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The Scientific Revolution By Steven Shapin

Steven Shapin’s offers a personal account on the workings of the Scientific Revolution in his appropriately titled book, //The Scientific Revolution.// Shapin, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard, specifically discusses four crucial elements that make the Scientific Revolution, as Alexandre Koyré insists, “the most profound revolution achieved or suffered by the human mind” (p. 1). The first facet of the reformation was the mechanization of nature. Shapin often reminds his audience that the Scientific Revolution was a transition from the belief in occult powers that stimulate nature. Secondly, he emphasizes the depersonalization of natural knowledge. Another prominent theme was the “attempted mechanization of natural knowledge making,” in other words methodizing the way one gathers knowledge. Finally, Shapin discusses outside applications of newly gained knowledge, like for political or economical usage. Truly as unbiased as a personal account can get, Steven Shapin gives a grand argument towards the reformation of natural philosophy in a historical sense towards a modern epoch of thinking.

The book is divided into three chapters, the first being “What Was Known.” Here Shapin provides a background to discussions he will later bring up in the remaining chapters. Before the Scientific Revolution, a popular belief was that in “occult” powers that resided in all matter; a red flower, for instance, would have the property of redness in it. Also, the concept of a universal power connection all things in nature was very popular.

At the dawn of the seventeenth century a new generation of “modern” thinkers gave rise to the concept of mechanical philosophy, a new, exciting way to observe the world. Shapin uses the notorious “clock metaphor” often to discuss the mechanical aspect to natural philosophy in this century. Far gone are the days of Aristotle and his logic, and in come the days of physical proof to drive facts into motion.

Shapin was very fond of René Descartes and his influence on natural philosophy during the seventeenth century. When Shapin discusses the matters of truth and reliability of knowledge Descartes is his flawless example. Descartes was very adamant about not letting personal morals, political influences and bias interfere with obtaining knowledge. Often times, as Shapin explains, René would be very harsh to members of the Royal Society if outside affairs were brought up while in session.

The prominent aspect of the second chapter entitled, “How was it Known?” was the debate over methodizing the act of obtaining natural knowledge. It only made sense that in order for knowledge to remaining as untainted as possible was to subject it to strict guidelines to come to rational, unassuming conclusions. This was popular due to its mechanical quality to it, which was the magic word during this epoch. By methodizing knowledge generation you take all variables other than those standing trial out of the equation, and as Shapin puts it, once everyone is on the same page, the former philosophical chaos will truly be healed because the experience is contained and controlled.

Experimentation came to life in a whole new sense. Shapin uses Descartes approach to interpret the purpose of experiments saying, “Descartes, for example, reckoned that the grounds of proper natural philosophical knowledge were to be sought through rationally conducted skepticism and self-interrogation. Doubt all you can, and when u arrive at principles that you cannot doubt then you have the foundations of philosophy” (p.109). If a hypothesis stands tall after being doubted on all levels then what remains is a matter of fact.

Religion and Science in our era have always been in opposite corners. Steven Shapin reminds us all that in the seventeenth century natural philosophy was religion’s “right hand man.” Going back to the clock metaphor, we get a glimpse on Shapin’s take on it all. “We must infer the causal workings from the effects, and we cannot interrogate God, who is the great clockmaker.

Shapin does an outstanding job of making sure his analysis of the Scientific Revolution covers every angle. Little personal opinion could be detected and thematically this is a good thing, for he writes about the evolution of knowledge that is uninfluenced to outside stimuli. His book is on the reformation of natural philosophy, the transition from looking at something and concluding on based on sensory images to breaking down every element of phenomena of nature and fundamentally analyzing every aspect of its make-up. He succeeds in depicting the leap from sensory ignorance into mechanical clarity. I enjoyed greatly the parallelism between this book and many of our class themes. This is obviously not an accident but to see elements like the scientific method, which we discussed I the first week of class, come to life with real historical and culture implications in regards to Francis Bacon, another one of Shapin’s favorites, attitude towards systematizing natural knowledge gathering.

In particular the set up of the book had its pros and cons. Shapin organized his three chapters to move from what was known, to how they got that knowledge, and finally ended at purpose for it all. The last chapter was by far my favorite. He introduces the cultural applications of the knowledge. He even pokes fun at the paradox by the applications of natural philosophy that was conducted without political or economical influences. This was very effective in terms of his outlook on the Scientific Revolution, but chronologically it was quite hard to distinguished where we were in history. He introduces mechanical philosophy quite prematurely in the book and does not depict to what it evolved from or specifically that it replaced the old Aristotelian way of observing nature.

The motive of this book, from what I can tell, was to give a brief summary of the major events that made the scientific revolution, well, so revolutionary. “The theme runs from Galileo’s and Hobbes’s critique of Aristotelian ‘natural place’ doctrines to Messene’s mechanical replacement of ‘Renaissance naturalism’ to Boyle’s wariness about the philosophical use of the language of ‘natural laws.’ A simplistic summary might therefore be tempted to conclude that this theme captures the ‘essence’ of the Scientific Revolution …” (p. 155). It was a joy to explore how modernity came into life, and Steven Shapin goes above and beyond in that sense. Other than my personal preference to chapter orientation, Steven Shapin’s //The Scientific Revolution// delivers a brief, but nevertheless intricate analysis of arguably the most important revolution the human race has seen.