Enlightenment Thinkers: Galileo, Bacon, Descartes Term Paper

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82) because he had to find a bridge from the old paradigm to the new one. He argued that science could restore man to the dominion he enjoyed before the "Fall" (caused by ignorance). Some scholars argue that Bacon never saw any environmental change as undesirable and viewed all science as good.

Rene Descartes also profoundly influenced the modern idea of nature. He argued that mind and matter are distinct and separate from each other, "and that the natural world is a machine" (p. 86). Like Bacon he believed that science would create a new world and triumph over nature. All reality would be explained through the use of scientific method, and social benefits would be a result because superstition and irrationality would be gone. The scientific method would make humans "the masters and possessors of nature" (p. 87). Knowledge was not in what others thought, or "what we ourselves conjecture," but "what we can clearly and perspicuously behold and with certainty deduce; for knowledge is not won in any other way" (p. 87). His most important contribution to the new view of nature was that animals were merely machines in a mechanical, clocklike world. This view led to the belief that animals have no feelings or intelligence and are only valuable in terms of human use and exploitation. The prehistoric idea of living in harmony with nature and other animals fell into obscurity. The so-called "unique position" of human beings has dominated Western culture ever since and formed a philosophical basis for industrialism or "the reshaping of matter and energy to a form more suitable for human use" (p. 89).

Isaac Newton was a physicist -- and a great genius -- who was born the same year that Galileo died. He developed the System of the World in which he explained change as "the mechanical repetition of a predictable and determinate sequence of phenomena" (p.

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90). Using mathematics he rendered the material world intelligible in a way it had never been before and triggered an outpouring of technological discovery. Newtonian physics made a great impact on the world, and was so successful, in fact, that people believed all knowledge would become known one day through Newtonian physics -- they saw physics as "the instrument' of human happiness" that would enable the fulfillment of every desire (p. 90). Newtonian physics ushered in the new world that Bacon and Descartes had envisioned in which nature was tamed and made to work for humanity's comfort and convenience.

The Newtonian view of the universe was tremendously useful for more than two hundred years as a vehicle for scientific and technological advancement. But Newtonian physics saw everything in the world as separate things that could be manipulated, arranged, changed into something else, irradiated, or multiplied without worrying about an effect on anything else. We thought, for example, that we could destroy the insect world in order to produce better crops. The result was devastation to the natural world of songbirds, wild flowers, pure water, and fish. The belief of separateness led to fragmentation and alienation from each other and from the earth. Quantum physics, a competing paradigm today, is telling us that there is much more to reality than a mechanical, clocklike universe. Separateness and objective reality are illusions. We are in….....

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