The Source:
David Wootton*, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution, Penguin Books 2016
*Social Science Files subscriber.
Chapter 2
The Idea of the Scientific Revolution
… As time has gone on the idea that there is something that can sensibly be called the Scientific Revolution has come increasingly under attack. Some have argued for continuity – that modern science derives from medieval science, or indeed from Aristotle. …
… The word ‘science’ comes from the Latin scientia, which means ‘knowledge’. One view to take, a view that derives both from Butterfield’s rejection of Whig history and from Wittgenstein (to whom we will turn later), is that truth or knowledge is what people think it is. On this view astrology was once a science, and so of course was theology. In medieval universities the core curriculum consisted of the seven liberal ‘arts’ and ‘sciences’: grammar, rhetoric and logic; mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy (including astrology). They are often now referred to as the seven liberal arts, but each one was originally called both an art (a practical skill) and a science (a theoretical system); astrology, for example, was the applied skill, astronomy the theoretical system. These arts and sciences provided students with the foundations for the later study of philosophy and theology, or of medicine or law. These, too, were called sciences – but philosophy and theology were purely conceptual explorations that lacked an accompanying applied skill. They had practical implications and applications, of course – theology was applied in the art of preaching; and both ethics and politics, as studied by philosophers, had practical implications – but there were no university courses in applied theology or philosophy. They were not arts, and it would have been incomprehensible to claim then, as we do now, that philosophy belongs with the arts, not the sciences.
Moreover, these sciences were organized into a hierarchy: the theologians felt entitled to order the philosophers to demonstrate the rationality of belief in an immortal soul (despite the fact that Aristotle had not been of this view: philosophical arguments against the immortality of the soul were condemned by the theologians of Paris in 1270); the philosophers felt entitled to order the mathematicians to prove that all motion in the heavens is circular, because only circular movement can be uniform, permanent and unchanging, and to demonstrate that the earth is the centre of all these heavenly circles. A basic description of the Scientific Revolution is to say that it represented a successful rebellion by the mathematicians against the authority of the philosophers, and of both against the authority of the theologians. …
… But for thirty years now a second generation of historians and philosophers of science has been attacking the claim that the Scientific Revolution vastly improved humankind’s ability to understand nature; adopting a relativist perspective, they have been unwilling to acknowledge that Newton was superior to Aristotle or Oresme, even if only in the sense that his theories made possible better predictions and new types of intervention. Their arguments have convinced almost all anthropologists, nearly every professional historian and many philosophers. But they are wrong. Thanks to the Scientific Revolution, we have a much more reliable type of knowledge than ancient and medieval philosophers ever had, and we call it science. For the first generation, the new science was all in the mind; for the second, it was simply a language-game. These two debates, about thinking and knowing, interlock because both generations have downplayed the idea that the new science was grounded in a new type of engagement with sensory reality. Both thus missed its essential characteristic: that it systematically employed the test of experience.
For the new scientists of the second half of the seventeenth century were in a quite different position from their classical, Arab and medieval predecessors. They had the printing press (a fifteenth-century invention whose impact grew through the seventeenth century), which created new types of intellectual community and transformed access to information; they had a family of instruments (telescopes, microscopes, barometers), all made from glass, that acted as agents of change; they had a new preoccupation with the test of experience, which had now given rise to the experimental method; they had a new, critical attitude to established authority; and they had a new language, the language which we now speak, which made it much easier to think new thoughts. Mutually supporting and interlocking, these diverse elements made possible the Scientific Revolution. …
Chapter 3
Inventing Discovery
… Aristotle was remarkable for his explorations of natural phenomena, studying, for example, the development of the chicken embryo within the egg. But as he was taken up in the universities of medieval and Renaissance Europe his works became a textbook of acquired knowledge, not a project to provoke further enquiry. The very possibility of new knowledge came to be doubted, and it was assumed that all that needed to be known was to be found in Aristotle and the rich tradition of commentary upon his texts. The Aristotle of the universities was thus not the real Aristotle but one adapted to provide an educational programme within a world where the most important discipline was taken to be theology. Just as theology was conducted in the form of a commentary upon the Bible and the Church Fathers, so philosophy (and within philosophy, natural philosophy, the study of the universe) was conducted in the form of a commentary upon Aristotle and his commentators. The study of philosophy was thus seen as a preparation for the study of theology because both disciplines were concerned with the explication of authoritative texts.
