STS-C2_B

• Intellectual Revolution


  Period where paradigm shifts occurred and where scientific beliefs that have been widely embraced and accepted by the people were challenged and opposed
• Instrumental reasoning


  A new type of decision making that may replace Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality, involving cost-benefit analysis
• Western Science


  • Born with the ancient Greeks
  • They were the first to explain the world in terms of natural laws rather than myths about gods and heroes
  • Passed on the idea of the value of math and experiment in science
• Aristotle


  • Most influential figure in Western science (1600's)
  • Philosopher who created a body of scientific theory that towered like a colossus over Western Civilization for some 2000 years
• Factors that worked to overthrow and preserve Aristotle's theories

  1. Aristotle's theories relied very little on experiment, leaving them vulnerable

  2. Attacking one part of Aristotle's system involved attacking the whole thing, making it daunting

  3. The Church had grafted Aristotle's theories onto its theology, making attacks on Aristotle an attack on the Church

  4. Renaissance scholars uncovered other Greek authors contradicting Aristotle, forcing them to think for themselves and find new theories
• Copernicus


  First person who started the slow process of dismantling Aristotle's cosmology
• Ptolemaic universe


  • Had some 80 epicycles attached to ten crystalline spheres to account for irregularities in planetary orbits
• Copernicus' solution


  Placing the sun at the center of the universe and having the earth orbit it, reducing the number of epicycles from 80 to 34

  
• Kepler


  Brilliant mathematician who realized the planetary orbits were elliptical, not circular
• Galileo Galilei


  Used the telescope to observe the sun's sunspots, the moon's craters, and Jupiter's moons, challenging the perfection of the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic universe

  
• The Church tried to preserve the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic view of the universe by clamping down on Galileo and his book
• Isaac Newton


  • Realized the same force pulling apples to earth was keeping the moon in orbit, and invented calculus to prove this mathematically
  • Responsible for the 3 laws of motion
• The printing of Newton's Principia Mathematica in 1687 is often seen as the start of the Enlightenment
• Darwinian Revolution


  • The publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin ushered in a new era in the intellectual history of humanity
  • Darwin's theory of biological evolution completed the Copernican revolution by showing the workings of the universe could be explained by natural laws
• Argument-from-design


  • Philosophers and theologians argued the functional design of organisms manifests the existence of an all-wise Creator
  • William Paley elaborated this argument, citing the human eye as evidence of a Creator
• The Bridgewater Treatises were published between 1833-1840 to set forth "the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation"
• ed


  Fish with gills to breathe in water
• Whenever there is design


  There is a designer
• Argument-from-design


  Forceful demonstration of the existence of the Creator
• Functional design of the human eye

  • Conclusive evidence of an all-wise Creator
• It would be absurd to suppose that the human eye by mere chance "should have consisted, first, of a series of transparent lenses ... secondly of a black cloth..."
• Bridgewater Treatises


  • Published between 1833 and 1840
  • Written by eminent scientists and philosophers to set forth "the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation"
• Structure and mechanisms of man's hand

  • Incontrovertible evidence that the hand had been designed by the same omniscient Power that had created the world
• Scientific explanations, derived from natural laws, dominated the world of nonliving matter, on the earth as well as in the heavens. Supernatural explanations, depending on the unfathomable deeds of the Creator, accounted for the origin and configuration of living creatures—the most diversified, complex, and interesting realities of the world.
• It was Darwin's genius to resolve this conceptual schizophrenia
• Sigmund Freud


  Born in 1856, before the advent of telephones, radios, automobiles, airplanes, and a host of other material and cultural changes that had taken place by the time of his death in 1939
• Freud saw the entirety of the first World War, a war that destroyed the empire whose capital city was his home for more than seventy years–and the beginning of the next.
• Freud began his career as an ambitious but isolated neurologist by the end of the World War.
• Freud described himself, not inaccurately, as someone who had a great impact on humanity's conception of itself as had Copernicus and Darwin
• Freud's most obvious impact

  To change the way society thought about and dealt with mental illness
• Before psychoanalysis, which Freud invented, mental illness was almost universally considered 'organic'; that is, it was thought to come from some kind of deterioration or disease of the brain.
• The conviction that physical diseases of the brain caused mental illness meant that psychological causes–the kinds that Freud would insist on studying– were ignored.
• It also meant that people drew a sharp dividing line between the "insane" and the "sane." Insane people were those with physical diseases of the brain. Sane people were those without diseased brains.
• Despite his background in physicalism (learned during his stay in Ernst Brucke's laboratory), his theories explicitly rejected the purely organic explanations of his predecessors.
• Jean-Martin Charcot


  One of Freud's biggest influences during his early days as a neurologist, a famous French psychiatrist who claimed that hysteria had primarily organic causes, and that it had regular, comprehensible pattern of symptoms
• Freud agreed with Charcot on the latter point, but he disagreed entirely on the former. In essence, Freud claimed that neurotic people had working hardware, but faulty software. Earlier psychiatrists like Charcot, in contrast, had claimed that the problems were entirely in the hardware.
• As psychoanalysis became increasingly popular, psychology and psychiatry turned away from the search for organic causes and toward the search for inner psychic conflicts and early childhood traumas. As a consequence, the line between sane and insane was blurred: everyone, according to Freud, had an Oedipal crisis, and everyone could potentially become mentally ill.
• Psychoanalysis in its many varieties appears to have little or no efficacy in treating mental illness. In contrast, psychopharmacology and cognitive-behavioral therapies (therapies that simply try to change what the patient thinks and does rather than analyzing the causes of the behavior), while far from perfect, do appear to help.
• Meso-America is the region from Mexico to Guatemala, Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador.
• The Mesoamerican civilization were isolated from the accumulated scientific knowledge of Africa, Asia and Europe.