A question from someone well outside the field, though very interested
in its doings.
In his Styles of scientific thinking in the European tradition (1994),
Alastair Crombie says that for Galileo science was “the moral enterprise
of freedom for the enquiring mind … a therapeutic experience offering
perhaps the greatest moral contribution of science to mankind” (1994:
8). Would it be reasonable to suppose that for Bacon as well as Galileo
science appeared thus because of the intense religious melancholia and
profound distrust of human nature characteristic of the time, as
discusssed e,g, at length by Jean Delumeau, Le Péche et La Peur (1983),
and especially for such innovative thinkers, such as both men were, at
the mercy of capricious worldly powers, i.e. the papal and Elizabethan
courts, respectively? Could anyone here point me to work along these
lines but specifically focused on such people?
Many thanks.
Yours,
WM
--
Professor Willard McCarty, Department of Digital Humanities, King's
College London; Professor (fractional), University of Western Sydney;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (www.isr-journal.org); Editor,
Humanist (www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist/); www.mccarty.org.uk/
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