Scientific Revolution - Historiographical Developments, A Tentative, Synthetic Overview, References
concept
As distinct from the centuries-old conception of scientific revolutions (plural), the concept of the one and only Scientific Revolution dates from the 1930s. What meaning, if any, to give the concept over and above its signifying the birth of modern science has been in lively, productive dispute ever since. This entry first outlines the historiographical vagaries of the term, then (from the heading "A Tentative, Synthetic Overview" onward) discusses the event itself in ways meant to do some justice to what historians' ongoing debates have yielded.
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The concept of the Scientific Revolution was introduced as part of a major historiographical overhaul that took place between the mid-1920s and the early 1950s. It was then meant to identify a period in European history, roughly between the second half of the sixteenth century and almost the full seventeenth century (that is, between Copernicus and Newton), when a unique, radical conceptual upheav…
Of those civilizations where natural phenomena were subjected to scrutiny of a kind that went beyond their identification with the divine, only two did so against the background of an articulated worldview. In the Chinese tradition, which was uninterrupted until the Jesuits brought modern science along, practitioners were much inclined to an empiricist approach. By means of three successive large-…
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