What did this mean in practice? Aristotle took the view that harder substances are denser and heavier than softer substances; it followed that ice is heavier than water. Why does it float? Because of its shape: flat objects are unable to penetrate the water and remain on the surface. Hence a sheet of ice floats on the surface of a pond. Aristotelian philosophers were still happily teaching this doctrine in the seventeenth century, despite the fact that there were two obvious difficulties. It was incompatible with the teaching of Archimedes, who was available in Latin from the twelfth century, and argued that objects float only if they are lighter than the water they displace. The mathematicians followed Archimedes; the philosophers followed Aristotle. Moreover, ice was easily available in much of Europe: in Florence, for example, it was brought down from the Apennines throughout the summer in order to keep fish fresh. The most elementary experiment will show that ice floats no matter what its shape. The philosophers, confident that Aristotle was always right, saw no need to test his claims.
This indifference to what we would call the facts is exemplified by Alessandro Achillini (1463–1512), a superstar philosopher, the pride of the University of Bologna. He was a follower of the Muslim commentator Averroes (1126–98), who studiously avoided introducing religious categories into the interpretation of Aristotle and so implicitly denied the creation of the world and the immortality of the soul. Achillini’s brilliance and the transgressive character of his thought were summarized in a popular saying: ‘It is either the devil or Achillini.’ In 1505 he published a book on Aristotle’s theory of elements, De elementis, in which he discussed a question that had long been debated by the philosophers: whether the region of the equator would be too hot for human habitation. He quoted Aristotle, Avicenna and Peter of Abano (1257–1316), and concluded, ‘However, that at the equator figs grow the year round, or that the air there is most temperate, or that the animals living there have temperate constitutions, or that the terrestrial paradise is there – these are things which natural experience does not reveal to us.’ As far as Achillini was concerned, the question of whether figs grow at the equator was as unanswerable as the question of where the Garden of Eden was located, and neither was a question for a philosopher. …
[End of book ‘Notes’]
Some Longer Notes
A NOTE ON GREEK AND MEDIEVAL ‘SCIENCE’
The whole of this book is an argument against the continuity thesis (exemplified by Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (1992)), but I want in this note to present some general arguments and to offer some crucial concessions.
The argument that there were no sciences before Tycho saw his nova in 1572 is open to some obvious (but mostly mistaken) objections. Kuhn thought Ptolemaic astronomy was a mature science (Kuhn, Structure (1970)): it certainly had functioning paradigms and a capacity for progress. Although some of its central arguments – that all movements in the heavens are circular, that there is no change in the heavens, that the earth is at the centre of the universe, that there can be no vacuum – derived from philosophy (Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (1957) calls these ‘blinders’ and ‘entanglements’), they corresponded rather well with experience. And it made possible, not only Copernicanism, but also Tycho’s research programme. Astronomy, though, was a peculiar discipline because it accepted unquestioningly the Aristotelian distinction between the sublunary and supralunary worlds. That distinction only began to break down in 1572, and with it went the notion that there might be different principles governing different parts of the universe, that there could be different sciences for different places. 1572 thus really is a crucial moment of change.
There are strong arguments for thinking that Aristotelian biology was a science (Leroi, The Lagoon (2014)). But Aristotle established no tradition of biological enquiry. In the seventeenth century William Harvey saw himself as an Aristotelian biologist, but he recognized only one person between himself and Aristotle who had understood how to conduct biological research, and that was his own teacher (and Galileo’s friend), Girolamo Fabrizi d’Acquapendente (Lennox, ‘The Disappearance of Aristotle’s Biology’ (2001); Lennox, ‘William Harvey’). Similarly, there are strong arguments for thinking that Archimedes was a scientist (Russo, The Forgotten Revolution (2004)), but his science had little influence in the Middle Ages except in so far as it could be integrated into Aristotelianism; it is only late in the sixteenth century that the mathematicians begin to imagine an Archimedean science which might supplant Aristotle (Clagett, ‘The Impact of Archimedes on Medieval Science’ (1959); Laird, ‘Archimedes among the Humanists’ (1991)). Thus the Scientific Revolution recuperated the lost sciences of Aristotelian biology and Archimedean mathematics; but very quickly it moved away from its sources: Harvey had no followers who claimed, as he did, to be true Aristotelians, and Galileo had no followers who claimed, as he did, to be disciples of Archimedes.
