The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800

This is a pretty good survey text. It is not very unique but it is well-written and quite amusing, especially where Butterfield is snappily demolishing some myth or other. Let us consider the role of experiments in science as an example. "Now, if we are seeking to understand [the] birth of modern science we must not imagine that everything is explained by the resort to an experimental mode of procedure, or even that experiments were any great novelty. It was commonly argued, even by the enemies of the Aristotelian system, that the system itself could never have been founded except on the footing of observations and experiments ...[I]n on of the dialogues of Galileo, it is Simplicius, the spokesman of the Aristotelians---the butt of the whole piece---who defends the experimental method of Aristotle against what is described as the mathematical method of Galileo." (p. 80, 1957 ed.). Nowadays, "we learn how [Galileo] this martyr of science climbed the leaning tower of Pisa with a one-hundred-pound cannon ball under one arm and a one-pound ball under the other. ... None of the vast crowd who are supposed to have observed the experiment gave any evidence on its behalf ... and the writings of Galileo give no confirmation of the story. On the contrary, the writings of Galileo showed that he had tried the experiment several times in his youth with the opposite result" (p. 81). "To crown the comedy, it was an Aristotelian, Coresio, who in 1612 claimed that previous experiments had been carried out from too low an altitude. In a work published in that year he described how he had improved all all previous attempts---he had not merely dropped the bodies from a high window, he had gone to the very top of the tower of Pisa. The larger body had fallen more quickly than the smaller one ..., and the experiment, he claimed, had proved Aristotle to have been right all the time." (p. 82). Thus Galileo's law of falling bodies was not based on experiment but was in fact directly counter-experimental. Likewise, the second main law of terrestrial mechanics, the law of inertia, "was hardly a thing which the human mind would ever reach by an experiment" (p. 84). And in the second great science of the day, astronomy, not a single experiment was performed, but it somehow made drastic progress anyway, and that again by flatly disregarding empirical evidence, which weighed heavily against Copernicanism. Meanwhile, "the science in which experiment reigned supreme [i.e. alchemy/chemistry] was remarkably slow, if not the slowest of all, in reaching its modern form" (p. 81). So if experiments played such a marginal role in early science, why were they undertaken at all and given such a prominent place in the literature? Part of the answer may be that they catered to interests of curious gentlemen. "It was customary for people to meet in informal societies and read news-letters which had been written by correspondent abroad---letters which would describe not only political ev

The Scientific Revolution: As spelled out in the introduction, to the book based on his lectures in 1948 the Scientific Revolution, popularly associated with the 16th and 17th century, has started much earlier than the Renaissance. Butterfield advanced the notion of its eruption was caused by the 'destruction of Aristotaslian physics,' that was crucial to the development of science that was the basis of western civilization. This is the best praise for an Alexandrian scientist he never mentioned, the sixth century dean of the academy in Alexandria, John Philoponus. Butterfield's Historiography: Thomas Kuhn was a milestone in the historiography of science by studying in depth how science evolved with new established concepts and ideas and how these catalyzed displacing the old ways of thinking with brisk new methods. What one of Kuhn's obituaries noted, "We all live in a post-Kuhnian age," so more applies with Butterfield treatment, especially when it concerns origins of modern science, which was not one of his favorite subjects. In the words of a history of science reviewer, Butterfield's observations that better described the underlying reality of the fields of science he considered lacked a scientific analysis that weakened his historiographic conclusions. The Impetus Theory: Although he started logically with the historical importance of 'Impetus Theory,'as the point of breakthrough, on obsolesence of the body of Aristotalian physics, he failed to identify, while Kuhn did, to dig out who effectively attacked it into rubble in the sixth century. On the same year, he revised the 'Origins' in 1957 Kuhn in,'The Copernican Revolution', wrote on page 119 that, "John Philoponus, the sixth-century Christian commentator who records the earliest extant rejection of aristotle's theory, attribute his ... to Hippacrius." Early on, in his Origins, he discusses Buridan (14th century), who elaborated on projectile dynamics, and quoted Philoponus, before Copernicus who read him, when he studied in the university of Padua, under or with Galileo who paid respect to John's pioneering thought in dynamics and astronomy. (Essays on Galileo & the History and Philosophy of Science, S. Drake) He missed the point again when he discussed the 'Downfall of Aristotle and Ptolemy,' which in both cases the Alexandrian Genius was the major catalyst many centuries before. This being said, the volume of books that were published in the last years, in the UK after his death, made the flaw even more obvious. Basic reading? 'The Origins of Modern Science' is basic reading, keeping in mind it was an original work on the history and philosophy of science. Butterfield's lectures described the prevailing milieu of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but did not give enough attention to their origins in the great city of science: Alexandria, which made the book core idea not supported. An in depth modern treatment of the subject, in the Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of

Professor Butterfield's history is easy to read and refreshing. Especially interesting are his chapters on pre-Newtonian mechanics and the transfer from Ptolemaic to Copernican models of the universe.

A previous reviewer called the thesis of this book - that the progress of science in Western society was the main historical current from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, to the point of relegating Renaissance and Reformation to the status of side issues - "arrogant". To the contrary, it seems to me not only justified (which has more influence on the lives of all men today, rich and poor: Martin Luther or electricity?) but a very welcome corrective to the ridiculous overvaluation of the sixteenth century and its heresies. The largely coincidental presence of a number of outstanding painters and architects (and a few English and Spanish playwrights) have given this period a gloss that it did not deserve; for intellectual and historical significance, the thirteenth, fourteenth and nineteenth are infinitely more important. But as for Sir Herbert Butterfield's delightful masterpiece, what one has to understand is how much it destroys, not only of much historical prejudice, but specifically of the way the history of science itself was taught. His account, in his very first chapter, of the reaction of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century to Aristotle, of the existence of an anti-Aristotelian tradition which reached Leonardo, of the significance of the willingness to challenge an ancient authority not on the basis of another authority but of one's own observation and research - all of this is a desperately needed corrective of historiographical cliches that are still, a full half-century after Buttefield, being taught. Likewise the very title of his second chapter, "the conservatism of Copernicus". And I could go on. Every chapter, almost every page, knocks down some lazy stereotype that is still today being handed down from journalist to journalist.But what is most important in this book is its central historical thesis: that science is not a "revolution" that exploded out of nowhere with Galileo (or even worse, with that desperate catch-all of ignorant scribblers, the Renaissance), but rather a tradition, you might say almost an apostolical succession, that goes back as far as the thirteenth century; that is, it is coeval with the rise of the distinctive Western (rather than Christian or Roman) civilization, with its distinctive cultural institutions - Universities and the private commercial publication of books. Butterfield's ability to discriminate, his insight into what is genuinely scientific and what he would call "archaic", are used in the service of a historical theory that, as far as I am concerned, has not aged and is still valid.

I discovered this book at the age of 15 in a box of one of my father's college books. I ended up reading it, and it sparked an interest in the history of science and technology, as well as the philosophy of science. I ended up reading perhaps a dozen other books in these two areas before I even got to college, becoming fairly knowledgeable about the subjects while still a fairly young teenager, and I continued these studies in college, even though I ultimately majored in something else--neurobiology. I have Butterfield's classic work to thank for this, and although I understand there are better histories on the subject now, it nevertheless fulfilled an important role in my early intellectual development.