Origins Of Modern Science Research Articles

The Origins of Modern Science in the Classroom

The Origins of Modern Science in the Classroom

Eco-Psychological and Phenomenological Approach to Sustainability

Our purpose is to show the value of eco-psychology and phenomenology for a cognitive paradigm fostering sustainable development. Our hypothesis is that those fields help lay the groundwork for truly sustainable development. Our method is a review of scholarly and theoretical work on the origins of the modern paradigm that has governed conceptions of development, and on eco-psychology, phenomenology, cognitive science, and sustainable development. Our contribution is a fully informed understanding of psychological and socio-cultural issues relevant to sustainability. The prevailing conception of development derives from the origins of modern science in seventeenth-century Europe. Francis Bacon and René Descartes elaborated a vision of development, or material progress, based on exploitation of a nature without inherent value, as a source of raw materials for human purposes. Eco-psychology aims to repair the rift between humanity and nature. Our dominant idea of development implies the alienation from nature that makes it difficult to prioritize authentic sustainability. Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes the crucial point that “we can never grasp the world in its totality but we grasp it according to the mode in which we inhabit it” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, as cited in Buckley, 2013). What will we sustain? How will we negotiate the socio-cultural and psychological obstacles and achieve reconciliation? What are some examples of meaningful, practical movement toward sustainability?Keywords: eco-psychology, phenomenological, sustainability, mindset/paradigm, mindfulness, emotions, healing

The Rise of the Concept of Laws of Nature Revisited

Abstract Over the course of the past half-century and in the wake of the first articles published on the matter by Edgar Zilsel, Joseph Needham, and myself, historians of science have come to focus with growing insistence on the rise to prominence among the seventeenthw-century mechanical philosophers of the concept of (physical) laws of nature and on the significant role it played in the emergence of early-modern science. Revisiting the case I made on that matter in 1961, this paper goes on to engage in dialogue with the related but divergent argument John Henry framed in the course of his “Metaphysics and the Origins of Modern Science,” an article that appeared in in the pages of Early Science and Medicine in the year 2004.

Burdens of the Scientific Revolution: Euro/West-Centrism, Black Boxed Machines, and the (Post) Colonial Present.

How is it possible that past technoscientific research in India does not serve as a sluice for circulations of technoscience even within India? Why do technoscientific artifacts and knowledge continue to flow largely through the West? The answer to these and related questions, I argue, lies in the entanglement of technoscientific practices in India with Orientalist historiography of the origin of modern science. Such an Orientalist construction forms the basis of the diffusion model and constitutes technologies and societies as black boxes, which, as I show in this article, is strikingly on display in the historical accounts of NMR and MRI machines at even the best institutions and laboratories in India. I thus propose a deconstructive-empirical approach to unravel the enduring implications of Orientalist construction of the origin of modern science.

Four Books for the Price of One

Four Books for the Price of One

Elizabeth Eisenstein as an agent of change in the field of media ecology

Abstract This article discusses Elizabeth Eisenstein’s contributions to the field of media ecology, insofar as she provides an in-depth examination of one of the most pivotal innovations in human history, the printing press with movable type attributed to Johann Gutenberg. Whereas Marshall McLuhan emphasized changes in sense ratios, Eisenstein examines the shift resulting from individuals having more access to written works and greater ability to distribute them. Some of her key points include the importance of job printing; the role of print in time-binding, preservation of knowledge and culture, and novelty and discovery; how publication was associated with publicity and fame; how the printing revolution preserved the Renaissance that immediately preceded it, served as the foundation for the Protestant Reformation and was associated with the origins of modern science.

Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution

Since the Enlightenment, alchemy has been viewed as a sort of antiscience, disparaged by many historians as a form of lunacy that impeded the development of rational chemistry. But, in Atoms and Alchemy, William R. Newman - a historian widely credited for reviving recent interest in alchemy - exposes the speciousness of these views and challenges widely held beliefs about the origins of the Scientific Revolution. Tracing the alchemical roots of Robert Boyle's famous mechanical philosophy, Newman shows that alchemy contributed to the mechanization of nature, a movement that lay at the very heart of scientific discovery. Boyle and his predecessors - figures like the mysterious medieval Geber or the Lutheran professor Daniel Sennert - provided convincing experimental proof that matter is made up of enduring particles at the microlevel. At the same time, Newman argues that alchemists created the operational criterion of an atomic element as the last point of analysis, thereby contributing a key feature to the development of later chemistry. Atoms and Alchemy thus provokes a refreshing debate about the origins of modern science and will be welcomed - and deliberated - by all who are interested in the development of scientific theory and practice.

