At the end of the Middle Ages, Aristotelian ideas had already reigned for 20 centuries, in which scientific thinking had evolved little. The church had assumed the role of censor and said what could and could not be done in philosophy and science. It was in this scenario that the scientific revolution began, a process that developed in Europe between the years 1500 and 1700 and which marked the beginning of modern science, making science a human endeavor completely independent of philosophy and religion.
To understand how science works, you need to understand its origins. In the previous video , you saw how thinking evolved from superstition to natural philosophy. Now, in this video, you're going to get an overview of how natural philosophy evolved to become modern science as we know it today.
You will understand this as you review the contributions of each of the leading thinkers. This is the type of content that can expand your knowledge. If you find this interesting, subscribe to Verve Científica, activate your bell and contribute to this content being disseminated on YouTube.
THE ROLE OF SCIENCE There are several factors that explain the transformations observed in Europe during the Middle Ages, but in all analyses, the importance of war and urban expansion play a very relevant role. After the first millennium, Europe, which was constantly being invaded, began to react. Europeans fought off encroachments on their territories and then began attacking other lands.
This marked a turning point in terms of political will and military initiative, which has affected the course of history ever since. The other face of Europe's recovery materialized in the reconstruction and expansion of cities. The Renaissance, which began in the 14th century, and the Scientific Revolution simply could not have happened without a revitalization of cities across the continent.
But Europe's political and economic renaissance, while necessary, was not enough to initiate the scientific revolution itself. Genuine progress in the way of acquiring knowledge had to take place. This was no easy task, ironically, given the great influence that the Greek classics had on the intellectual climate of early European universities.
The main obstacle to overcome was precisely the Aristotelian thought. ARISTOTHELIC THINKING PROHIBITED BY THE CHURCH If, on the one hand, Aristotle was an inevitable reference in the intellectual development of the time and simply could not be ignored, on the other hand, a significant part of what he wrote, such as on the mortality of the soul or on the world not having been created, he would have just existed, was obviously at odds with church doctrine. This meant that the leaders of the then powerful Catholic Church, around the year 1200, came to restrict the influence of Aristotelian philosophy, regulating and censoring philosophical works.
This marked the beginning of the religious censorship that three centuries later would claim the life of Giordano Bruno and cause many personal problems for Galileo Galilei. THE INTERVENTION OF THREE THEOLOGISTS An apparent solution to the problem of censorship was proposed by leading theologians who in some way knew of the importance of natural philosophy. Roger Bacon and, shortly thereafter, Alberto Magno and Thomas Aquinas indoctrinated that philosophy could indeed be useful and that the new disciplines could take advantage of it, as long as they maintained the right of religious authorities to prohibit what seemed very inconvenient and potentially heretical.
. Despite this unpromising beginning, the intellectual floodgates opened and a series of reinterpretations of this doctrine eventually led to an effective independence of science from both philosophy and theology. Perhaps the first blow for the independence of science was delivered by Alberto Magno, who was a teacher of Thomas Aquinas.
Magno defended the radical idea that God operates through the natural laws that he himself established from the beginning. This partial separation between the natural and the supernatural meant that science could focus on studying the world based entirely on its own internal laws, without invading the territory of theology. Thomas Aquinas, surely one of the most influential theologians of all time, also got in on the game and continued the same project.
He concluded that if philosophy and theology were in conflict, it could be because of human error, either on the philosophical or theological side, and not because there is in fact a real conflict between the two lines of thought. Historically, it was he who started and still continues today the process of separation between religion and science, which naturally is beneficial for both. THE REVOLUTIONARIES OF SCIENCE Scientific obscurantism was not distinguished by the separatist doctrine of Bacon, Magnus and Aquinas.
