The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685

Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK (2006)
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Abstract

Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners.The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development---and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer.

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Chapters

The Interpretation of Nature and the Origins of Physico‐Theology

There was always a lack of fit between natural philosophy and natural history in the Aristotelian tradition, and the latter was better adapted to the Christian idea of the universe as something created. The natural history tradition was marginalized with the introduction of Aristotelianism... see more

The Aims of Enquiry

This chapter builds on the previous two to offer a more integrated account of the intersections between questions of truth, justification, objectivity, and legitimacy. The origins of philosophy in Plato's Socratic dialogues are represented as a struggle between sophism and philosopher, whe... see more

Experimental Natural Philosophy

This chapter deals with experimental philosophy, as represented in Gilbert on magnetism, Hobbes on the air pump, and Newton on the production of the spectrum. It is shown that experimental philosophy differs from mechanism in quite radical ways. In particular, it has explanatory success bu... see more

The Unity of Knowledge

One of the driving ideas behind many of the various movements in 17th-century natural philosophy was that of the unity of knowledge. There were two principal ways of establishing this in its most general form. The first was politico-theology: Spinoza undermined the claims of Christianity t... see more

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Author's Profile

Stephen Gaukroger
University of Sydney

Citations of this work

The Argument from Underconsideration and Relative Realism.Moti Mizrahi - 2013 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 27 (4):393-407.
Francis Bacon.Juergen Klein - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Kant on Experiment.Alberto Vanzo - 2012 - In James Maclaurin (ed.), Rationis Defensor. Springer. pp. 75-96.

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