In this first book-length historiographical study of the Scientific Revolution, H. Floris Cohen examines the body of work on the intellectual, social, and cultural origins of early modern science. Cohen critically surveys a wide range of scholarship since the nineteenth century, offering new perspectives on how the Scientific Revolution changed forever the way we understand the natural world and our place in it.
Cohen's discussions range from scholarly interpretations of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, to the question of why the Scientific Revolution took place in seventeenth-century Western...

The soul rejoices in perceiving harmonious sound; when the sound is not harmonious it is grieved. From these affects of the soul are derived the name of consonances for the harmonic proportions, and the name of dissonances for the unharmonic proportions. When to this is added the other harmonie proportion whieh consists of the longer or shorter duration of musical sound, then the soul stirs the body to jumping dance, the tongue to inspired speech, according to the same laws. The artisans accommodate to these harmonies the blows of their hammers, the soldiers their pace. As long as the...

Once, the concept of 'the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century' was innovative and inspiring, yielding what is still the master narrative of the rise of modern science. That narrative, however, has turned into a straitjacket--so often events and contexts just fail to fit in. Even so, in Floris Cohen's view neither the early, theory-centered historiography nor present-day contextual and practice-oriented approaches compel us to drop the concept altogether. Instead, he offers here a narrative restructured from the ground up, by means of a comprehensive approach, sustained comparisons, and...

For centuries, laymen and priests, lone thinkers and philosophical schools in Greece, China, the Islamic world and Europe reflected with wisdom and perseverance on how the natural world fits together. As a rule, their methods and conclusions, while often ingenious, were misdirected when viewed from the perspective of modern science. In the 1600s thinkers such as Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Bacon and many others gave revolutionary new twists to traditional ideas and practices, culminating in the work of Isaac Newton half a century later. It was as if the world was being created anew. But why...

For centuries, laymen and priests, lone thinkers and philosophical schools in Greece, China, the Islamic world and Europe reflected with wisdom and perseverance on how the natural world fits together. As a rule, their methods and conclusions, while often ingenious, were misdirected when viewed from the perspective of modern science. In the 1600s thinkers such as Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Bacon and many others gave revolutionary new twists to traditional ideas and practices, culminating in the work of Isaac Newton half a century later. It was as if the world was being created anew. But why...