Religious authorities across Europe still condemned many philosophical positions, and the fight for natural philosophy continued with ups and downs, in part reflecting the emergence of strong personalities on all sides of the debate. Although there are numerous important names in this process, historians are in no doubt about the impact of the intellectual contribution of four scientist-philosophers to the flowering of the scientific revolution: Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. These individuals were characterized by exceptional intellectual abilities and serve as benchmarks for the rapid development that marked the 16th and 17th centuries, catalyzing the final transition between philosophy and science.
FRANCIS BACON Francis Bacon was an important Renaissance figure with a crucial role in the classical transition process between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. His philosophy was the beginning of a radical change in the relationship between science, philosophy and religion. A fundamental aspect in Bacon's work is the defense of the method of induction, a form of reasoning that makes inferences based on an observation.
This was the opposite of what Aristotelian philosophy preached. For Aristotle, deduction, which is a form of reasoning in which a conclusion is reached from broad premises, was a superior method. According to Aristotle, this was the only means by which we could obtain true and certain knowledge.
In a future video, I'll cover inductive and deductive reasoning in more detail. But the important thing now is to realize that Bacon's great insight was to reveal the Achilles' heel of deductive reasoning. If the premises of an idea are incorrect, the entire conceptual edifice erected on top of it immediately collapses.
In induction, this does not happen. Ideas gradually move from local observations to ever-wider generalizations, and according to Bacon, this provides a much stronger foundation for scientific knowledge. The greatest importance of Bacon's ideas is not only due to his defense of the inductive method.
What made Bacon relevant was that he openly challenged the Aristotelianism that had reigned for many centuries. With this, he started a tradition of discussion about how science works and marked the beginning of the divergence between philosophy and science, which would result, two centuries later, in the fully mature scientific enterprise. The scientific revolution had just begun.
RENÉ DESCARTES When Bacon died in 1626, René Descartes was only 30 years old, with some of his work still to come. Like Bacon, Descartes sought to overthrow the Aristotelian-Scholastic way of thinking. But, unlike Bacon, he was convinced that Aristotle was right to give preference to the deductive method.
His reason was clear: mathematics, which is entirely based on deduction, is the most successful science. Therefore, if we want natural science to succeed, we must use deduction as the foundation of science itself. Descartes pursued this goal in an original and daring way.
Although it was doomed to fail, he began to derive all knowledge, both philosophical and scientific, using his four-step rationalist method. The first of these is to accept as true only what cannot be doubted. Then, subdivide each part of the problem into manageable parts that are simpler to deal with.
Then tackle the easier stuff first and then move on to the more complicated stuff. Finally, review frequently so that the entire building is continually reviewed. The final three stages of Descartes' list are, in a sense, or another feature of how science works today.
Although it was quite revolutionary at the time, But it's first step is more problematic. Today, it is philosophically accepted that we have no way of accessing absolute truth. The best we can do is recognize that real-world knowledge comes to us at confidence levels, and it is prudent to treat these in probabilistic terms.
So it becomes clear why science does not need Descartes' first step, which is simply impossible to achieve. Descartes' failure to describe science as a purely deductive method not only marks the separation between philosophy and science, it also highlights the difference between the two disciplines. Something more radical needed to be done.
GALILEO GALILEI And that's exactly what Galileo Galilei, a contemporary of Descartes, did. We've already talked a lot about him here on the channel, both about his work and his life. And there we saw that Galileo was important to modern science, not because he was yet another anti-Aristotelian agitator, but because of the way he criticized the Greek master.
As you have seen, Bacon and Descartes questioned Aristotle on philosophical grounds. Both were defending the philosophy. But Galileo, instead, made a case for science proper.
By first employing a telescope to investigate the heavens, Galileo was one of the first to apply empiricism to science. He did this as a blunt means of finding evidence against Aristotelian philosophy's ideas of celestial perfection. Galileo's strategy was to show, through empirical examples, that Aristotle's distinction between the terrestrial and celestial kingdoms was illusory.
