The Rise of Natural Philosophy, Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment (^) ‹ 117
Paragraph Outline:
I. Galileo’s rejection of the Aristotelian model of the cosmos and the scholastic approach.
Descartes’s skeptical assertion that “received knowledge”—that is, information that you do
not learn for yourself—amounted to nothing more than “opinion.”
II. Galileo’s observations of the moon and his inductive argument that those observations
refute the claims of Aristotle. Descartes’s rejection of observation on the grounds that our
senses can be fooled and his deduction of his own existence by the fact that he cannot doubt
that he is thinking about the question of his existence.
Rapid Review
By the mid-sixteenth century, the spirit of Renaissance humanism fused with other reviving
traditions, such as Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, to create a Platonic–Pythagorean tradi-
tion that sought to identify the fundamental mathematical laws of nature. Nicolas Copernicus
was the first to challenge the traditional scholastic view of the cosmos by suggesting that the
sun—not the Earth—was at the center of the system. But it was in the seventeenth century
that Copernicus’s successors promoted new ways of knowing about nature:
• Galileo promoted both the Copernican system and an observationally based inductive
method in increasingly bold ways until he was silenced by the Inquisition in 1633.
• René Descartes developed and promoted an alternative method that began with radical
skepticism and went on to deduce knowledge about nature by seeking clear and distinct
thought.
• Near the end of the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton showed, through empirical obser-
vation and reason, that one could discern the laws that God had created to govern the
cosmos. In the eighteenth century, writers known as philosophes developed and popular-
ized a vision of society based on Newton’s emphasis on reason. They wrote philosophical
treatises, histories, novels, plays, pamphlets, and satires critical of traditional social and
political conventions and institutions, like absolute monarchy and the Church. Hoping
to reform society by educating the powerful monarchs of European kingdoms, when
enlightened despotism waned, philosophes found new venues like salons, to discuss and
promote the more egalitarian and democratic aspects of Enlightenment thought, con-
tributing to an atmosphere of political and social revolution that flourished in modern
Europe at the end of the eighteenth century.KEY IDEA15_Bartolini_Ch15_099-118.indd 117 27/04/18 1:54 PM