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Reconceptualizing the Scientific Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2007

H. FLORIS COHEN
Affiliation:
Utrecht University, Department of Humanities, Drift 10, 3512 BS Utrecht, the Netherlands. Email: h.f.cohen@utwente.nl

Abstract

Academics all over the world rightly desire to understand how modern science has come about. Indeed there was a time when historians of science had on offer a clear-cut conception of how that happened. But ongoing innovation in historiographical approaches has rendered the period from Galileo to Newton ever more elusive. Its monolithic coherence has been dissolved, a mood of sceptical resignation reigns in the profession over the very possibility of treating seventeenth-century science as more than a string of loosely connected episodes. I argue that, without returning to a historiographical past definitively behind us, coherence may be restored at a higher level of sophistication. Cross-cultural comparison, and unusual ways of dealing with historical concepts and causes, are proper tools to revitalize the issue and come up with partly novel answers to a question that in any case refuses to go away.

Type
Focus: Thoughts on the Scientific Revolution
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2007

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