Science
Questions
- In what ways does Bacon’s scientific project differ from those of medieval scholars?
- What is the Scientific Revolution and when, and where, did it occur? Dear and Barrera-Osorio answer to this question differently--what are the differences?
- Did overseas discoveries lead to the scientific revolution?
Required Primary Source
- Bacon, Francis, Novum Organum (The New Organon; or, True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature), Encompassing Nature: A Sourcebook, ed. Robert M. Torrance, Counterpoint (Washington D.C., 1998), 878-885.
Required Secondary Readings
- Barrera-Osorio, Antonio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution, University of Texas Press (Austin, 2006), Introduction.
- Dear, Peter, Revolutionising the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions, 1500-1700, Palgrave (London, 2001), Introduction.
Additional Readings
- Daston, Lorraine, ‘Baconian Facts, Academic Civility, and the Prehistory of Objectivity’, Annals of Scholarship 8 (1991): 337-363.
- Henry, John, Knowledge is Power: Francis Bacon and the Method of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), introduction.
- Martin, Craig, ‘Experience of the New World and Aristotelian Revisions of the Earth’s Climates during the Renaissance’, History of Meteorology, vol. 3 (2006).
- Portuondo, María, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, 2009).
- Sánchez, Francisco, That Nothing is Known, trans. D.F.S. Thomson, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 1988 [1576]).