Ebook: How Modern Science Came into the World: Four Civilizations, One 17th-century Breakthrough

Once, the concept of &;the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century&; was innovative and inspiring, yielding what is still the master narrative of the rise of modern science. That narrative, however, has turned into a straitjacket&;so often events and contexts just fail to fit in. Even so, in Floris Cohen&;s view neither the early, theory-centered historiography nor present-day contextual and practice-oriented approaches compel us to drop the concept altogether. Instead, he offers here a narrative restructured from the ground up, by means of a comprehensive approach, sustained comparisons, and a tenacious search for underlying patterns.

Key to his analysis is a vision of the Scientific Revolution as made up of six distinct, yet tightly interconnected revolutionary transformations, each of some twenty-five-to-thirty years&; duration. This vision enables him to explain how modern science could come about in Europe rather than in Greece, China, or the Islamic world.'