Reassessing the Butterfield Thesis

Abstract

September/October 2006 Historically Speaking Herbert Butterfield and the Scientific Revolution: A Forum OVER FIFTY YEARS AGO, BRinSH HISTORIAN HERBERT Butterfield declared that the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries was a majorformative influence on Western modernity. In his classic The Origins of Modern Science (1949) he wrote: "Since that revolution overturnedthe authority in science not only of the MiddleAges but of the ancient world—since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholasticphilosophy but in the destruction ofAristotelianphysics— // outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internaldispkcements, within the system of medieval Christendom. " In recentyears, however, a number of historians have claimedthatthere was no such thingas the ScientificRevolution. Steven Shapin,forexample , begins his revisionist account of 17th-century science with the memorable line: 'There was no such thing as the ScientificRevolution, andthis is a book aboutit. " We askedone of the leadinghistorians of the rise of science, PeterHarrison, to revisitButterfield 's claim thatsciencegives the modern Westits distinctive character. Commenting on Harrison are three veteran historians of science, Charles Gilltspie, DavidLindberg, and William Shea. Thisforum was supported by agrantfrom the John Templeton Foundation. Reassessing the Butterfield Thesis Peter Harrison Like so many familiar historical categories— the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation , the Enlightenment—the Scientific Revolution has undergone something of an identity crisis in recent years. For historians of science , both terms in the expression Scientific Revolution have come to be regarded as problematic "Revolution" is said to be misleading because die relevant transitions took place over a rather more protracted time period dian die term would normally warrant. A. Rupert Hall's The Scientific Revolution: 1500-1800, to offer an instructive example , implies a "revolution" of some 300 years duration. While it is possible to contract the chronological scope of the putative revolution to the more manageable one hundred years or so between Galileo and Newton, this still leaves us with a rather less climactic event than such analogous political upheavals as the French or Russian Revolutions. Neither is it easy to identify specific events or occasions that might act as markers that signal the commencement or, for that matter, the completion of the Scientific Revolution. There is no equivalent, in other words, of the fall of Rome or the storming of the Bastille. Some have thought that the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus's De revolutionibus in 1543 might play such a role, and the coincidental appearance of the De humant corporisfabrica of Andreas Vesalius in the same year might seem to add weight to the status of this date as the logical terminus a quo for this particular revolution. Yet when we considerits immediate impact, the only thing revolutionary about Copernicus's work was its tide. De revolutionibus aroused litde controversy at the time and for almost half a century attracted few converts. Robert Westman has convincingly argued that there were at most ten genuine Copemicans in Europe before the year 1600—considerably fewer, I suspect, than those currendy living in the U.S. who are comScience in its modern form did not appear until the 19th century. Indeed some have spoken ofa "secondscientific revolution33thattookplace atthattime. mitted to the geocentric system.= It took the combined efforts of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and others to establish the credentials of the heliocentric hypothesis, and even at the end of the 17th century there were many who remained unconvinced . In sum, we can legitimately ask whether the term "revolution" is the rightword here and, beyond issues of semantics, question the idea of a radical discontinuity between medieval and modern approaches to the study of nature. The term "scientific" is, if anything, more problematic . Stricdy speaking, science in its modern form did not appear until the 19th century. Indeed some have spoken of a "second scientific revolution" that took place at that time. The study of nature in the 16th and 17th centuries was conducted in a variety of disciplines—natural philosophy, natural history, the "mixed mathematical sciences" (such as astronomy and mechanics), anatomy, astrology, and alchemy. According to the traditional divisions of the sciences inherited from the Middle Ages, natural philosophy concerned itself with the causes...

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