Chapter 4 - Renaissance Science and Philosophy Flashcards
Describe the church based beliefs before the Renaissance?
- sun circled the earth
- body = sin
- God = greatest of all beings
- knowledge reserved for clergy
What were some factors that influenced the development of humanism (and thus challenged church authority)?
- Exploration of Marco Polo (1271-1295)
- invention of moveable type writer
- discovery of the new world
- Luther’s challenges to Catholicism
- Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe
What was the idea of the Renaissance?
humans had reliable sensory systems, reasoning, enjoyment
- abilities were God given
What 4 ideologies were born out of the Renaissance?`
- Individualism: concern for human potential and achievement
- personal religion: less formal, naturalistic religion
- intense interest in early Greek and Roman poets, philosophers, ad politicians - desire to read and study original meaning
4 antiaristotleism: combo of Aristotle’s philosophy and christianity made a complex set of rules
Who am I?
- attacked scholasticism
- freed the human sprit from medieval traditions
- skepticisms towards all forms of dogma
Francesco Petrarch
Who am I?
- freedom of choice
- synthesis of philosophy and religion
Giovanni Pico
Who am I?
- opposed fanatical belief in anything
- humility rather than pomp and circumstance
- the praise of the folly: attacked church, philosophers and nobility
- His criticisms may have caused Martin Luther’s actions
Desiderius Erasmus
Who am I?
- personal religion
- de-emphasized ritual and church hierarchy
- initiated the reformation
- progressive ideas about sex and marriage
- humans do not have free will, instead they are servants of the will of Gd
- God is the only one who knows why God exists
- protestantism: denied Pope’s authority
Martin Luther
Who followed the geocentrist school of thought?
Ptolemy
- earth is the center of all heavenly bodies (as opposed to man as center)
Who followed the heliocentrist school of thought?
1) Aristarchus of Samos (believed that the earth rotates on its own axis & revolved around the sun with the other planets)
2) Copernicus (proposed a heliocentric universe)
Who am I?
- mathematical harmony of the heliocentric model
- true reality was the mathematical harmony that existed beyond the world of appearance
- sensory world was an inferior reflection of the certain, unchanging, mathematical world
Johannes Kepler
Who am I?
- set out to explore true mathematical reality that existed beyond the world of appearance
- set out to correct misconceptions about the world and the heavenly bodies
- scientific observations to exemplify laws and then followed by using mathematical deduction to describe the law and therefore the universe
Galileo
What were some of Galileo’s thoughts?
- objective reality
- exists independent of a person’s perception
- includes what would later be called primary qualities, quantity, shape, size, position, and motion of objects - subjective reality
- psychological experiences
- later called sensory qualities
- relative, subjective, fluctuating
- colour, sound, temperature, taste - conciousness can never be studied by objective methods (because they are made up of secondary qualities)
- excluded from science what is in psychology
Who am I?
- the universe is a complex, lawful machine created by God who set it in motion then ceased involvement (deism)
- set out to discover and describe the laws of nature, including gravity (natural events can never be explained by postulating properties inherent in them; occam’s razor should be accepted)
Sir Isaac Newton
Who am I?
- demanded science be based on INDUCTION
- radical empiricism (later called positivism)
- observation –> pattern –> hypothesis–> theory
- 4 sources of error that could hinder scientific investigations:
1. idols of the cave: personal biases
2. idols of the tribe: human nature biases
3. idols of the marketplace: biases from too much influence of meaning assigned to words
4. idols of the theatre: biases from blind allegiance to any viewpoint
Francis Bacon