Evolution of Cooperation Patterns in Psoriasis Research: Co-Authorship Network Analysis of Papers in Medline (1942-2013).

BackgroundAlthough researchers have worked in collaboration since the origins of modern science and the publication of the first scientific journals in the eighteenth century, this phenomenon has acquired exceptional importance in the last several decades. Since the mid-twentieth century, new knowledge has been generated from within an ever-growing network of investigators, working cooperatively in research groups across countries and institutions. Cooperation is a crucial determinant of academic success.ObjectiveThe aim of the present paper is to analyze the evolution of scientific collaboration at the micro level, with regard to the scientific production generated on psoriasis research.MethodsA bibliographic search in the Medline database containing the MeSH terms “psoriasis” or “psoriatic arthritis” was carried out. The search results were limited to articles, reviews and letters. After identifying the co-authorships of documents on psoriasis indexed in the Medline database (1942–2013), various bibliometric indicators were obtained, including the average number of authors per document and degree of multi-authorship over time. In addition, we performed a network analysis to study the evolution of certain features of the co-authorship network as a whole: average degree, size of the largest component, clustering coefficient, density and average distance. We also analyzed the evolution of the giant component to characterize the changing research patterns in the field, and we calculated social network indicators for the nodes, namely betweenness and closeness.ResultsThe main active research clusters in the area were identified, along with their authors of reference. Our analysis of 28,670 documents sheds light on different aspects related to the evolution of scientific collaboration in the field, including the progressive increase in the mean number of co-authors (which stood at 5.17 in the 2004–2013 decade), and the rise in multi-authored papers signed by many different authors (in the same decade, 25.77% of the documents had between 6 and 9 co-authors, and 10.28% had 10 or more). With regard to the network indicators, the average degree gradually increased up to 10.97 in the study period. The percentage of authors pertaining to the largest component also rose to 73.02% of the authors. The clustering coefficient, on the other hand, remained stable throughout the entire 70-year period, with values hovering around 0.9. Finally, the average distance peaked in the decades 1974–1983 (8.29) and 1984–2003 (8.12) then fell over the next two decades, down to 5.25 in 2004–2013. The construction of the co-authorship network (threshold of collaboration ≥ 10 co-authored works) revealed a giant component of 161 researchers, containing 6 highly cohesive sub-components.ConclusionsOur study reveals the existence of a growing research community in which collaboration is increasingly important. We can highlight an essential feature associated with scientific collaboration: multi-authored papers, with growing numbers of collaborators contributing to them, are becoming more and more common, therefore the formation of research groups of increasing depth (specialization) and breadth (multidisciplinarity) is now a cornerstone of research success.

The Central Asian Role in the Making of Modern European Science: A Review of Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World, by Christopher Beckwith (Princeton University Press, 2012)

At first glance, Christopher Beckwith’s Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World is rather straightforward. It attempts to argue that the origins of modern science are to be found in the Middle Ages, and those origins, in turn, can be traced back to Islamic civilization, which was in direct, intimate contact with Latin Europe during the same medieval period. That much is rather well-known and heavily documented. But Beckwith goes a step further. He now claims in this book that the essential components of what he calls “full scientific culture” (p.120) should themselves be sought in ancient Buddhist texts of pre-Islamic Central Asia.

A Matter of Method: British Aristotelianism and the New Science

Since long, the origins of modern science have been a topic of debates and controversies between continuist and discontinuistic historical approaches. Despite their differences, these approaches shared the emphasis on scientific methodology. But in the last decades of the twentieth century, historians and philosophers of science proposed critical approaches to methodology which radically altered the debate on the origins of modern science. Two historians, Steffen Ducheyne and Marco Sgarbi have recently offered a reappraisal of the traditional continuist theses, with respect to the influence of British Aristotelianism on Newton and early modern Empiricist philosophers. This paper aims to evaluate their impact on current historiographical debates, and will also offer some criticism of their main theses.

