The Scientific Revolution

Abstract

The Scientific Revolution is commonly taken to denote the period between 1500 and 1700, during which time the conceptual and institutional foundations of modern science were erected upon the discredited ruins of the Medieval world-view, itself a Christianised elaboration of the scientific and natural philosophical heritage of classical antiquity. The central element in the Scientific Revolution is universally agreed to be the overthrow of Aristotelian natural philosophy, entrenched in the universities, along with its attendant earthcentred Ptolemaic system of astronomy. These were replaced by the Copernican system of astronomy (see art. 14) and the new mechanistic philosophy of nature (see art. 38), championed by Rene Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle. Historians of science agree that by the turn of the eighteenth century, Isaac Newton’s scientific and natural philosophical work had subsumed and solidified Copernican astronomy, unified the terrestrial and celestial mechanics deriving respectively from Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, and transformed the mechanical philosophy by adding to it an ontology of immaterial forces and ‘ethers’ acting on ordinary matter according to mathematically expressed laws. It is also agreed that conceptual breakthroughs in related areas complemented these major transformations: Galileo and Newton laid the foundations for classical mathematical physics; William Harvey established the circulation of the blood, based on the achievements of the sixteenth-century anatomical tradition; and Descartes, Pierre Fermat, Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz created the first modern fields of mathematics, coordinate geometry and differential and integral calculus.