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The Scientific Revolution Revisited
Mikuláš Teich 
Mikuláš Teich's new book draws on 60 years of scholarship. In it he develops an original thesis that the scientific revolution is both a factor in and a product of wide-ranging societal transformation. [...] The scientific revolution is a part of our common heritage. Understanding how it came about and continues to unfold should be part of the professional formation of every scientist, engineer and educationist.
—Ian Benson, EducationEye, Spring 2016, https://library.prospect.org.uk/id/2016/April/12/EducationEye-Spring-2016
The writer offers a principled interpretation of what influenced the completion of the Scientific Revolution. As everything has a history, so does science. Teich employs the classical chronological method, and presents each chapter, theme or concept in historical context. First, he points to the roots of the Scientific Revolution in classical times. Then follow the milestones in the history of the Scientific Revolution... Teich’s book appeals because the style of writing is direct and simple. Moreover, it invites the reader to consider themes necessary for the understanding of the Scientific Revolution.
—Antonie Doležalová, Lidové Noviny
The Scientific Revolution Revisited brings Mikuláš Teich back to the great movement of thought and action that transformed European science and society in the seventeenth century. Drawing on a lifetime of scholarly experience in six penetrating chapters, Teich examines the ways of investigating and understanding nature that matured during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, charting their progress towards science as we now know it and insisting on the essential interpenetration of such inquiry with its changing social environment. The Scientific Revolution was marked by the global expansion of trade by European powers and by interstate rivalries for a stake in the developing world market, in which advanced medieval China, remarkably, did not participate. It is in the wake of these happenings, in Teich's original retelling, that the Thirty Years War and the Scientific Revolution emerge as products of and factors in an uneven transition in European and world history: from natural philosophy to modern science, feudalism to capitalism, the late medieval to the early modern period.
With a narrative that moves from pre-classical thought to the European institutionalisation of science – and a scope that embraces figures both lionised and neglected, such as Nicole Oresme, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Thaddeus Hagecius, Johann Joachim Becher – The Scientific Revolution Revisited illuminates the social and intellectual sea changes that shaped the modern world.
With a narrative that moves from pre-classical thought to the European institutionalisation of science – and a scope that embraces figures both lionised and neglected, such as Nicole Oresme, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Thaddeus Hagecius, Johann Joachim Becher – The Scientific Revolution Revisited illuminates the social and intellectual sea changes that shaped the modern world.
The Scientific Revolution Revisited
Mikuláš Teich | December 2012
x + 146 | 15 colour illustrations | 6.14" x 9.21" (234 x 156 mm)
ISBN Paperback: 9781783741229
ISBN Hardback: 9781783741236
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783741243
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783741250
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783741267
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0054
BIC subject codes: PDX (History of Science), HBTB (Social and cultural history), HBJDC (European history)
Note on Terminology and Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
1 From Pre-classical to Classical Pursuits
2 Experimentation and Quantification
3 Institutionalisation of Science
4 Truth(s)
5 The Scientific Revolution: The Big Picture
6 West and East European Contexts
Epilogue
References
Index
© 2015 Mikuláš Teich
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Attribution should include the following information:
Mikuláš Teich, The Scientific Revolution Revisited. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2015, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0054
Please see the list of illustrations below for attribution relating to individual images. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. For information about the rights of the Wikimedia Commons images, please refer to the Wikimedia website (the relevant links are listed in the list of illustrations).
Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
List of Illustrations:
1) Image of heliocentric model from Nicolaus Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (c. 1543). Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Copernican_heliocentrism.jpg
2) Palaeolithic painting, Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave (southern France), c. 32,000-30,000 BP. Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Etologic_horse_study,_Chauvet_cave.jpg
3) The Prague Astronomical Clock (Prague Orloj) in Old Town Square, Prague, Czech Republic. © BrokenSphere/Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prague_Orloj_1.JPG
4) Portrait of Nicolaus of Cusa wearing a cardinal’s hat, in Hartmann Schedel, Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cusanus_schedel_chronicle.jpg
5) Georg Ernst Stahl. Line engraving (1715). Wellcome Trust, CC BY 4.0, http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0008079.html
6) Portrait of Robert Boyle by Johann Kerseboom (c. 1689). Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Robert_Boyle_0001.jpg
7) View from above of Gresham College, London, as it was in the eighteenth century. By unknown artist, after an illustration in John Ward, Lives of the Professors of Gresham College (1740). Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PSM_V81_D316_Old_gresham_college.png
8) Portrait of an old man thought to be Comenius (c. 1661) by Rembrandt. Florence, Uffizi Gallery. Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_an_Old_Man,_Rembrandt.jpg
9) Spherical burning mirror by Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1786). Collection of Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon (Zwinger), Dresden, Germany. Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spherical_burning_mirror,_Ehrenfried_Walther_von_Tschirnhaus,_Kieslingswalde_(today_Slawonice,_Poland),_1786,_copper_-_Mathematisch-Physikalischer_Salon,_Dresden_-_DSC08142.JPG
10) Title page of New Atlantis in the second edition of Francis Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum: or A naturall historie. In ten centuries (London: William Lee at the Turks, 1628). Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bacon_1628_New_Atlantis_title_page.png
11) A diagrammatic section of the human brain by René Descartes, in his Treatise of Man (1664). Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Descartes_brain_section.png
12) A page from Song Dynasty (960-1279), printed book of the I Ching (Yi Jing), Classic of Changes or Book of Changes. National Central Library, Taipei City, Taiwan. Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:I_Ching_Song_Dynasty_print.jpg
13) Zheng He’s Treasure Ship. Model at the Hong Kong Science Museum. Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zheng_He%27s_Treasure_Ship_1.jpg
14) David Gans, Ptolemaic cosmological diagram (planetary circles surrounded by Zodiac constellations) in Hebrew, from his Nechmad V’Naim (1743). Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Galgalim_gans.JPG
15) Emperor Franz Stephan (sitting) together with his natural science advisors. From left to right: Gerard van Swieten, Johann Ritter von Baillou (naturalist), Valentin Jamerai Duval (numismatist) and Abbé Johann Marcy (Director of the Physical Mathematical Cabinet). Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kaiserbild_Naturhistorisches_Museum_cropped.jpg