El modelo figural para una historia de la historiografía de la ciencia

The analysis of the linkages between different texts on history of science entails formulating, or employing, a concept of history of science historiography. Hayden White holds that the figural model for literary history, proposed by Erich Auerbach, constitutes a paradigm of relationships between successive attempts of representation. This scheme displays a plot structure in which linkages are created through performative acts that point from the present to the past, and, at the same time, establish the earlier events as figures and the present events as their fulfillment. The purpose of this article is to elaborate a fragmentary history of science historiography by making use of the figural model. In this sense, I examine a set of historiographic writings by Steven Shapin as the fulfillment of a series of figure-fulfillment mediations shaped around the origin of modern science in seventeenth-century England.

Fireworks and the origin of modern science

Fireworks and the origin of modern science

Confessing Secrets: Secret Communication and the Origins of Modern Science

During the Renaissance there was an explosion of interest in secret communication when political intrigue and war intersected with new scientific developments. This article shows how leaders of the Scientific Revolution who espoused openness in science, reconciled that ethos with the need for secrecy in affairs of state.

The presocratic origins of modern science

Not satisfied with identifying the origins of modern science in the workings of Renaissance natural philosophers, some historians in the mid twentieth century searched for the roots of modern scientific practice amongst the writings of the presocratic thinkers. During the 1950s and 1960s, Marshall Claggett, George Sarton, W.K.C. Guthrie and Giorgio de Santillana wrote highly celebrated works on ancient scientific thought with the aim of identifying when human knowledge of natural structures and motions began. These authors considered the Ionian presocratic Greeks to be the first to construct a science of nature that would lay the seeds for Western early modern and modern thought. During the past 40 years, there have been very few studies of the presocratics. One might be tempted to think, therefore, that Vamvacas could embrace the opportunity in this book to revise and refresh the historiography of ancient natural philosophy. However, this is not his objective. Instead, Vamvacas, a physicist, does not approach the topic from the point of view of an historian, but that of a scientist wishing to provide an empirical account of the lives and thoughts of the presocratics with the intention of reminding his scientific colleagues of the intellectual origins of their field. More specifically, Vamvacas aims to show that the presocratics worked on a unified world-view that drew upon physics, cosmology, biology, chemistry and philosophy. This, he argues in the book’s preface, should serve as an example to modern scientists who find themselves trapped in their narrow fields of specialisation and unable to comment on the interdisciplinarity of natural knowledge. As Vamvacas puts it, the purpose of this book is to remind scientists of the ‘‘interdisciplinary philosophic-scientific presentation of the presocratic tradition’’ (p. viii) that supposedly serves as an example to modern science. So, this book does not claim to break any new ground in the historiography of presocratic natural philosophy. As a result, it does not contest or add to any claims

Psychosomatic medicine and the philosophy of life

Basing ourselves on the writings of Hans Jonas, we offer to psychosomatic medicine a philosophy of life that surmounts the mind-body dualism which has plagued Western thought since the origins of modern science in seventeenth century Europe. Any present-day account of reality must draw upon everything we know about the living and the non-living. Since we are living beings ourselves, we know what it means to be alive from our own first-hand experience. Therefore, our philosophy of life, in addition to starting with what empirical science tells us about inorganic and organic reality, must also begin from our own direct experience of life in ourselves and in others; it can then show how the two meet in the living being. Since life is ultimately one reality, our theory must reintegrate psyche with soma such that no component of the whole is short-changed, neither the objective nor the subjective. In this essay, we lay out the foundational components of such a theory by clarifying the defining features of living beings as polarities. We describe three such polarities:1) Being vs. non-being: Always threatened by non-being, the organism must constantly re-assert its being through its own activity.2) World-relatedness vs. self-enclosure: Living beings are both enclosed with themselves, defined by the boundaries that separate them from their environment, while they are also ceaselessly reaching out to their environment and engaging in transactions with it.3) Dependence vs. independence: Living beings are both dependent on the material components that constitute them at any given moment and independent of any particular groupings of these components over time.We then discuss important features of the polarities of life: Metabolism; organic structure; enclosure by a semi-permeable membrane; distinction between "self" and "other"; autonomy; neediness; teleology; sensitivity; values. Moral needs and values already arise at the most basic levels of life, even if only human beings can recognize such values as moral requirements and develop responses to them.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: What is at Stake in the Cartesian Debates on the Eternal Truths?

Any study of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ and particularly Descartes’ role in the debates surrounding the conception of nature (atoms and the void v. plenum theory, the role of mathematics and experiment in natural knowledge, the status and derivation of the laws of nature, the eternality and necessity of eternal truths, etc.) should be placed in the philosophical, scientific, theological, and sociological context of its time. Seventeenthcentury debates concerning the nature of the eternal truths such as ‘2 + 2 = 4’ or the law of inertia turn on the question of whether these truths were created along with nature, or were uncreated and subsisting in God’s mind. One’s answer to that question has direct consequences for conceptions of the necessity ⁄ contingency of mathematical and natural knowledge, how knowledge of such truths is accomplished by humans, and what grounds these truths. In this paper, I review the positions of four successors to Descartes’ philosophy on the question of the eternal truths to illustrate how in specific ways that question with its theological, metaphysical, modal, and epistemological dimensions concerned the objectivity and certainty of the discoveries of the new science.

Voluntarism and the Origins of Modern Science: A Reply to John Henry

Voluntarism and the Origins of Modern Science: A Reply to John Henry

Voluntarist Theology at the Origins of Modern Science: A Response to Peter Harrison

Voluntarist Theology at the Origins of Modern Science: A Response to Peter Harrison

Edward Grant, A history of natural philosophy: from the ancient world to the nineteenth century, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. xiv, 361, £40.00, $70.00 (hardback 978-0-521-86931-7); £14.99, $24.99 (paperback 978-0-521-68957-1).

Edward Grant is one of the world's greatest authorities on medieval science. In the book under review he brings together his lifelong research on medieval science to reflect on the relation between natural philosophy and science. Grant constructs an illuminating history of natural philosophy, which he considers to be a discipline distinct from theology, mathematics and mixed mathematics. The chronological scope of the narrative reaches from around 3500 bc to the nineteenth century, but the book has a strong emphasis on the Middle Ages and the importance of this period for the Scientific Revolution. The central thesis for which the book argues is that “the most profound change in natural philosophy occurred in the seventeenth century. It involved a union of the exact sciences and natural philosophy, a phenomenon that has received relatively little attention in the vast literature about the meaning and causes of the Scientific Revolution” (p. xii). The outcome of this union, so Grant continues his argument, was that “natural philosophy, once regarded as largely independent and isolated from mathematics and the exact sciences, became significantly mathematized. In this mathematized form, natural philosophy became synonymous with the term science” (p. xii). The book derives its scope and central thesis from a disagreement between Grant and the historian Andrew Cunningham on the nature of natural philosophy. On multiple occasions, including an “open forum” discussion between Grant and Cunningham in the journal Early Science and Medicine (2000, 5 (3): 259–300), Grant had the opportunity to take issue with Cunningham's views. In the book under review he returns to these issues repeating most of his arguments against Cunningham's thesis on the nature of natural philosophy. Cunningham's view on the identity of natural philosophy is that it is about God and His creation. “For the whole point of natural philosophy was to look at nature and the world as created by God, and as thus capable of being understood as embodying God's powers and purposes and of being used to say something about them” (Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, ‘De-centring the “big picture”: The Origins of Modern Science and the modern origins of science’, Br. J. Hist. Sci., 1993, 26: 407–32, p. 421). Grant's response is to insist on the separation of natural philosophy from theology. He generalizes that “the penetration of substantive religious material into natural philosophy was minimal during the late Middle Ages. For the most part, medieval natural philosophers focused their attention on the study of natural phenomena in a rational and secular manner” (p. 261). Within the space of this review I will limit my brief comments to Grant's reaction to a second, but related aspect of Cunningham's thesis. Cunningham has insisted on the rejection of the concept of “scientific revolution” which placed, or rather misplaced, the origins of modern science in the seventeenth century. For Cunningham, natural philosophy and science, an “invention” of the nineteenth century, are two mutually exclusive endeavours. Grant's reaction is to return to the use of the concept of “scientific revolution” and to the restoration of continuity between the Middle Ages and the Scientific Revolution. However, his rejection of Cunningham's thesis depends here on the ambiguity of the term “science”. The medieval mixed mathematical disciplines were, of course, also scientiae (in their own terms), and Grant chooses to understand the term in this sense. Therefore, the central thesis of the book that the Scientific Revolution was about the fusion of the exact sciences (or mixed mathematics) and natural philosophy is for Grant an argument against Cunningham's thesis. An uncoincidental consequence of Grant's view is that endeavours such as medicine and alchemy—of which he only occasionally points out whether they were considered part of natural philosophy—are again pushed to the margins of the description of the Scientific Revolution. But perhaps this is somewhat unfair to Grant's book. With it, Grant joins the ranks of those historians (such as John Schuster and others, including Cunningham) who have pointed to the neglected importance of the category of natural philosophy for an understanding of the changes in natural knowledge practices in the seventeenth century. Although the polemical context may have introduced more ambiguities (such as that of the term “science”) than one would have wished, the book should, without hesitation, be applauded for this important contribution.

