This scholarly and accessible study presents “a provocative new reading” of the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century advances in scientific inquiry (Kirkus Reviews). In The Scientific Revolution, historian Steven Shapin challenges the very idea that any such a “revolution” ever took place. Rejecting the narrative that a new and unifying paradigm suddenly took hold, he demonstrates how the conduct of science emerged from a wide array of early modern philosophical agendas, political commitments, and religious beliefs. In this analysis, early modern science is shown not as a set of disembodied ideas, but as historically situated ways of knowing and doing. Shapin shows that every principle identified as the modernizing essence of science—whether it’s experimentalism, mathematical methodology, or a mechanical conception of nature—was in fact contested by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century practitioners with equal claims to modernity. Shapin argues that this contested legacy is nevertheless rightly understood as the origin of modern science, its problems as well as its acknowledged achievements. This updated edition includes a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship. “An excellent book.” —Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review

The Scientific Revolution Revisited brings Mikuláš Teich back to the great movement of thought and action that transformed European science and society in the seventeenth century. Drawing on a lifetime of scholarly experience in six penetrating chapters, Teich examines the ways of investigating and understanding nature that matured during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, charting their progress towards science as we now know it and insisting on the essential interpenetration of such inquiry with its changing social environment. The Scientific Revolution was marked by the global expansion of trade by European powers and by interstate rivalries for a stake in the developing world market, in which advanced medieval China, remarkably, did not participate. It is in the wake of these happenings, in Teich's original retelling, that the Thirty Years War and the Scientific Revolution emerge as products of and factors in an uneven transition in European and world history: from natural philosophy to modern science, feudalism to capitalism, the late medieval to the early modern period. ??With a narrative that moves from pre-classical thought to the European institutionalisation of science – and a scope that embraces figures both lionised and neglected, such as Nicole Oresme, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Thaddeus Hagecius, Johann Joachim Becher – The Scientific Revolution Revisited illuminates the social and intellectual sea changes that shaped the modern world.

An absorbing account of the origins of modern science as well as a biography, this book places particular emphasis on Galileo's experiments with telescopes and his observations of the sky.

A prismatic examination of the evolution of medicine, from a trade to a science, through the exemplary lives of ten men and women. Johns Hopkins University, one of the preeminent medical schools in the nation today, has played a unique role in the history of medicine. When it first opened its doors in 1893, medicine was a rough-and-ready trade. It would soon evolve into a rigorous science. It was nothing short of a revolution. This transition might seem inevitable from our vantage point today. In recent years, medical science has mapped the human genome, deployed robotic tools to perform delicate surgeries, and developed effective vaccines against a host of deadly pathogens. But this transformation could not have happened without the game-changing vision, talent, and dedication of a small cadre of individuals who were willing to commit body and soul to the advancement of medical science, education, and treatment. A Scientific Revolution recounts the stories of John Shaw Billings, Max Brödel, Mary Elizabeth Garrett, William Halsted, Jesse Lazear, Dorothy Reed Mendenhall, William Osler, Helen Taussig, Vivien Thomas, and William Welch. This chorus of lives tells a compelling tale not just of their individual struggles, but how personal and societal issues went hand-in-hand with the advancement of medicine.

Amid the unrest, dislocation, and uncertainty of seventeenth-century Europe, readers seeking consolation and assurance turned to philosophical and scientific books that offered ways of conquering fears and training the mind—guidance for living a good life. The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution presents a triptych showing how three key early modern scientists, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried Leibniz, envisioned their new work as useful for cultivating virtue and for pursuing a good life. Their scientific and philosophical innovations stemmed in part from their understanding of mathematics and science as cognitive and spiritual exercises that could create a truer mental and spiritual nobility. In portraying the rich contexts surrounding Descartes’ geometry, Pascal’s arithmetical triangle, and Leibniz’s calculus, Matthew L. Jones argues that this drive for moral therapeutics guided important developments of early modern philosophy and the Scientific Revolution.

Lawrence M. Principe takes a fresh approach to the story of the scientific revolution, emphasising the historical context of the society and its world view at the time. From astronomy to alchemy and medicine to geology, he tells this fascinating story from the perspective of the historical characters involved.

Cohen's exploration seeks to uncover nothing less than the nature of all scientific revolutions, the stages by which they occur, their time scale, specific criteria for determining whether or not there has been a revolution, and the creative factors in producing a revolutionary new idea.

An introduction to a large and complicated subject, which has come to be called the Scientific Revolution, this book refers to the fundamental changes in our understanding of the natural world that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These changes led to a rejection of ancient and medieval thinking about the universe in favor of the new thinking that gave birth to modern science. Professor Jacob does not pretend to tell the whole story of this momentous transformation, which is perhaps more important than any other in modern history. But he does highlight and survey what are often considered to be the six principal developments associated with this shift from old to new science. The six changes are: first, the abandonment of an ancient Greek picture of an earth-centered universe and its replacement by the modern picture of a solar system surrounded by an enormous universe; second, the gradual rejection of the Aristotelian binary physics in favor of the modern physics of universal forces; third, a medical revolution that culminated in the discovery of the circulation of the blood, and put animal (and human) physiology on a new foundation; fourth, the shift from an Aristotelian theory of knowledge to a modern skepticism; fifth, the development of new methods for establishing scientific certainty; and, finally, the founding of the world's first national, government-sponsored scientific societies for promoting research, spreading scientific knowledge, and stimulating inquiry.

In this first book-length historiographical study of the Scientific Revolution, H. Floris Cohen examines the body of work on the intellectual, social, and cultural origins of early modern science. Cohen critically surveys a wide range of scholarship since the nineteenth century, offering new perspectives on how the Scientific Revolution changed forever the way we understand the natural world and our place in it. Cohen's discussions range from scholarly interpretations of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, to the question of why the Scientific Revolution took place in seventeenth-century Western Europe, rather than in ancient Greece, China, or the Islamic world. Cohen contends that the emergence of early modern science was essential to the rise of the modern world, in the way it fostered advances in technology. A valuable entrée to the literature on the Scientific Revolution, this book assesses both a controversial body of scholarship, and contributes to understanding how modern science came into the world.