Scientific revolution

Summary

Dominique Pagani first approaches the scientific revolution as the Galilean-Cartesian break with Aristotle's finalist physics. With inertia and impact, motion comes from outside. Descartes "de-animates" the world and thus, through a ruse of reason, completes Christian transcendence against animism1. He sees in it a passage from quality to quantity: colour, weight or temperature become measurable relations, which creates a consensus23. With Kant, he holds that Galileo and Torricelli discover that reason sees only what it produces itself2. In 2021, drawing on a reading of André Akoun on Koyré, he presents the passage from the closed world to the infinite universe as a crisis of the subject, from Nicholas of Cusa to Kepler's horror at Bruno's universe, echoing Pascal4. He also links the appearance of automata to it5. Against Heidegger, who traces the atomic bomb back to Descartes, he defends this break as a conquest of abstraction in which truth becomes the daughter of time. He also compares Bellarmine's "we cannot know" to the supposed absence of any alternative to capitalism6.

1. 1#1.4 Between crisis and war: philosophising?10 Dec 2015
2. 2#1.5 Between crisis and war: philosophising?10 Dec 2015
3. 3#11 Modal and tonal music24 Jan 2021
4. 4#9.11 How can sciences of history be real?7 Jan 2021
5. 5#9.22 Science and/or philosophy of “artificial intelligence” (part 2)27 May 2021
6. 6Panzer-philosophy against the cogito: neo-fascism or the ideology of nature (Heidegger, Descartes)5 Mar 2022

Introduction produced automatically from the 7 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.