[SydPhil] Why the Scientific Revolution Wasn't a Scientific Revolution

[Debbie Castle]

Why the Scientific Revolution Wasn't a Scientific Revolution

Professor Daniel Garber
Monday 25 August 2014
6-7:30 pm
Law LT 101
Sydney Law School
The University of Sydney

When Thomas Kuhn was writing the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it was common to refer to the period in the history of science roughly from Copernicus to Newton as the Scientific Revolution. One might reasonably assume that his book might give us a theoretical structure to understand the transformations in our understanding nature that happened in the period. I will argue that the political analogy behind the idea of a scientific revolution is singularly inappropriate to describe what happened in this crucial period in the history of science and Western culture. Instead of one paradigm, that is scientific orthodoxy replacing another, I claim, what really happened in the period was the eclipse of the idea that we need a single scientific orthodoxy. The so-called Scientific Revolution of the early-modern period, I claim, was the opening up of an intellectual world of new ideas in competition.

Co-presented with Sydney Ideas<http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/> and Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science<http://sydney.edu.au/foundations_of_science/>.

Click here<http://whatson.sydney.edu.au/events/published/sydney-ideas-professor-daniel-garber> to register.

Daniel Garber is Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He is also affiliated with the Program in History of Science and the Department of Politics. He is the author of Descartes' Metaphysical Physics, Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad, and with Michael Ayers, the editor of The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, among other books and articles, and is the co-editor of the Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy.

________________________________


Debbie Castle
Administration Officer
Unit for History and Philosophy of Science
Room 441, Carslaw Building F07| THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   NSW  2006
T: + 61 2  9351 4226 E: debbie.castle at sydney.edu.au
Office Open: Monday Tuesday and Wednesday

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.sydney.edu.au/pipermail/sydphil/attachments/20140724/c1b570b1/attachment-0002.html>