The traditional account of the scientific revolution usually centres its interpretation of the scientific advancement of the early modern period on the achievements of such elite figures like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and Newton. In this context limits of space, time and theme are inevitably placed to demarcate the scope within which the transformations wrought by these men were achieved. However, as a periodization, the Scientific Revolution has grown increasingly complex. As it has attempted to take account of new research and alternative perspectives, new additions and changes have been made. Since the institution of the ´Scientific Revolution´ as a major historiographical concept, beginning from the 1960s, a number of sub-periodizations have been generated by more narrow research topics, usually from a more focused topical theme or from a narrower chronological period. Some of these sub-periodizations include The Copernican Revolution, the Galilean Revolution; the Keplerian Revolution; the Cartesian Synthesis; and not least, the Newtonian Revolution and the Newtonian Synthesis. Understood as an historical periodization, which is periodization defined by geographical, chronological and topical element, the Scientific
140 Pierre Duhem, Études sur Léonard de Vinci, vol 2. p. 411, quoted in Alexandre Koyré, “Le vide et l'espace infini au XIVe siècle,” Etudes de l'histoire de la pensée philosophique. (Paris: Gallimard, 1961) p.37 The essay was originally published in 1949 but was later included in his work on the Studies of the history of the philosophical thinking.
141Ibid.
Revolution refers to European developments extending over periods of at least 80 to 300 years. These developments involve changing conceptual, cultural, social, and institutional relationships involving nature, knowledge and belief.
Many scholars do not agree on the exact dates of the scientific revolution. Various historians of science now consider the term ¨Scientific Revolution¨ as very problematic.142 Some have reduced or entirely denied the earliest years of the Scientific Revolution, usually associated with what had been long known as the ´Copernican Revolution´. Some argued that if there was a Copernican Revolution, then it began and ended in 1610 with the work of Galileo and Kepler. Other scholars, emphasizing the development of key conceptual elements, have the opinion that the key period of the Scientific Revolution was 1610-1660. Some others, specializing in social institutional elements, have suggested that the period after 1660 was more crucial, as it was then that scientific periodicals and state-sponsored science emerged. The question is: have there been other comprehensive revolutions? Recent scholars have suggested the existence of a ¨second scientific revolution¨ in the institutional structure of the sciences in the decades around 1800. On this same period authors like Thomas Kuhn (1962), identifies a multidisciplinary revolution in the ¨Baconian sciences¨(chemistry, electricity, magnetism, heat, etc). Likewise, it has been illustrated that there was a general revolution in the sciences in the decades around 1900.143 In fact, the issue of the periodization of the scientific revolution has shifted historiographically across chronological, geographic, thematic, and methodological boundaries.
Two English men, Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) and A. Rupert Hall (1920-2009), have been very outwithstanding in handling this problem of periodization and prompting its diverse analysis within the historiographical context. The former is generally recognised as having introduced the expression ´the Scientific Revolution´
into historical discourse while the latter has been a vigorous opponent of attempts at monocausal explanation and one-sided interpretation of the Scientific Revolution.
142 For illustration of the relevant issues see Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.1-4; David C. Lindberg, “Conceptions of the Scientific Revolution from Bacon to Butterfield,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, eds. David C. Lindberg & Robert Westman (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 1-26; and A. Rupert Hall, “Retrospection on the Scientific Revolution,” in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, eds. J. V. Field and Frank James (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 239-250)
143See I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science, chapter 6
2.5.1 THE BUTTERFIELD THESIS
Six decades ago the British historian Herbert Butterfield (Oct. 1900 – Jul. 1979) started a stir by arguing that the emergence of modern science between 1600 and 1700
´outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episode, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom´.144 The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century marked a watershed in Western Civilization and Modern Thought. It challenged Christian revelations, altered the world view of philosophers, permeated university curricula, established new literary genres, and suggested new approaches for economic, political, and social theorists. The idea that there was something called ¨the scientific revolution¨ was popularized by Butterfield in The Origins of Modern Science (which has been his only work on the topic) published in 1949.