As far as Kuhn was concerned, Aristotelian dynamics was itself a mature science (Kuhn, Structure (1970); see also Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (1957); Kuhn, The Essential Tension (1977); Kuhn, The Road since Structure (2000)). Although he refused to recognize that optics was a science before Newton, because there were always competing schools (and so no ‘normal’ science), he presented Aristotelian dynamics as a successful paradigm which was supplanted in the late Middle Ages by impetus theory, which in its turn led to Galileo’s new physics (Kuhn, Structure (1970)). The test here is that ‘the successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature sciences’ (Kuhn, Structure (1970)). But the medieval theory of impetus produced no such transition. Aristotle continued to be the textbook, and although the theory of impetus was used to patch and mend problems within Aristotle’s theory, there were no separate treatises devoted to impetus theory (Sarnowsky, ‘Concepts of Impetus’ (2008)). Impetus theory was used to handle some anomalies, not to bring about a revolution; indeed, medieval natural philosophers were incapable of imagining a revolution that would supplant Aristotle. Because they were not conducting normal science, they never finally resolved the problems that puzzled them. There are two characteristic forms that natural philosophy takes in the Middle Ages: one is the commentary on Aristotle; the other is the collection of quaestiones, of problems to which there is no agreed solution. Over time new problems were added; old ones were never eliminated.
Of course one reason why Aristotelian natural philosophy survived virtually unchallenged through the Middle Ages was that outside three very restricted areas (the magnet, the rainbow, alchemy) experiments were not conducted, and where appeals to experience were made these never involved measurement. Thus in the vast bulk of Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (1959), the first proper experiments are those conducted by Galileo. Turn to the even vaster bulk of Grant (ed.), A Source Book in Medieval Science (1974), and we find, for example, a section entitled by its editor ‘Experiments Demonstrating that Nature Abhors a Vacuum’, translated from Marsilius of Inghen (1340–1396). But these are experientiae or experiences: Marsilius has collected examples of phenomena which seem best explained by the claim that nature abhors a vacuum (one can suck water up through a straw, for instance). He has not conducted any experiments. When we turn to William Gilbert (On the Magnet, 1600), on the other hand, we find not only specially designed experiments, but also (something we do not find in his predecessors, such as Garzoni) experiments that require measurements.
A very powerful intellectual tradition has been dedicated to showing that medieval philosophy was a precondition for modern science (e.g. Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science (1996); Hannam, God’s Philosophers (2009)). This work builds on the pathbreaking studies of Pierre Duhem (1861–1916), Annalise Maier (1905–1971), and Marshall Clagett (1916–2005). It is no part of my argument to dispute the claim that we only have the sciences we have because Aristotle and the medieval philosophers opened up certain lines of enquiry; the first scientists inherited a set of problems from their predecessors, but their procedures for resolving those problems were new, and the intellectual tools they constructed to facilitate those procedures were drawn not from philosophy but from astronomy and the law. No medieval natural philosopher had a view of natural science as making progress, and no medieval natural philosopher was engaged in research, if we understand that to mean the gathering of relevant new information. Tycho, on the other hand, had a research programme which he conducted systematically over many years, and which he believed would resolve fundamental problems in contemporary astronomy; and with the idea of a research programme came, necessarily, the idea of progress.
A NOTE ON RELIGION
Rethinking an important subject like the Scientific Revolution involves a complex process of recalibration and revaluation; topics which once seemed central become marginal, and topics which once seemed of merely antiquarian interest take on a new importance. There is a very extensive literature devoted to the relationship between Christianity and science in the early modern period.
Some argue that belief in a creator God was a fundamental prerequisite for modern science, as it made possible the idea of laws of nature, an idea unknown in ancient Greece and Rome, or in China. Others claim that there is a particular affinity between one or other particular sort of Christianity (Puritanism, for example) and the new science. I do not find these arguments convincing, although they are certainly intriguing. If monotheism was what counted, there would have been a scientific revolution in the Islamic and Orthodox worlds. If Protestantism was what counted, Galileo would not have been a great scientist. The idea of laws of nature represents a crucial test case, and theological questions do not prove to be fundamental: indeed, the key source for the concept appears to be Lucretius; and, as for the religious convictions of the first scientists, the only safe conclusion is that generalization is impossible. There are Jesuits and Jansenists, Calvinists and Lutherans, and some who have little or no belief. The first scientists appear, as far as their religious beliefs are concerned, to be a more or less random sample of the intellectuals of seventeenth-century Europe. Many of the scientists I have discussed were profoundly pious, but their religious faith was not what they had in common. To grasp this point one only has to think of Pascal and Newton, the first a Jansenist and the second an Arian. What they had in common was not religion but mathematics and, of course, a need for freedom of expression. ‘Me tenant comme je suis, un pied dans un pays et l’autre en un autre, je trouve ma condition très heureuse, en ce qu’elle est libre,’ wrote Descartes to Elizabeth of Bohemia in the summer of 1648 (‘Carrying on as I do, with one foot in one country [France] and the other in another [the Netherlands], I find my situation very happy, in that I am free.’