CONTINUITY THESIS EXPANDED

Duhem´s target had been to challenge the historiography of science that depicts the medieval period as a time of intellectual and cultural desolation, and such works of historians like Voltaire and Condorcet who denigrated the impact of the middle ages on science. Condorcet´s history of science strived to show that the ancient achievement, such as it was, fell before barbarian invasions and the triumph of Christianity. For him, the triumph of Christianity was the signal for the complete decadence of philosophy and the science.¹²⁸

The astounding discovery of the rich scientific heritage of the Parisian school and its exposition in Duhem´s work echoed the danger of such negligence of the medieval science. This is because the history of scientific development does not follow a sporadic process; rather it is subject to the law of continuity. And it is in this regard that the great discoveries are almost always the fruit of slow and complex preparation, which is pursued in the course of the centuries. The awakening created by the continuity concept of Duhem led to massive subsequent works that sought to provide details of medieval

127Pierre Duhem, Études sur Léonard de Vinci, p. 583

128Marquis de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, ed. Stuart Hampshire, trans. June Barraclough (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955) p. 76

scientific achievements and uncovering the ¨germs of later scientific discoveries¨¹²⁹ in the works of medieval masters.

In The History of Science and the New Humanism¹³⁰,George Sarton, argued that science was first introduced to Western Culture in the 12^th century during the Arabic-Latin translation movement. It was later introduced again in the 17^th century during what became known as the ¨Scientific Revolution¨. The first occurrence was when a number works, predominantly those by Aristotle, were translated from Arabic into Latin and thus became known in the West for the first time. The major developments brought by this movement were however stagnated during the Renaissance. The Renaissance humanism had put more emphasis on form over fact and adored ancient authorities over empirical investigation. The humanists’ revival of Platonism neglected the epistemic importance of experience which was visible in the Aristotelian thought that was made popular during the translation movement. Even though the disposition to experiment in the Aristotelian thought is bit defective and not that tangible to guarantee productive experimentation in the sense of the modern science, his thought was marked throughout by the awareness of the epistemic importance of experience. This awareness was totally lacking in the humanist´ Platonism. Likewise, the humanists were almost like the scholastics in their great regard for authorities. Hence, Sarton´s idea that science had to be introduced to Western culture twice was due to the first appearance of science being swept away by Renaissance humanism before science had to be re-introduced again in the 17^th century.

He states thus,

It does not follow, as so many ignorant persons think, that the medieval activities were sterile….The Middle Ages were pregnant with many ideas which could not be delivered until much later. Modern science, we might say, was the fruition of medieval immaturity. Vesalius, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton were the happy inheritors who cashed in.¹³¹

129 Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923-1958), Vol. 4. p. 612

130 See George Sarton, The History of Science and the New Humanism (New York: Henry Holt, 1931)

131 George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science. Vol. 3. (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1947) p.91

Unlike the usual claim that the Middle Ages were notable for the decline in scientific activities the sympathisers of the continuity thesis argued that it was the Renaissance and not the medieval period that cause stagnation to the scientific progress. The Australian mathematician and historian of science, James Franklin (1982), claims that the Renaissance was in face a period when thought declined significantly, bringing to an end a period of advance in the late Middle Ages. Just like Sarton he argues that the twelfth century was the ¨real, true and unqualified renaissance.¨¹³² The reason is that the rediscovery of ancient knowledge, which the later Italian humanists claimed to themselves, was actually accomplished in the 12^th century. Edward Grant (1996), also complimented this view by arguing that the origins of modern science lie in the Middle Ages¹³³, and was due to a combination of four factors. They include the Translation into Latin of Greek and Arabic scientific texts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the development of universities, which were uniquely Western and used the translations as the basis of a science curriculum; the adjustments of Christianity to secular learning and the transformation of Aristotle´s natural philosophy.

Generally, the emphasis of these continuity theses on the importance of the medieval science has centred mainly on the medieval activities within the European environment thereby leading to a Eurocentric conception of the Scientific Revolution. Arun Bala argued on the contrary. In The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science¹³⁴, he claimed that the activities of the middle ages that yielded to the triumph of the Scientific Revolution should be sought in the foreign multicultural influences on Europe within the medieval period. For instance, Islamic science gave the first exemplar of a mathematical realist theory with Alhazen´s Book of Optics in which physical light rays travelled along mathematical straight lines. The swift transfer of Chinese mechanical technologies in the medieval era shifted European sensibilities to perceive the world in the image of a machine. The Indian number system, which developed in close association with atomism in India, carried implicitly a new mode of mathematical atomic thinking. And then the heliocentric theory which assigned central status to the

132See J, Franklin, ¨ The Renaissance Myth¨, Quadrant, 1982, 26(11), 51–60

133 See Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); See also Grant, E., Sourcebook in Medieval Science (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 1974)

134 Bala, Arun, The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

sun, as well as Newton´s concept of force acting at a distance, were rooted in ancient Egyptian religious ideas associated with Hermeticism.

The continuity theory has been very instrumental in development in the studies of the medieval science. However, most of the studies have not been able to prove in very satisfying way how the science of the early modern period was a continuation of its medieval predecessor. Evidently, the two sciences have not operated within the same framework. The cosmology within which the medieval science was developed does not provide the mechanism that facilitated the activities of the early modern science. Still, studies on the medieval science have brought up many crucial issues which the historiography of science could not neglect without losing its central focus.

Notwithstanding the wonderful insights brought by the continuity theory, ´majority of scholars on the ´Scientific Revolution´ still hold to the traditional viewthat it occurred in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.¹³⁵