Among his many finds, Galileo, for example, showed the existence of dark spots on the surface of the Sun and craters on the Moon, imperfections that meant that there was not much difference between the corruptible sublunary world and the supposedly perfect celestial world. It also meant that Earth was not unique. Before Galileo, the basic assumption that the Earth was merely another planet would have been so averse in the eyes of philosophy, theology and common sense that very few would have had the courage to face the dire consequences of such a claim.
But after 1609, when Galileo revealed to the world what the universe was like, they had to accept that the telescope showed that the world was not Ptolemaic, not Aristotelian. Although folklore has it that Galileo actually performed the experiment by dropping different weights from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, there is much historical doubt that he actually did so. But Neil Armstrong performed this physical experiment in 1969.
And at that point, it was just a demonstration, as no one doubted the result. Spectacularly, he did this on lunar terrain, dropping both a hammer and a feather during the Apollo mission. Here it is possible to imagine the old ancient Greek nodding his head in defeat and approval to the genius of the Italian scientist.
ISAAC NEWTON Isaac Newton lived after Bacon, Descartes and Galileo. He was born precisely in the year of Galileo's death. Despite this, he was still an important figure in this transitional age, and his work represents the apex of the scientific revolution.
At the end of the 17th century, Newton's work consisted of a synthesis of the most important components of the scientific revolution: the philosophy of mechanics, modern cosmology and the mathematization of nature. Newton's ideas about absolute space and time defined physics and the way we thought about the structure of the universe. And the structure of Newtonian thought was not challenged until the advent of Einstein's theory of relativity centuries later.
Newton's theory differed from ancient understandings in essential aspects, such as, for example, the requirement of an external force for movements to occur, which was not necessary in Aristotle's heuristic. His book "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", published in 1687, is one of the greatest scientific milestones, a fundamental work for all modern science. In it, he exposed his theory of gravitation, which alone would have been enough to consider him one of the greatest thinkers in history.
history. This work not only presented revolutionary mathematical developments and physical concepts, but, more importantly, it revealed the way scientists would work from then on. And Newton's proposed recipe for the pursuit of knowledge was established on four points: first, never accept unnecessary explanations; second, the causes must be proportionate to the effects; third, equal qualities for different bodies must be considered universal; and fourth, conclusions obtained by induction on the basis of experiments must be assumed to be true until otherwise demonstrated .
This improved way of thinking is the underpinning of modern science, which has been refined by two centuries of intellectual efforts in the pursuit of knowledge of the natural world. THE SUPERNATURAL PERSISTS Thanks to the efforts of Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Newton and a number of other enlightened thinkers, science became independent of religion and philosophy and achieved a refined method to support scientific thinking. The method not only allows us to search for authentic knowledge, it also allows us to distinguish supernatural claims from those observed in the real world, in the natural world.
However, human frailties, such as fear and self-deception, did not allow our thinking to free itself from superstitions. Although it no longer has space in the scope of science, the supernatural still persists in the individual or collective thinking of modern people. Regardless of the intellectual level the individual may have, he may still be subject to mixing things up and trying to explain the natural world through justified beliefs.
Newton himself is a notable example of this. By some accounts, Newton spent more of his active life on alchemy than on physics. He placed alchemy on the same level as his other scientific interests, a position that would be considered incredibly ridiculous by modern standards.
His interest in a literal interpretation of the Bible is also no less surprising for someone considered one of the fathers of modern science. He wrote several essays in which he tried to extract scientific information from the scriptures. It is difficult to reconcile all this with his own exposition of the scientific method.
It's hard to imagine where alchemy or biblical studies fit into modern scientific thinking, which is why Newton's example is a wake-up call for all of us common men: even a brilliant mind like Isaac Newton's cannot see the contradictions inherent in what they are doing. This is a stark warning to anyone who believes that thinking critically can turn out to be an easy task. On the other hand, this task can be made easier now that you have an idea of how science has evolved.
You'll be in a position to appreciate the deeper themes of how science works, which will be covered in upcoming videos. Subscribe to the channel and have Scientific Verve. Hug and see you next time!
