New Learning or Scientific Revolution?: Natural Philosophy from Galileo to Newto
New Learning or Scientific Revolution?: Natural Philosophy from Galileo to Newton
Benjamin Guyer
It is often claimed that the seventeenth century saw one of the most important events in modern history: the Scientific Revolution. From this perspective, the Scientific Revolution is the pivot around which modern history turns, enabling science to marginalize religion and enabling reason to overcome myth, paving the way for the Enlightenment and the explosive political revolutions of the late-eighteenth century. But in fact, no one in the seventeenth century thought this way. The proper noun “Scientific Revolution” actually dates to 1939, and entered into widespread usage only in the mid-1950s.[1] Even though many of the ideas discussed in this chapter were recognized as new, no one at the time sought to break with the past, and new scientific endeavors were often inspired by ancient sources. Seventeenth-century science was heavily influenced by the medieval scholastic belief that nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu (Latin for “nothing is in the mind that is not first in the senses”). The events often associated with the so-called Scientific Revolution merely continued to work out this much older commitment to empiricism. Debates about the reliability of sensory experience shaped the relationship that science had with both religion and technology. The results of scientific research were sometimes new, but the assumptions guiding them were oftentimes not.
Instruments and Methods
Can we trust our senses? This might seem like a strange question, but it is not. According to the historian of science Peter Dear, science has two faces. The first is concerned with intelligibility, understanding how the world works. The second is concerned with instrumentality, using technology to improve understanding and then applying that knowledge in a practical way.[2] Intelligibility and instrumentality became inseparable in the seventeenth century. Together they gave rise to modern empiricism, but also to a keen recognition that the senses have limits and can even deceive. On the one hand, all empiricism presumes that sensory data communicates something true and trustworthy about the world; on the other hand, scientific knowledge today is impossible without the aid of technology such as microscopes—and yet, microscopes reveal precisely how much our eyes fail to see. No less important, the successful use of scientific instruments requires training, because without the requisite skills, the senses are not, in and of themselves, adequate for successful scientific research. Empiricism is nothing if not paradoxical.
The telescope is among the most well-known seventeenth-century scientific instruments. Originally called the spyglass, it was invented in 1608 by Hans Lipperhey (1570–1619), a Dutch spectacle maker, and was intended for navigation and military use.[3] The telescope was not yet two years old when Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) used it to first study the heav