Peter Harrison, Ronald L. Numbers, and Michael H. Shank, eds., Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). (original) (raw)
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1 Before my arrival in Grenoble, I presented this paper in Paris, Oxford and Aix-en-Provence; I wish to thank the organizers of the corresponding seminars and conferences for giving me the opportunity to make my point more precisely, and the audiences for having obliged me to do so. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.
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Introduction. The paper deals with the philosophical problems of the mathematisation of nature in modern science.Methodology and sources. The analysis is based on the issues in modern science viewed through the prism of the critique of the mathematisation of nature in phenomenological philosophy.Results and discussion. It is argued that the radical mathematisation of nature devoid of any references to the source of its contingent facticity in humanity, leads to the diminution of humanity and concealment of the primary medium of existence, that is the life world. Phenomenology shows how the life-word can be articulated through contrasting it to “nature” constructed scientifically. It is the analysis of the scientific universe as mental creation that can help to uncover the life-world when “nature” (as scientifically constructed and abstracted from the life-world), is itself subjected to a kind of deconstruction which leads us back to the life-world of the next, so to speak, reflected...
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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.
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In this paper, we present an analysis of the evolution of the history of science as a discipline focusing on the role of the mathematization of nature as a historiographical perspective. Our study is centered in the mathematization thesis, which considers the rise of a mathematical approach of nature in the 17 th century as being the most relevant event for scientific development. We begin discussing Edmund Husserl whose work, despite being mainly philosophical, is relevant for having affected the emergence of the narrative of the mathematization of nature and due to its influence on Alexandre Koyré. Next, we explore Koyré, Dijksterhuis, and Burtt's works, the historians from the 20 th century responsible for the elaboration of the main narratives about the Scientific Revolution that put the mathematization of science as the protagonist of the new science. Then, we examine the reframing of the mathematization thesis with the narrative of two traditions developed by Thomas S. Kuhn and Richard Westfall, in which the mathematization of nature shares space with other developments taken as equally relevant. We conclude presenting contemporary critical perspectives on the mathematization thesis and its capacity for synthesizing scientific development.
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Although Shapin in his book claims a freedom from anachronism, it is not without anachronistic orientations. He cannot hesitate, at least occasionally, to represent the sciences of the Middle Ages as teleological, mythic, non-experimental, non-mechanical knowledge and strongly under the influence of the religious discourses. It seems he is not able to hesitate about a comparison between modern mechanical science and ancient sciences. This comparison, I believe, usually leads to underestimate the premodern sciences, at least for the young readers. In some places, Shapin follows a completely partial approach. He presents the rivals of the modern science in seventeenth century as a vulgar knowledge, which leads the reads to see no difference between ancient sciences and the vulgar knowledge of the nature. Although Shapin is aware of the rhetoric of those times, he never tries to represent a pure image of the scientific-mathematical knowledge of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries