Lecture overview: first class meeting
The Scientific Revolution
Traditional account of the scientific revolution
1. Rise of mechanism and materialism
2. Mathematization of theories of nature
3. Thoroughgoing experimentalism
4. Focus on method
New School critiques of the traditional account
1. The continuities with previous centuries are greater than the differences:
(a) Magical, alchemical, and other older ideas continued through the 1600s
(b) The people studying nature before 1600 often engaged in activities we would think of as "scientific"
2. No such thing as THE scientific revolution: there were changes in the 1600s, but these changes pulled in opposite directions, and do not form a single, cohesive unity
The Presocratics
The first philosophers/ scientists. (Want to know more about the Presocratics? Go here.)
- Thales said that water is, in some sense, the fundamental stuff of the universe.
- Anaximenes said that air is fundamental, and claimed that all changes in nature are the result of condensation and rarefaction (contraction and expansion) of this air.
- Empedocles said there are four fundamental kinds of thing: earth, air, fire, and water.
Changes in the natural world are due to two fundamental forces: Love (attraction) and Anger (repulsion).
- Note that all of them claim that what is fundamental, what is truly real, is something physical/ material. Plato will reject this view.
Plato's Allegory of the Cave
- We are the prisoners on the floor of the cave: the shadows on the wall represent the material world know via our 5 senses.
- The world outside the cave represents the realm of the Forms, which Plato believes to be the real world. The Forms are perceived only through reason, not our 5 senses. The forms are eternal, unchanging, and perfect -- whereas the material world is changing and imperfect.