HIST 1001 Western Civilization

Lecture 2-2

Science, Society, and Culture in 17th and 18th Century Europe

Housekeeping

TAs returned document analyses on Tuesday; I have them with me and will place them in the History Department after today.

Dr. Nelles’ grades for midterm available via his webpage: http://www.carleton.ca/~pnelles

Today’s Main Themes

• Like absolutism and constitutionalism, new ways of thinking about the world emerged in the 17th centuries -- in the wake of religious strife in 16th century

• New world view, new world order, new ways of seeing, new relationships of power.

Nicolaus Copernicus

Portrait from St. John’s Basilica in Torun, Poland about 1580 AD.

Heliocentric universe, 17th century depiction

Tycho Brahe(1546-1601)

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition Cristiano Banti (1857)

Galileo on the Natural World

“We cannot understand it (the universe) if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders through a dark labyrinth.” (pg. 454 Kagan)

Isaac Newton and the prism

The deification of Newton

“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night,

God said let Newton be and all was light”

Alexander Pope eulogizes Newton in 1727.

Science AND religion?

The watchmaker.

VESALIUS, Andreas, 1514-1564. De humani corporis 2nd edition [1555].

Vesalius and the one-sex model

Andreas Vesalius, "uterus, vagina, and external pudenda from a young woman" (in Laqueur, 1987: 10).

The Philosophes

Sapere Aude

Dare to Know!

-Kant

-the Encyclopedie

Voltaire

The Salon of Madame Geoffrin LEMONNIER, Anicet-Charles-Gabriel (1812)

Rousseau vs. Wollstonecraft

Next class:

reason andrationalismrun amokin the French Revolution