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The Influence of Renaissance Thought on the Scientific Revolution See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264443219 The Influence of Renaissance Thought on the Scientific Revolution Conference Paper · March 2010 DOI: 10.13140/2.1.2778.4324 CITATIONS READS 0 1,628 1 author: Marina P. Banchetti Florida Atlantic University 70 PUBLICATIONS 36 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: The Concept of ‘Rational Program’ in Nature from Logoi Spermatikoi to the Double Helix View project The Discovery of the Weak Neutral Current: A Case Study Against the Kuhnian Notion of Incommensurability View project All content following this page was uploaded by Marina P. Banchetti on 15 October 2017. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. [Not for publication – Please do not cite] Lecture sponsored by: The National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of Health THE INFLUENCE OF RENAISSANCE THOUGHT ON THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION Marina P. Banchetti Florida Atlantic University Introduction Throughout the course of the 20th century, the majority of philosophers and historians of science traditionally conceived of the Scientific Revolution as representing a radical break with the cosmological views of the Classical period and the Middle Ages and as representing the victory of reason and open inquiry over faith, mysticism, or dogma. When we examine the history of science more closely, however, we find that this traditional conception of the Scientific Revolution is not faithful to the actual historical phenomenon. When the history of the Scientific Revolution is examined in a more nuanced and complicated manner, we find that, far from being detached from mythical ways of thinking, the developments of both science and medicine were significantly influenced by the hermeticism and magical way of thinking that dominated the intellectual and cultural milieu of Renaissance Italy and other parts of Europe. Historians of science such as Lynn Thorndike, Frances Yates, Walter Pagel, and Eugenio Garin argued, in fact, that the influence of hermetic, magical, and Neoplatonic thought on science and medicine was felt well into the first half of the 18th century and is reflected in 2 the work of such luminary scientific figures as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Newton, and others. Although this new conception of the Scientific Revolution was, at first, controversial, it has since generated a great deal of research on the topic of the Renaissance revival of hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and ‘natural magic’ and of their incontrovertible influence on the development of modern science and medicine. The idea that the Scientific Revolution was influenced by Renaissance magic, however, has not yet had an impact on how the non-academic world and the general public think about the history of science. Yet, knowing the influence that Renaissance Neoplatonic and hermetic philosophy had on the development of modern science up to the 18th century is important from both a historical and a philosophical point of view, since this history reveals something profound about the nature of reason and knowledge and their relationship to analogical and metaphorical thinking and to the mythical and poetic imagination. Although we know that the intellectual and cultural life of 15th and 16th century Florence was significantly shaped by the rediscovery and translation of many Classical texts of ancient Greece and Rome, writers and philosophers also gained access to other sources whose origins were believed to be much older than Aurelius, Aristotle, or even Plato and were believed to have influenced these Classical authors. The most important of these were the writings attributed to the supposed founders of the magical arts, Hermes Trismegistus and Zoroaster. The Corpus Hermeticum and Oracula Chaldaica [Chaldean Oracles] were magical writings of the second and third centuries C.E. that combined Neoplatonic, Neopythagorean, Stoic, Persian and Gnostic Christian ideas and, in some cases, elements taken from pre-Lurianic kabbalistic teachings. However, Renaissance 3 scholars assumed that these writings, collectively referred to as hermetic writings, were the genuine production of two ancient sages, Hermes and Zoroaster, who were widely believed to have been contemporaries of Moses. Many leading philosophers, such as Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Francesco Patrizi, believed that the Hermetic and Chaldean writings represented an ancient wisdom derived, like that of Moses, directly from God. This revival of interest in magic also led to an increased appreciation of those medieval thinkers who were believed to have been the best magicians; notably Roger Bacon, but also Islamic philosophers like Al-kindi and Ibn Sina. The common thread running throughout all of the hermetic writings was a Neoplatonic conception of the cosmos that presented nature as dynamic and full of hidden forces, among which there was a mutual interaction: between higher and lower beings, between the characteristics of various planets and certain human characteristics, between the macrocosm and the microcosm. These mutual interactions, as well as analogies between the world as a huge animal and created things, between terrestrial and celestial entities, and between the human body and its natural surroundings were the key to an understanding of both human beings and the cosmos. In addition, many hermeticists believed that numbers and combinations of numbers were symbolic representations of the world and the key to understanding it. The hermetic writings also offered a concept of man as not only created in the image of God, but as similar to God in powers of creation and involvement in the universe. Knowledge of the world consisted in the interpretation of analogies between things and capturing the influences working in the cosmos. This knowledge could be gained through an intimate acquaintance with 4 nature and through technical means, which in the Renaissance nearly always coincided with magical techniques referred to as ‘natural magic’. These magical writings enjoyed a tremendous vogue throughout the 15th, 16th, and well into the 17th centuries. During this most exciting intellectual period, we discover a fascinating cross-fertilization taking place between hermeticism, humanism, natural magic, and pre-modern natural philosophy. According to many historians of science, this cross-fertilization and the impact of the hermetic writings on Renaissance culture served as a necessary preliminary to the rise of modern science. My focus here concerns the manner in which these various intellectual trends, collectively referred to as Renaissance hermeticism, influenced four of the major developments that have traditionally been associated with the Scientific Revolution and that helped to demarcate modern science from its pre-modern Aristotelian predecessors. These four developments were: 1) The rejection of Aristotelian cosmology 2) The notion of the centrality of the sun in the universe or heliocentrism 3) The conceptual and methodological mathematization of nature 4) The empirical approach to the study of nature The last two developments, combined as they were in the scientific method, are arguably the aspects of modern science that guaranteed its unprecedented success as a heuristic (i.e., knowledge seeking) enterprise. To the extent that the Scientific Revolution was a historical phenomenon, deeply embedded in the cultural and intellectual life within which it was situated, we should not be surprised to discover that, although it was clearly a rational achievement, it was one that was deeply affected by the particularities of the 5 intellectual traditions that dominated the cultural life of Renaissance and early modern Europe. The Microcosm-Macrocosm Analogy and Its Impact on Modern Scientific Cosmology From the mid-17th century to the early 20th century, modern science was dominated by a conception of nature as a mechanistic physical system consisting of inert matter governed by deterministic causal principles. Up to the mid-17th century, however, European natural philosophy tended to describe nature not in mechanistic terms but, rather, as an organic and living whole, in which all aspects of the cosmos were interdependent and connected in important ways. This conception of nature has been referred to as vitalism, the idea that nature is alive, that ‘vital forces’ are causally operative in nature, and that the presence of ‘vital force’ marks the difference between organic and inorganic matter. Vitalism is a type of holistic and organismic conception of nature that views the causes of motion as inherent within matter and treats all of nature as if it were intrinsically active and self-organizing. Throughout the history of both speculative and natural philosophy, vitalistic theories have been overlaid with theological overtones of one sort or another, and the vitalistic theories that dominated natural philosophy during the Renaissance and up to the early 17th century are no exception. Renaissance and early modern natural philosophers believed that they lived in an enchanted universe, that the physical universe did not consist of inert matter but was either itself animate by virtue of containing a ‘world soul’ (anima mundi) or was inhabited by vital forces and spirits that played a causal role in the occurrence of natural 6 phenomena. For these philosophers, the presence of a world soul or of vital forces and spirits
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