HIST 4120 - [Scientific Revolution in Early - Modern Europe]

(crosslisted)
(also BSOC 4121, STS 4120) # (HA-AS)

Spring. 4 credits.

P. Dear.

Modern science is often seen as having been originally developed in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Copernicus, who set the Earth in motion around the sun in the early 16th century, and Newton, who made the universe an infinite expanse filled with gravitational attractive forces, at the end of the 17th, frame this crucial period of European expansion. The new universe was invented at the same time as the discovery and exploitation of the New World and the establishment of new trading relationships with the East. This course, a weekly 400-level seminar, examines the new ideas and approaches to nature promoted by European philosophers and mathematicians as part of this outward-looking enterprise aimed at the practical command of the world. We will read works by such people as Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and others, as well as important secondary literature, in order to understand how European thought attempted to integrate nature, God, and the state into new ways of making usable knowledge of the world.