The Ethos of Modern Science and the „Religious Melting Pot”. About the Topicality of Merton's Thesis (original) (raw)
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Debate over the positive role of Medieval Catholic institutions and thinkers in the process of emergence of Western science has been rife since the nineteenth century. Advocates, such as the Pierre Duhem, and later, Alistair Crombie, were continually countered by proponents of the view that modern science arose suddenly in the seventeenth century, through a necessary rupture with, and revolution against, Medieval thought and institutions. These deniers came from both the idealist right (Koyré) and the materialist left (Haldane), as well as from champions of a definitive role for Protestantism (Merton). Historians of science have outgrown those debates, without resolving them. However, recent work on the seventeenth century Scientific Revolution provides hints about how to take seriously the role of the High Medieval heritage in the process. This paper surveys the earlier debate, arguing that Duhem and Crombie suffered from now outmoded historiographical conceptions, and also from cultural assumptions that Catholic advocates of continuity in the West, such as Christopher Dawson, properly rejected. A new form of positive solution is then sketched. It consists in reconceptualizing the precise nature of that ‘dynamic continuity’ of the Western tradition of seeking theoretically systematic and empirically reliable knowledge of nature, which runs from the High Middle Ages, through to the generations of Descartes and Newton. This historiographical strategy is based upon creative articulation back to the Middle Ages from what we now know about the Scientific Revolution itself, using the categories and interpretative frames that leading historians of that event now invoke.
Journal of Classical Sociology, 2007
In this article I examine the historical background to Merton's formulation of the scientific ethos, especially in relation to his dissertation, published in 1938 as Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England. Here Merton outlined the so-called 'Merton thesis', and I emphasize how both the content and the context of the monograph is related to his formulation of an 'ethos of science' -introduced for the first time in 1938 in 'Science and the Social Order'. Three different readings can, however, highlight different aspects of Merton's monograph, thus the article attempts to enrich the understanding both of the ethos of science and of Merton as a politically engaged social scientist by discussing 'The Three Merton Theses'.