With Bacon and Descartes, new scientific methods emerged and view of knowledge changed. Aristotle’s texts lost their importance and the knowledge of nature had been changed with developments of physic. Instead of scholastic logic, new methods were used; as a result, the limitation which was constituted by the Catholic Church started to lose its effect especially in Europe. This caused some developments and new knowledge about the universe and the people themselves.
Before Bacon and Descartes, Copernicus published a book which is called On the Revolution of the Heavenly Sphere. It was a starting point of development of the astronomy and physics later. He suggested a new model of the universal system which is called heliocentrism. According to heliocentrism, the sun is in the middle and all other planets turn around it. Not Copernicus himself but his followers found some important discovery by using his heliocentric model. This was a turning point for science. This was a new approach, and this is applied instead of the Aristotelian universe. Because with his ideas, the heliocentric model was founded more appropriate but the development of physics was not enough to explain it. With Copernicus’ ideas, two problems emerged. First one, Earth must be different from other planet because just it made of four basic substances; the second one, if the earth turns around the sun, why do we not understand and feel it. Some of the scientists tried to answer these questions. Kepler believed that the Copernican model is fine because it illustrates the harmony of math. Despite Kepler, Galileo tried to prove this issue with more physically concentrated. He pointed out some evidence like the satellite of Jupiter, the substances issue (he argued that both earth and moon is made by same substances, the moon is not made by aether), mistakes of fixed stars and perfection of heaven notions. In addition, Descartes created new things to explain the problem; vortices. He also claimed that there is a power which pushes everything not pull. And finally, Newton discovered gravity and its relationship between the mass of matter. After this innovation, people have accepted that universe is ruled by physics’ rules. Moreover, mechanical universe suggests a totally materialist world. Pierre- Simon Laplace disregards God in his work which is called “Celestial Mechanics”. In this book, a deterministic mechanistic theory of physics was published.
In biology, there were also some new ideas and improvement of knowledge. Firstly, Julian Offray de la Mettrie rejects Descartes mind-body. Because Offray’s frog experiment shows that dead body can be moved via electricity, and he concluded that idea: Soul must be a material thing. And also John Locke was against some of Descartes’ ideas, like innate notions. According to John Locke, we have senses; our brain is just the collection of our senses. That means what you experience; you assume that this is the universe. Locke has an impact on others like Etienne Bonnot de Condillac. But his basic idea is that the human mind is not a fixed thing, it can be developed through education. The mind can only know pleasure and pain. Personality is a collection of sensation. So if sense can be control which is the aim of education, our personality also controls and develops. Therefore, with education, we can develop our mind. However, during to enlightenment, the idea of human evolution is not very spread. The general thought was if a person is savage, he does not have a chance to change; or if a person is a peasant, he will be a peasant at the end of his life. Despite this general notion, Montesquieu believed that change is possible. He tried to explain that idea with climate example. Under cold climate conditions, people have weak sensation, not care pain or pleasure. But under warm climates conditions, the situation is totally opposite. All these things affect people’s lives, not just individuals also society is affected. When circumstances change, people also change. Then, especially in France and England, people started to think about the idea of progress. According to this approach, societies and individuals are all malleable. For Condorcet, everything pushes society to progress this is inevitable. Furthermore, Adam Smith claimed a new idea; freely interacting individuals force to progress. All these ideas are against Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being. These have two basic reasons. First one is the discovery of America. European thought that American people are savages. They tried to kill them but according to Christianity, this is forbidden. They claimed that American doesn’t have any soul. They are natural slaves. In that way, they made the killing and taking their land more easily. But Montaigne disagreed that by saying there are no differences. Life style’s differences are caused by different life condition, this is not people fault. The second reason is that they are living in a brutish manner like a beast. European claimed that they live between animal and civilized people. Then, this kind of new notions required new researches. And people started to observe the apes. Linnaeus invented the binomial nomenclature. He used “humanoids” for both people and apes, but human is the superior humanoids. And Petrus Camper claimed that humanoids can be differed by measuring their face’s rate. There is an ambiguous statue between savages and intelligent apes, according to this approach. Some people disagreed that by saying human are different because human has their capacity.
Another development can be seen in the geological area. Mainly two arguments are defended: Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism. Catastrophism means the earth had changed and the changes stopped. Uniformitarianism means earth’s changes continue. Georges Cuvier studied on anatomy and paleontology. According to him, from the beginning, all animals exist, but some of them disappear. It means time causes destroying animal, not bringing new species. In addition, Abraham Gottlob Werner studied rock formation and strata. He was the founder of Neptunism which defends primordial oceanic parts. He conveys “Old Earth Theory”. Uniformitarianism was introduced by Charles Lyell. He also claims that species cannot transform each other.
All these developments and new thoughts and knowledge on the human being leads to emerge of evolution Darwinism. Before Darwin, there were some important people who affect Darwin’s evolution theory. Firstly, according to Lamarck, life always exists, but a simple organism becomes more complex and more perfect over time. Evolution is linear, evolution refers always get better. Adaptation and relation between use and disuse of characteristics and inheritance of characteristic were the important terms in his notions. So if a creature stops using a part of his body, it will disappear. These ideas constituted Darwin’s thoughts. He has some key point in his notions. First one is struggle for existence; the aim is the reach the largest number of offspring. Second one is natural selection, the well-adopted species will increase the number and will survive; otherwise ill-adapted species will decrease the number and won’t survive. These well-adapted organisms are all randomly chosen. Moreover, certain species live in certain places, so this is the geographical distribution of existing species. Continuous and biological diversity is practically endless. In “Descent of Men” suggests that sexual selection explains human culture, what are the effect women/men make the culture.
Max Planck founded a new very important theory, quantum theory. According to this theory, when you shine the light on a black body, it emits energy at a specific spectrum that is determined by its temperature. Albert Einstein founded some new knowledge about energy. According to him, energy is not a continuous but discrete quantity. Light is also composed of discrete quantity; the unit of quantity is called the photon. But he didn’t consider waves. Later Schrödinger claimed that it is a wave packet and actually wave and particles are mathematically equivalent. Moreover, Bohr thinks that it is sometimes a particle sometimes wave. For quantum mechanics, there are some conflict and an ambiguous idea. This focused on two major statements. First of all, “world was knowable without changing it”. Heisenberg defends that there is a limit to know where the starting point is. Because the energy which is given is changeable this is called the observer effect. Without this change, nobody can be understood the start point. However, Einstein was more optimistic and he defends that it can be possible in the future, a way can be founded. The second one is “the world is subjective”. This subjectivity idea belongs to Bohr. He claimed that understanding depends on who is the observer. On the other hand, Einstein disagrees that and suggest that with two observers, it can be calculated.
To conclude, after the separation from scholastic logic, in many scientific areas, there are many developments, more specifically, biology and physics were developed and in these areas, some very important notion was found.
(From lecture notes, 23.05.2013)
Sinem Atılgan Uşaklı 