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The Cambridge History of Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution
  • Edited by David Marshall Miller, Dana Jalobeanu
  • Published online:
    14 January 2022
    Print publication:
    06 January 2022
  • The early modern era produced the Scientific Revolution, which originated our present understanding of the natural world. Concurrently, philosophers established the conceptual foundations of modernity. This rich and comprehensive volume surveys and illuminates the numerous and complicated interconnections between philosophical and scientific thought as both were radically transformed from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. The chapters explore reciprocal influences between philosophy and physics, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and other disciplines, and show how thinkers responded to an immense range of intellectual, material, and institutional influences. The volume offers a unique perspicuity, viewing the entire landscape of early modern philosophy and science, and also marks an epoch in contemporary scholarship, surveying recent contributions and suggesting future investigations for the next generation of scholars and students.

  • Introduction - The Disciplinary Revolutions of Early Modern Philosophy and Science

  • Edited by David Marshall Miller, Iowa State University, Dana Jalobeanu
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution
    Published online:
    14 January 2022
    Print publication:
    06 January 2022, pp 1-12

  • Summary

    Philosophical arguments must be understood in relation to the historical contexts in which they were produced. This yields the recognition that the distinction between early modern “philosophy” and “science” is an anachronistic imposition—the philosophical foundation of modernity and the Scientific Revolution are facets of the same transformations. However, the “contextualist turn” presents methodological difficulties arising from the opposition of philosophical analysis and historical narrative. This introduction presents two strategies for resolving these tensions in the study of the period. First, examination of how authors identified with peers and opposed themselves to foes generates a fine-grained understanding of early modern disciplines, without anachronistic impositions. Second, shifts in disciplinary boundaries can be used as entry points into the networks of influences that ramified across the intellectual landscape, yielding narratives that are sensitive to a wide range of textual and contextual factors. Together, awareness of disciplinary boundaries and their “inflection points” offers an updated methodology for the investigation of the early modern period. Anachronistic grand narratives of early modern philosophy and of the Scientific Revolution will be superseded by more modest but much more sophisticated accounts of the multiplication and reorganization of intellectual disciplines.

  • 17 - Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius and Its Reception

  • from Part III - Problems and Controversies
  • Edited by David Marshall Miller, Iowa State University, Dana Jalobeanu
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution
    Published online:
    14 January 2022
    Print publication:
    06 January 2022, pp 315-330

  • Summary

    Sidereus Nuncius was a seminal text of the Scientific Revolution. It reported celestial observations whose implications upended the geocentric cosmology few had ever doubted. But Galileo’s treatise also combined topics and methodologies that traditionally had been assigned separately to mixed mathematics and natural philosophy. Whereas the bounds between these disciplines had been weakened by earlier controversies, particularly about the regressus method and about the certainty of mathematics (i.e., the Quaestio de Certitudine), Sidereus Nuncius broke them down altogether, to the delight and dismay of readers. Galileo’s application of mathematical methods—empiricism and quantification—to natural philosophy framed the ensuing discussions, such that even those who disagreed with his conclusions responded on those grounds. Thus, the book was pivotal in the process of disciplinary admixture that reorganized the study of nature into modern science.

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