Scientific Revolution Category

Stephen Gaukroger, H. Floris Cohen, and the Scientific Revolution (Part One)

In the recent April 2013 issue of Historically Speaking, there is a fascinating forum about Stephen Gaukroger’s massively ambitious, multivolume historical project on the emergence and consolidation of a “scientific culture” in the West in the modern era. A total of four historians participated in the discussion, but the most important contributions came from Gaukroger […]

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Images of the Man of Science

Historian and sociologist of science Steven Shapin is one of the leading practitioners of constructivist historiography. Constructivitism assumes that scientific knowledge is locally created, produced, and situated. The local in scientific knowledge and the processes by which it becomes universally accepted are the two central issues in constructivist historiography. Constructivists, moreover, view scientific knowledge not […]

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Myths about Science and Religion: That the Scientific Revolution Liberated Science from Religion

On May 12 of 2010, the general reading public witnessed a robust, if not at times acerbic, exchange between two prominent scholars of modern European history. It began with the publication of a review essay entitled “Mind the Enlightenment” in The Nation magazine by Samuel Moyn, professor of modern history at Columbia University. In that […]

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Peter Dear’s Historiography of Not-so-Recent Science

I came across Peter Dear’s “Historiography of Not-so-Recent Science” (Hist. Sci. 1, 2012) while doing some research last week at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Memorial Library. It is a fine article, reviewing some of the most recent themes and trends on the historiography of science on the period c. 1500-c.1700; that is, on the late Scientific […]

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