that a copy of Newton’s system was launched into space as one of humanity’s calling cards three centuries later? How did that particular form of knowledge come to represent—for Condillac, Goldsmith, Hume, Pownall, Granger—our species’ good and bad efforts to advance knowledge? The primary generic marker of what came to be called Enlightenment, I conclude, were the monumental efforts—highlighted by Adam Smith’s project for Scotland—to scale up systems into master SYSTEMs that persisted from roughly the 1730s through the 1780s.

scholarly journals Pierre Monbeig and the Formation of Geography in Brazil (1925-1957): Geohistory of Knowledge, Intellectual History and the Insertion of Brazilian Geography into the World-Science

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larissa Alves de Lira
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
World Science ◽  
Empirical Results ◽  
The World ◽  
University Professor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context

This paper aims to present the exemplarity of an intellectual meeting between a French intellectual, trained in history and geography at the Sorbonne, France (before spending time in Spain during the beginning of his doctorate), and the “Brazilian terrain”. From his training to his work as a university professor in Brazil, what I want to characterize is a transnational intellectual context in the domain of the history of science, using geographical reasoning as a reference. However, before becoming aware of these intellectual processes, it should be said that at the base of this context lies the Brazilian space. This kind of reasoning as a proposed methodology is named here the geohistory of knowledge. In this paper, I seek to present this methodology and its theoretical and empirical results, focusing on how the construction of contextualization can be related to space.

scholarly journals Batalia „szklanej rury”. Współzawodnictwo „starego” i „nowego” w debacie wokół doświadczeń z próżnią z 1647 roku

1970 ◽  
pp. 167-190
Author(s):  
Anna Kołos
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Blaise Pascal ◽  
Normal Science ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Knowledge Formation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic

The article addresses the issue of one of the more intense and captivating European scientific disputes, likewise common to Poland, in the era of the seventeenth-century transformation of knowledge formation, which centered around the possibility of the existence of vacuum, and which culminated in 1647. The fundamental aim of the article comes down to an attempt to determine a position in the scientific-cognitive debate, from which the pro and anti-Polish and European representatives of The Republic of Letters (Respublica literaria)  could voice their opinions. In the course of the analysis of the mid-seventeenth century scientific discourse, the reflections of Valeriano Magni, Torricelli, Jan Brożek, Wojciech Wijuk Kojałowicz, Blaise Pascal, Giovanni Elefantuzzi, Jacob Pierius, and Pierre Guiffart are subjected to close scrutiny. From the perspective of contextualism in the history of science, experiments demonstrating the existence of vacuum are perceived as anomalies that fall into the crisis of normal science, largely based on Aristotle’s physics. The conflict between the old and the new is not, however, presented as a battle of progression with epigonism, but merely as a contest between opposing individual views and the concept of science, which before the formation of the new paradigm was accompanied by ambiguous verification criteria.

The Dawn of Scientific Biography

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 207-230
Author(s):  
Michael Segre
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Scientific Biography ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Model

Abstract This article endeavors to contribute to a better understanding of the literary contexts of early biographies of scientists written during the Scientific Revolution. To what extent are these biographies influenced by stereotypes that are an inadequate fit for modern history of science? Its claim is that there was, indeed, a literary model for biographies of scientists, and that this model had deep roots in Biblical and classical literature. While the model was similar to that used in Renaissance biographies of artists, it did not fully emerge until as late as the seventeenth century.

Not to Amuse My Readers Any Longer

2019 ◽  
pp. 205-218
Author(s):  
Scott Huler
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

This chapter retraces Huler’s thoughts about Lawson’s book, including Lawson’s collection of plants and insects that benefitted the history of science. Huler does not fail to mention his admiration for Lawson’s voyage with the Indians and their tradition. Lawson provides his opinion of slaves and considers Indians the freest People in the World. Lastly, Huler makes his last stop in Grifton listening to lectures and learning of traditional crafts. Huler closes his book with thoughts about Lawson’s death and reminiscences about the beauty of nature.

Diasporas in Despair, 1560–1700

The Great Sea ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Abulafia
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Sephardic Jews ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Jewish Descent

