Rennaisance- Scientific Revolution

[jaycee]

I need to do an essay about this guy(Shapin) he seems to argue that the term scientific revolutionis misguided and that there was no one single moment or catalyst for it and therefore it was more gradual than the term suggests.

It seems obvious that this was a process which was part of the bourgoies revolution and was a clear sign of the progressive role of capitalims at that time.

Does anyone know what Marx said exactly?

[General Patton]

I would critique his assertion, because it was Descartes who convinced the Catholic Church to stick to things of the supernatural and allow the sciences to investigate that which is temporal. This was very instrumental in causing a panoply of ideas that set the whole scientific revolution into motion. Shapin would be correct in that this age of discovery and enlightenment has continued. However, his characterization of this as a gradual phenomenon would be a complete misnomer, as this revolution continues at an exponential rate, not a constant rate of change. Today, we sit on hundreds of thousands of new breakthroughs that didn't exist as at the time of Galileo, Newton, Descartes, but they were all made possible by that fundamental paradigm shift within the Catholic Church during that epoch.

Furthermore, I wouldn't look to Marx's thoughts on science, as that would be akin to asking a caveman what he thought about quantum physics. He knew nothing about logic, hence his crippled way of thinking about the world.