Western Civilization_ Volume B_ 1300 to 1815 - Jackson J. Spielvogel [212]
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CHAPTER 16
Toward a New Heaven and a New Earth: The Scientific Revolution and the Emergence of Modern Science
A nineteenth-century painting of Galileo before the Holy Office in the Vatican in 1633
Louvre, Paris// © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY
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CHAPTER OUTLINE AND FOCUS QUESTIONS
Background to the Scientific Revolution
What developments during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance contributed to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century?
Toward a New Heaven: A Revolution in Astronomy
What did Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton contribute to a new vision of the universe, and how did it differ from the Ptolemaic conception of the universe?
Advances in Medicine and Chemistry
What did Paracelsus, Vesalius, and Harvey contribute to a scientific view of medicine?
Women in the Origins of Modern Science
What role did women play in the Scientific Revolution?
Toward a New Earth: Descartes, Rationalism, and a New View of Humankind
Why is Descartes considered the “founder of modern rationalism”?
The Scientific Method and the Spread of Scientific Knowledge
How were the ideas of the Scientific Revolution spread, and what impact did they have on society and religion?
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CRITICAL THINKING
In what ways were the intellectual, political, social, and religious developments of the seventeenth century related?
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IN ADDITION TO the political, economic, social, and international crises of the seventeenth century, we need to add an intellectual one. The Scientific Revolution questioned and ultimately challenged conceptions and beliefs about the nature of the external world and reality that had crystallized into a rather strict orthodoxy by the Later Middle Ages. Derived from the works of ancient Greeks and Romans and grounded in Christian thought, the medieval worldview had become formidable. But the breakdown of Christian unity during the Reformation and the subsequent religious wars had created an environment in which Europeans became more comfortable with challenging both the ecclesiastical and political realms. Should it surprise us that a challenge to intellectual authority soon followed?
The Scientific Revolution taught Europeans to view the universe and their place in it in a new way. The shift from an earth-centered to a sun-centered cosmos had an emotional as well as an intellectual effect on the people who understood it. Thus, the Scientific Revolution, popularized in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, stands as the major force in the transition to the largely secular, rational, and materialistic perspective that has defined the modern Western mentality since its full acceptance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The transition to a new worldview, however, was far from easy. In the seventeenth century, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (gal-li-LAY-oh GAL-li-lay), an outspoken advocate of the new worldview, found that his ideas were strongly opposed by the authorities of the Catholic Church. Galileo’s position was clear: “I hold the sun to be situated motionless in the center of the revolution of the celestial bodies, while the earth rotates on its axis and revolves about the sun.” Moreover, “nothing physical that sense-experience sets before our eyes … ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of Biblical passages.” But the church had a different view, and in 1633, Galileo, now sixty-eight and in ill health, was called before the dreaded Inquisition in Rome. He was kept waiting for two months before he was tried