Unlike the 19th century historians who claimed that the great changes that ushered Europe into the modern age were the Reformation and the Renaissance, Butterfield argued in The Origins of Modern Science that the major breakthrough were in the paired advance of scientific conceptualization and factual discovery that began in the 16th century. It was this double advancement that led to the ´Revolution´ in science which overturned the authority not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world—it did not only result to the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but also the destruction of Aristotelian physics. He identified the Scientific Revolutions as the upheaval in science during the period between 1300 and 1800. Though the period of the scientific revolution has been popularly associated with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries he recognised that it reached ¨back in an unmistakably continuous line to a period much earlier still.¨145 The long duration assigned to the scientific revolution gives rise to serious doubt on what significance dating its start from 1300 holds for him? One could see that the whole historical survey in his work centred entirely on the period between Copernicus and Newton while describing the scientific revolution. His account of the period was mainly the 16th and 17th achievements in astronomy and mechanics, which for him hold the strategic place in the whole movement. However, his major reason in putting the date so
144Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800, p. 7 145Ibid.
early could be to incorporate the era of the impetus physics which he claimed was the starting point of the scientific revolution. He wrote,
A particular development of ideas which was already taking place in the later middle ages has come to stand as the first chapter in the history of the transition to what we call the scientific revolution.146
This first stage was started by that school of thinkers who as far back as the fourteenth century were challenging the Aristotelian explanations of motion. They were able to put forward an alternative doctrine of ´impetus´ which though was imperfect in itself but represented a major step to the final break from the authority of the Aristotelian physics.
Just like Duhem, he identified his group of thinkers as Jean Buridan, Albert of Saxony and Nicholas of Oresme. However, these men could not achieve such final break because of their resort to ´verbal subtleties´ and ´excessive straining of language´ to resolve the complicated issues involved in the Aristotelian intricate dovetailing of observations and explanations. It was on this aspect that the modern law of inertia triumphed though on a total different framework. Butterfield argues thus,
…the modern law of inertia is not the thing you would discover by mere photographic methods of observation—it required a different kind of thinking-cap, a transposition in the mind of the scientist himself; for we do not actually see ordinary objects continuing their rectilinear motion in that kind of empty space which Aristotle said could not occur, and sailing away to that infinity which also he said could not possibly exist; and we do not in real life have perfectly spherical balls moving on perfectly smooth horizontal planes—the trick lay in the fact that it occurred to Galileo to imagine these.147
The actual transformation occurred in Galileo´s thought of mathematical ways to formulate things and his idea of geometrical bodies moving in a world without resistance and without gravity. Such thought requires a ´transposition in the mind´, ´new thinking-cap´ which has to do away with the framework of the older system of
146Ibid., p. 14 147Ibid., 17
ideas—therein lays the major triumph of the scientific revolution. It did not just stop there, the extension of the date to 1800, illustrates that the revolution in chemistry which started with Robert Boyle(1627-1691) and subsequently culminated in the achievement of Antoine Lavioser (1743-1794), who maintained that weight was conserved through the course of chemical reactions even those involving gases, are included in this historical period.
It could be asserted that the notion of scientific revolution popularized by Butterfield was an analysis of the concept already developed by Edward Burtt in the Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science(rev. ed. 1932), and more deeply by Alexandre Koyré in Études Galiléennes(1939) and From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957).
Also some influence of the continuity thesis of Duhem could be seen in his work.
However, his concept of the scientific revolution offered a framework with which to contrast our accounts of ancient and medieval science and within which to develop the story line leading to modernity. His thesis helped narrowed the internal versus external divide that often appear on the narratives of scientific progress by tying the very content of the questions that provide the agendas of the sciences to the material conditions and social practices of the various disciplines. In fact, the Butterfield thesis presented a picture of the development of the scientific disciplines that overcomes the separation of history of ideas from history of social structures and interests. In doing so, he has stretched the date to include the 18th century for the benefit of the Enlightenment and the revolution in chemistry.
2.5.2 HISTORICAL OVERVIEW AND `WHIGGISHISM´ OF THE ORIGINS
The structure of his Origins, however, contradicts his historical theory in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and has often been criticized as the most classic example of whiggishness in the historiography of science. In The Whig Interpretation of History he had criticized the Whiggish history because it twists the past to see it in terms of the present, to squeeze the contending forces of such periods like the mid-17th century into those which remind us of ourselves most and least, or to imagine them as struggling to produce our wonderful selves. He wrote that ¨Whiggishness¨ is too handy a ¨rule of thumb… by which the historian can select and reject, and can make his points
of emphasis.¨148 Therefore, he argued that the historian must seek the ability to see events as they were perceived by those who lived through them. However, The Origins of Modern Science appears to be typical of such whiggish history as a result of its emphasis on the canonical set of subjects in the scientific revolution by considering the achievements of such canonical individuals like Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, Vesalius, Harvey, Descartes, Boyle, and Newton, with their predecessors. Another important work that followed the traditional histories of the Scientific Revolution which customarily focus on a list of canonical individuals who explored a canonical set of subjects is Rupert Hall´s The Revolution in Science, 1500-1750.149