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I appreciate that you're defending the pre-Renaissance period from being called the Dark Ages (a term worth abandoning if there ever was one) but I think you're

I appreciate that you're defending the pre-Renaissance period from being called the Dark Ages (a term worth abandoning if there ever was one) but I think you're being led astray here by equating a breakdown in "the human condition" with the status of scientific knowledge. The demographic/epidemiological/economic/political crises of the 17th century, after all, overlapped with the period that's traditional considered the high point of the Scientific Revolution - heck, Newton even began working on his optics and calculus during an outbreak of the Plague! - so it's not clear to me that two actually have much to do with one another. Granted, a certain baseline for material conditions and political stability needs to exist for scientific work to take place, but beyond that I don't buy the argument that something like, say, wars of religion or periods of plague necessarily leads to intellectual stagnation. From the 17th century crisis to WWII, I'd actually say that it's arguably the opposite. I'm also struck by the fact that the period where you consider science to have "stopped dead" overlaps with Copernicus, Bacon, and Galileo! All this isn't intended to be argumentative at all, I just find debating this stuff to be interesting, and I'm an early modern historian so I couldn't resist being pedantic about it.

clock_tower 11y ago
As I'd said, the human condition stopped advancing for longer than science did. Advances in science started up again by 1600, maybe earlier (the history of science isn't one of my specialties -- Copernicus and Bacon were late 1500s, right?), while the human condition remained stagnant for more than a century longer.
scottlocklin 11y ago
Kenneth Clark thinks the 12th-13th century was special in some mysterious way; pointing out that all kinds of interesting progress happened then. There was certainly a great deal of learning which occurred then; in addition to Bacon and Grosseteste; Witelo, Albertus Magnus, Petrus Peregrinus, Leonardo Fibonacci, Abelard. In the spiritual realm, Francis of Assisi; an important thinker even to the non-religious. Clark points out that, oddly, a lot of interesting and nice things happened in other civilizations at around the same time. I can't list any at present, as my world history isn't as good as Clark's, but it's in his documentary. I dunno, maybe the weather was particularly conducive to elevated thinking. The conventional wisdom is that science was hamstrung by the black death, since something like half the population of Europe died off. While Newton escaped a plague at Cambridge during his miraculous year, that's not the same level of disaster as half the population going away. Anyway, history nerding is fun.

clock_tower 11y ago

As I'd said, the human condition stopped advancing for longer than science did. Advances in science started up again by 1600, maybe earlier (the history of science isn't one of my specialties -- Copernicus and Bacon were late 1500s, right?), while the human condition remained stagnant for more than a century longer.

scottlocklin 11y ago

Kenneth Clark thinks the 12th-13th century was special in some mysterious way; pointing out that all kinds of interesting progress happened then. There was certainly a great deal of learning which occurred then; in addition to Bacon and Grosseteste; Witelo, Albertus Magnus, Petrus Peregrinus, Leonardo Fibonacci, Abelard. In the spiritual realm, Francis of Assisi; an important thinker even to the non-religious. Clark points out that, oddly, a lot of interesting and nice things happened in other civilizations at around the same time. I can't list any at present, as my world history isn't as good as Clark's, but it's in his documentary. I dunno, maybe the weather was particularly conducive to elevated thinking. The conventional wisdom is that science was hamstrung by the black death, since something like half the population of Europe died off. While Newton escaped a plague at Cambridge during his miraculous year, that's not the same level of disaster as half the population going away. Anyway, history nerding is fun.