Ottoman sultans and Spanish kings, along with their tax officials, took a strong interest in the religious identity of those who crossed the areas of the Mediterranean under their control. Sometimes, in an era marked by the clash of Christian and Muslim empires, the Mediterranean seems to be sharply divided between the two faiths. Yet the Ottomans had long accepted the existence of Christian majorities in many of the lands they ruled, while other groups navigated (metaphorically) between religious identities. The Sephardic Jews have already been encountered, with their astonishing ability to mutate into notionally Christian ‘Portuguese’ when they entered the ports of Mediterranean Spain. This existence suspended between worlds set off its own tensions in the seventeenth century, when many Sephardim acclaimed a deluded Jew of Smyrna as the Messiah. Similar tensions could also be found among the remnants of the Muslim population of Spain. The tragic history of the Moriscos was played out largely away from the Mediterranean Sea between the conversion of the last openly practising Muslims, in 1525, and the final act of their expulsion in 1609; it was their very isolation from the Islamic world that gave these people their distinctive identity, once again suspended between religions. The world inhabited by these Moriscos differed in important respects from that inhabited by the other group of conversos, those of Jewish descent. Although some Moriscos were hauled before the Inquisition, the Spanish authorities at first turned a blind eye to the continued practice of Islam; it was sometimes possible to pay the Crown a ‘service’ that bought exemption from interference by the Inquisition, which was mortified to discover that it could not boost its income by seizing the property of exempt suspects. Many Morisco communities lacked a Christian priest, so the continued practice of the old religion is no great surprise; even in areas where christianization took place, what sometimes emerged was an islamized Christianity, evinced in the remarkable lead tablets of Sacromonte, outside Granada, with their prophecies that ‘the Arabs will be those who aid religion in the last days’ and their mysterious references to a Christian caliph, or successor (to Jesus, not Muhammad).

Boyle, Robert (1627–91)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rose-Mary Sargent
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Experimental Methods ◽  
Experimental Investigations ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Advance Knowledge

Boyle is often remembered for the contributions that he made to the sciences of chemistry and pneumatics. Like other natural philosophers in seventeenth-century England, however, he was a synthetic thinker who sought to advance knowledge in all areas of human concern. An early advocate of experimental methods, he argued that experimentation would not only reveal the hidden processes operative in the world but would also advance the cause of religion. Through the study of nature, experimentalists would come to understand that the intricacy of design manifest in the world must be the result of an omniscient and omnipotent creator. Boyle’s experimental investigations and theological beliefs led him to a conception of the world as a ’cosmic mechanism’ comprised of a harmonious set of interrelated processes. He agreed with the leading mechanical philosophers of his day that the corpuscular hypothesis, which explains the causal powers of bodies by reference to the motions of the least parts (corpuscles) of matter, provided the best means for understanding nature. He insisted, however, that these motions and powers could not be known by reasoning alone, but would have to be discovered experimentally.

Can Children Benefit from Thought Experiments?

2019 ◽  
pp. 262-279
Author(s):  
Igor Bascandziev ◽  
Paul L. Harris
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Preliminary Evidence ◽  
Popular Belief ◽  
Direct Observations ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

The “child as scientist” metaphor has been a source of many important insights about how children learn about the world. Extensive research has shown that, like scientists, children construct and test theories about the world through observation, exploration, and experimentation. What is not known, however, is whether children are similar to scientists in their employment of thought experimentation and other rationalistic processes when trying to learn about the world. Although the history of science has documented many instances of thought experiments being central to conceptual revolutions, there have been no empirical studies that ask the same question within developmental psychology. Such empirical studies are needed and warranted. Contrary to popular belief, children’s imagination is not fanciful or poorly disciplined. Instead, their imagination is constrained by knowledge of causal principles across different domains. Thus, engaging children in thought experiments should not produce unrealistic or impossible outcomes; rather, it should produce outcomes consistent with the causal structure of the world. Indeed, the consideration of hitherto unacknowledged implications of such outcomes may teach children something new about the world. This chapter reviews evidence from several studies that were not originally designed to test whether children can benefit from thought experiments but which nonetheless provide encouraging preliminary evidence of such benefit. Somewhat surprisingly, they hint that at least under some circumstances, the benefit from thought experiments may be greater than the benefit from direct observations of the world.

History of Science and Medicine

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Staffan Müller-Wille
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Medical Sciences ◽  
Growth Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores what both historians of medicine and historians of science could gain from a stronger entanglement of their respective research agendas. It first gives a cursory outline of the history of the relationship between science and medicine since the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. Medicine can very well be seen as a domain that was highly productive of scientific knowledge, yet in ways that do not fit very well with the historiographic framework that dominated the history of science. Furthermore, the article discusses two alternative historiographical approaches that offer ways of thinking about the growth of knowledge that fit well with the cumulative and translational patterns that characterize the development of the medical sciences, and also provide an understanding of concepts such as ‘health’ and ‘life’.

Al-Bīrūnī on Hermetic Forgery

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-66
Author(s):  
Kevin van Bladel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Reception History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hermes Trismegistus

AbstractIn Central Asia in the early eleventh century, the Chorasmian scholar Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī recognized that the Arabic works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus were inventions of recent centuries falsely written in the name of the ancient sage of legend. He did, however, accept the existence of a historical Hermes and even attempted to establish his chronology. This article presents al-Bīrūnī’s statements about this and contextualizes his view of the Arabic Hermetica as he derived it from Arabic chronographic sources. Al-Bīrūnī’s argument is compared with the celebrated seventeenth-century European criticism of the Greek Hermetica by Isaac Casaubon. It documents a hitherto unknown but significant event in the reception history of the Hermetica and helps to illustrate al-Bīrūnī’s attitude toward the history of science.

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