Scientific Revolution was neither (cartoon)

The Simpsons; Professor of Philosophy Dan Cohen (Colby); Eds., Wisdom Quarterly

"Scientific Revolution" was neither scientific nor revolutionary

I'm a mad scientist. See how cray-cray?

The "Scientific Revolution" of the 16th and 17th centuries marked a sea change in Western thought about the world and our place in it.

At its start, it was qualitative. We located ourselves at the center of a finite cosmos that was harmonious, purpose-filled, and defined by the vocabulary of form and matter, essence and accident, potentiality and actuality.

By its end, the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic complex of theories that had been burnished by centuries of Medieval Arabic and Latin scholastic “natural philosophers” gave way to a Newtonian universe quantitatively defined by space and time, matter and motion, mass and momentum.

It also gave the world two very powerful ideas, science and a scientific revolution. In retrospect, neither is a perfect fit in describing that era. More