Renaissance and Scientific Revolution: Transition to Modern Thought

From the standpoint of the history of philosophical and scientific thought, the Renaissance can be characterized as a period of transition between medieval and modern philosophy. The most significant cultural forces operating in this period are humanism, the Protestant Reformation, and the uninterrupted advance of science. Of these three forces, science most deeply affects the advent of modernity. Scientific progress in this period was driven by two factors: the needs of a technical nature (weapons, navigation, etc.) and the discovery of the texts of Greek scientists, especially Archimedes and Pythagoreanism. The return to the classics—a feature of Renaissance culture in its various manifestations—positively influenced the shaping of modern science, whose ultimate triumph would take place in the seventeenth century.
The Renaissance generally represents a return to classical tastes and standards, resulting in the abandonment of medieval styles and modes.
On the political front, the creation of national states resulted from the disintegration of the empire at the end of the Middle Ages.
Economically, a capitalist bourgeoisie emerged, exercising a dominant role in society and politics.
In philosophy, the sources of Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle, were rediscovered.
In terms of discovery, significant advances and technical improvements took place. The development of cartography, navigation techniques, and the compass enabled maritime and commercial expansion, including the discovery of America.
The use of gunpowder in war favored the strengthening of royal power against the nobility, whose castles were vulnerable to cannon fire. Finally, the discovery of printing facilitated cultural expansion, editions of the classics by the humanist movement, and of biblical texts, which favored religious reform.
In the religious field, the Protestant Reformation occurred with Luther’s rebellion in 1517. On the Catholic side, the Society of Jesus was founded, and the Council of Trent initiated the Counter-Reformation.
In summary, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries reflect many of the changes initiated at the end of the Middle Ages and consolidate the foundations of what would become the modern era in the first third of the seventeenth century. In the early decades of the seventeenth century, science finally became established, and modern philosophy began. The top two players in this event were Galileo and Descartes, respectively.

It began with the publication in 1543 of Copernicus’s work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbits, which laid the foundation of the heliocentric theory.
Later, Kepler and Galileo challenged the Church’s authority to publicly defend the heliocentric Copernican hypothesis.
Thus began the scientific revolution that replaced the Aristotelian model and led to new concepts based on a rigorous method of knowledge, which led to the mathematization of nature. The main features of the new science, as opposed to Aristotelian science, are:

1. The Machine as a Model: Aristotelian science took the organism as a model. Now the model is the machine, particularly the clock.
2. The Universe is Composed of Moving Parts: This eliminates the fundamental elements of Aristotelian science: qualities and purposes. The new science is quantitative and does not consider ends.
3. The Mathematization of the Universe: Only what can be mathematized is considered real: quantity, size, and movement.

Galileo created a new scientific method, the deductive method, which departs from Aristotelian methodology and whose premises are:

– The authority of the past loses value.
– The simplicity of nature: nature always uses the easiest and simplest ways. This is the famous principle of economy.
– Nature has a rational and necessary order, which can be formulated in mathematical terms. The new science is rational because reason is more reliable than the senses.

With these premises, Galileo was inspired by the “resolution and composition” method of the Padua school of medicine, where he was a professor of mathematics, to develop his own method of knowledge, the resolving-composition method, which has three stages:

1. Resolution: We analyze the phenomenon under study and reduce (or resolve) it to its essential properties, discarding all others.

2. Composition: We construct a mathematical hypothesis linking the elements to which the phenomenon has been reduced. We then mathematically deduce the consequences of this hypothesis. This is the pivotal moment of the method, and therefore it would later be called the hypothetical-deductive method.
3. Verification: We test the hypothesis by conducting experiments that prove the veracity of the consequences deduced from that hypothesis.