8 - HOW THE FOUNDATIONS OF EARLY MODERN SCIENCE WERE LAID IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Summary

Although science has a long history with roots in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, it is indisputable that modern science emerged in the seventeenth century in Western Europe and nowhere else. The reasons for this momentous occurrence must, therefore, be sought in some unique set of circumstances that differentiate Western society from other contemporary and earlier civilizations. The establishment of science as a basic enterprise within a society depends on more than expertise in technical scientific subjects, experiments, and disciplined observations. After all, science can be found in many early societies. In Islam, until approximately 1500, mathematics, astronomy, geometric optics, and medicine were more highly developed than in the West. Indeed, the West learned these subjects from translations of Arabic treatises into Latin. But science was not institutionalized in Islamic society. Nor was it institutionalized in ancient and medieval China, despite significant achievements. Similar arguments apply to all other societies and civilizations. Science can be found in many of them, but it was institutionalized and perpetuated in none.

An impressive array of scholarship testifies that modern science emerged in Western Europe as a result of the Scientific Revolution, a phenomenon associated overwhelmingly with the seventeenth century. That same scholarship has proclaimed that the emergence of modern science in the seventeenth century owes little or nothing to the Middle Ages. Not only did medieval natural philosophy play little, if any, role in the advent of early modern science, so goes the argument, but it was the major obstacle to it.