Revolutions in Knowledge and Thought

Key Themes

The Scientific Revolution (end of the Renaissance - late C18th).
The Enlightenment (dominated C18th).
Dissemination of new ideas - all different ways of forming knowledge in the C17th/C18th.

Scientific Revolution

In the early C17th, how did scholars understand truth?

René Descartes

Situated abstract reasoning in trying to understand the natural world - trying to understand the world through reason rather than empiricism (looking at the world and developing knowledge through this experience).
Focused a lot on doubt - questiong the world around us in relation to the senses/how the senses can deceive us. That's why he focused on reason rather than empiricism.
He ''dared to doubt'' (''dare to know''), and question the world around us which was (and he thought) created by God).
Laws of nature depended on God, but he created them in accordance to mathematical principle.
Descartes' idea about the world was dualist: the world consisted of mind (ideas) and matter (physical entities). From this he derived his famous ''cogito ergo sum'' (I think, therefore I am).
In this idea, Descartes deduced that matter was inert - it cannot think. Matter needs other forces to move it, e.g God's pushing of causes in the universe. This was what was known as 'mechanical philosophy' - seeing the world in motion, e.g the weather.
Descrates was famous for his deductive reasoning - making a conclusion about the world through linking major and minor premises, e.g P1) All men are mortal, P2) Socrates is a man, C) Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Other scholars in the Scientific Revolution began to question this method of reasoning and so many moved towards inductive reasoning.

Francis Bacon

Scholar who made the move away from deductive reasoning - to inductive reasoning.
Inductive reasoning: based on predictions or assumptions about the world, e.g P1) It rained all through last September, P2) It's September now and it has been raining for 25 days, C) It is likely that it will rain all through this September.
This method was founded on empirical observation and experimentation and also had an impact on other thinkers, e.g Isaac Newton.

Isaac Newton

1687: Principa Mathematic.
Unlike Descartes (who expressed the importance of inert matter), Newton was more interested in invisible forces - most importantly: gravity.
Deduced that there are invisible forces in the natural world that cause other things to occur. These things are not the power of God - a contoversial way of looking at the world in this time.

Margaret Cavendish

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