Medieval Thought
...d had created the earth and saw that it was good, but also permitted the first murder, when Cain struck down Abel in the real landscape outside the tamed Garden of Eden. But mankind’s curiosity and the desire for knowledge would cause them to venture anyway. Comparative anatomy was practiced not for an interest in health, but to establish the difference from the rest of the animal kingdom. This it appears was mans first attempt to answer how. It would lead to the style of thinking that would inspire Bacon. In turn Bacon was first to reflect upon the connection between natural philosopher and the scientist. The first attempt at the marriage of reason and empiricism. The medieval philosophy had been challenged. It would be the scientific revolution that would establish a new breed of thinkers. The Renaissance presented a new attitude that expressed individuality, persona, and uniqueness. This shift in thinking gave rise to greater interest in life’s possibilities rather than the worldly concerns. The distinction between knowledge and opinion, between science and ideology, crumbles under this form of thinking. What is right becomes a matter of majority rule, or mob psychology. This was a huge shift in the perspective from medieval worldview to the age of reason. It seems overwhelming to have made a complete 180 degree change in thinking. The age of reason would now seek to define matter under the premise of how it is made, rather than the notion of why is made. This mode of thinking, even though unpopular in religious beliefs, sought to bring a greater understanding to faith and the relationship to the higher world. It is in this time frame that the earliest stage of the historical transformation by which new science became a part of Western understanding of nature. The vernacular appeals sought to integrate science into the values and interests of the elites to whom they spoke. But Galileo made the argument that there should be a separation of scripture and science. With the Protestant Reformation and the split between Protestants and Catholics, Galileo’s friends in the scientific academy believed it was possible to win the church over. Placing the new science at the center of its learning. Galileo’s concepts are a prime example of the bridge between reason and empiricism. He has formulated conclusions from experiment and has now sought to apply those to reason. However the new philosophy of nature would not and could not apply to a post medieval but pre enlightment church. The promise of control over nature must have been overwhelming to those who believed in nature’s control over humankind. These first appeals to integrate empiricism to reason found strong opposition. After careful deliberation over the rejection of their ideals. The new science found their appeals somewhat vague as to what might be accomplished and to what purpose. This was a problem that would be remedied in the days to come. It also upset clerical elites by challenging authority over society. It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the political order of the medieval period scattered. The idea of the modern state was now a “secular character; promotion of religion was no longer a states concern, and churches did not determine policy.” This gave birth to enlightened thinking. In which natural science was sought as the staple for examining and understanding life, not faith. The scientific method and the idea of progress were also characteristics that would challenge medieval thinking. The new science that sought to bridge mathematics and experiment and thus shift the perspective from medieval worldview to the age of reason comes full circle in Carolyn Merchant’s The World an Organism & The Mechanical Order. This period of intellectual enlightenment in which new science of mechanics and a mechanical world view laid the foundation for modern scientific progress. But now with the threat of depleting natural resources society has come to appreciate the environmental values that have seemed to be lost during the Scientific Revolution. Only now has the idea that everything while dependent on one another mutu...