The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science (review)

Reviewed by: The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science Nurdeng Deuraseh The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science. By Arun Bala. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 244 pp. $74.95 (cloth). The call for acknowledging the birth of modern science as a result of the integration of several civilizations rather than the unique genesis of Western civilization has been made over the years by many prominent scientists, philosophers, and historians. Among those scholars one could list Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyeraband, Joseph Needham, and Martin Bernal. In one way or another, they and their colleagues—including, but not limited to, postmodernists, multiculturalists, and cultural pluralists—contend that the origin of modern science as a method and body of knowledge is neither a uniquely European cultural achievement nor one of which the ancient Greeks could solely boast, but, rather, those origins can be found in different ancient civilizations. Arun Bala draws upon and contributes to that argument in his eminently readable The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science. His intellectual debt is owed most strongly to scholars of ancient Egyptian-African, Arabian, South Asian, and Chinese culture, intellectual life, and science. On the other hand, this is probably the first full-length monograph to cover the unique achievement of the “moderns” as the result of the dialogical integration of ancient Greece with those non-Western civilizations and their ideas. In other words, while it is true that Bala challenges the argument that the birth of modern science is a uniquely European cultural achievement, he also challenges [End Page 552] the complementary arguments that any other “great” civilization of the past can lay claim to those origins. Instead, he finds that Chinese, Indian, Arabic, and ancient Egyptian ideas all played an indispensable role in making possible the birth of modern science in the West. That hypothesis rests in good part on timing. Bala shows that the European Renaissance, an era nearly always assumed to be a key turning point in the history of ideas and culture, cannot be understood as a moment in the history of science if one ignores the intellectual consequences of European overseas exploration; that is, the conquest of and contact with non-European societies and civilizations. The Portuguese among others not only opened corridors of trade and war, but also corridors of intellectual communication between India, China, Arabia, and Europe. Bala contends that the exchanges of ideas and texts provide the major intellectual context not only for explaining the phenomenon of the Renaissance, but also for the birth of modern science and philosophy in Europe. In this revisionist narrative, a central episode, such as the Copernican Revolution, is reinterpreted to include the profound influence, if not the absolutely necessary influence, of non-Western ideas and discoveries. The multicultural contributions led not only to the articulation and perhaps acceptance of the heliocentric theory, but also the longer-term and more widely felt consequences of that Revolution represented by Galileo (1564–1642), Kepler (1571–1630), and Newton (1643–1727), including the latter’s unification of cosmological and physical theory. That line of argument is only one of many considered by Bala in this broad-ranging history of the birth of modern science. In addition to pondering specific civilizations, he also ponders how many, if not all, of them held ideas about specific problems, such as optics, the atom, universal mathematical laws, and solar and stellar cosmologies. In this way, Bala poses the possibility that the presence of themes and problems in modern science were not found only in ancient Greek intellectual life and that their existence in many different civilizations presents the possibility that modern science emerged from a “dialogue” among them. The author acknowledges the presence of modern science in Europe around the time of the Renaissance, so what explains that historical phenomenon? Why did such scientific method and knowledge not develop in other places at that time? Bala recognizes some of the distinctive religious, geographic, political, social, and economic characteristics of Europe in that era, including unique institutions that [End Page 553] might have been sufficient and necessary for modern science to be born (p. 5). There was also good...