Abstract

The fifteen independently written essays in this volume are held together by a recent dispute among some historians of science about the historiographic meaning and validity of the concept of the Scientific Revolution as referring to what happened in Western intellectual culture in the century and a half between Copernicus and Newton. Is that concept a distortion of what actually occurred since as traditionally understood, it reads the past primarily in terms of what science has become today? Or is it fundamentally correct, and important, to maintain that the Scientific Revolution was a unique, one-time event which was a sudden, radical, and complete transformation of the Western world from a religious culture to one based on a mechanistic and reductionistic model of reality?