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Entelektüel Merak ve Bilim Devrimi
İnsanlık tarihinin en önemli devrimlerinden olan Bilim Devrimi, bugün dünyamızın her alanında söz sahibi. Hollanda’da icat edilen teleskoptan Newton’un evrensel kütle çekimi yasasına uzanan bu hikâye, yalnızca bilimsel keşiflerin kronolojisini değil, aynı zamanda bu keşiflerin arkasındaki kültürel, kurumsal ve entelektüel yapıların önemini de gözler önüne seriyor. Bu denli çığır açıcı ve etkisini her geçen gün ileriye taşıyan bu devrimin tarihsel gelişimini okuyabileceğiniz bu başyapıtı iftiharla dikkatinize sunuyoruz.
388 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
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204 people want to read
About the author
Toby E. Huff
11 books17 followersAmerican sociologist specializing on history, philosophy and sociology of science. He undertook Max Weber-inspired studies of the Arab and Muslim world, as well as China.
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January 5, 2017
Toby Huff’s “Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution” is in many ways a companion book to his earlier “The Rise of Early Modern Science.” That book was a comparative study of the approach to science in the major world cultures, discussing in great detail and breadth why it was that modern science only arose in Europe. This 2011 book complements Huff’s earlier book by more narrowly showing the results of different ways of thinking, in China, India and the Muslim world, when exposed in the early 17th Century to a specific new European invention, the telescope. The sweep of this book is less broad than Huff’s earlier book, but this is an easier read, and very informative in its own right.
Huff’s premise about the material aspects of the modern world, which he does not claim is original, is that while we frequently treat the Industrial Revolution as the basis of the modern world, preceding that was a scientific revolution, on which the Industrial Revolution wholly depended. By “science,” Huff means not technology, which can be obtained from tinkering, but “a search for the underlying principles and properties of nature.” This scientific revolution was a purely European phenomenon, which “produced an enormous flow of discoveries that transformed scientific thought,” and “resulted in the accumulation of an enormous amount of intellectual capital absent outside Europe.” And this intellectual capital (shades of Thomas Sowell, who also emphasizes the intellectual capital of a culture as the determinant of its success) was essential for the emergence of Newton’s thinking, on which all modern science, and the modern material world, is based.
But across most of the globe, the result of this scientific revolution, all technical aspects of which were fully and immediately available to the rest of the world, was—nothing at all. It is this huge difference among world cultures that Huff seeks to describe and explain. Huff’s book therefore fits into the general category of books about the “Great Divergence”—i.e., books attempting to explain why the West is now massively materially superior to the rest of the world, whereas until 1500 or so it was behind the rest of the world. (Huff acknowledges, in the text and in his copious footnotes, that other scholars dispute that a “scientific revolution” occurred, or that its impact was as important as Huff says.)
Huff does not sugarcoat the failures of the rest of the world to participate in European innovation and scientific advancement. “Whatever glories ancient China, India, or the Islamic Middle East may have enjoyed in the past, their contributions to the making of modern science were minor. This conclusion will seem shocking to many readers, largely because of the romantic view of China that can be found in histories of it. Likewise, the Arab-Islamic achievements in mathematics and astronomy have often been discussed, but their direct influence on Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, among others, have yet to be shown.” And from this, Huff draws the conclusion, in almost so many words, that given this record of non-Western scientific failure, it remains to be seen whether these cultures will succeed in the modern world, especially to the extent their cultures remain mired in non-Western ways of scientific thought.
Huff begins with a detailed exploration of when, how, and why the telescope, what he calls “the discovery machine,” and around which the entire book revolves, was invented. I don’t mean to give the impression that this is a book about telescopes, with some thoughts about cultures and their effect on science as an adjunct. Rather, it’s a book about how “not all [] cultural universes are equally encouraging of scientific inquiry, neither are they equally supportive of original ideas.” The telescope is ideal for this study, since very quickly after its invention it, and the easy methods used to make it, were globally disseminated by Europeans. This was before the age of imperialism, so it was offered, not forced. The reactions of different cultures, and what they did with the new knowledge, are used by Huff to draw larger conclusions about those cultures and their systems of education, innovation, and development.
The telescope was invented in Holland and quickly spread; it became a truly famous instrument in the hands of Galileo, whose simultaneous skills in lens grinding and cosmology made him ideally suited to take up the new instrument and use it for new purposes. Although eyeglasses had been used for some time, the telescope was not a wholly obvious consequence, in part because focal lengths were poorly understood and differed for each lens. Galileo was interested in scientific knowledge, but he most of all aspired to be not a mere “mathematician,” one who only analyzed the sky, but a “philosopher,” one who was recognized as qualified to inquire into and talk about the causes of things. Huff discusses this at length, along with the efforts of other early astronomers, first to confirm Galileo’s results, then to expand them.
This section of the book contains many fascinating accounts, including attempts to understand the rings of Saturn and how viewing the phases of Venus proved that Venus circled the Sun. Another fascinating account is of the “geoheliocentric system,” an intermediate system proposed by Tycho Brahe, in which the Sun revolved around the Earth—but all the other planets revolved around the Sun, thus solving a variety of observational puzzles while retaining the core of the heliocentric system. In fact, this was the system presented by the Jesuits to the Chinese, due to religious trepidation about endorsing the “full” heliocentric system (which, of course, was NOT the primary reason Galileo was put under house arrest).
At this point, one theme that springs out from Huff’s discussion, although he does not much remark on it as an independent theme, is the eagerness with which the Roman Catholic Church participated in, funded, and spread new scientific thought. This, of course, is the opposite of the ignorant stereotype, namely, that in which modern lumpen-intellectuals chant a call and response: “Galileo!” “Evil, ignorant, repressive Catholics!” Moreover, most international spread of European science, that is to say, all modern science, was done by missionaries. This was not done incidentally, but, as in China, as a deliberate part of their program to benefit the cultures they were converting (and, not incidentally, to impress them with European and Christian superiority in knowledge).
In the next two chapters, Huff discusses how the telescope came to China and the Muslim world, and what the results were. In China, the Jesuits, beginning with Matteo Ricci, worked closely with Chinese allies, notably Xu Guangqi, to translate large amounts of the latest technical scientific literature (along with older works, such as Aristotle). Very quickly, the Jesuits “set about providing all the basic tools that were needed to put Chinese astronomy on the same observational footing as European astronomy of the early seventeenth century.” The official Chinese Bureau of Mathematics and Astronomy was focused on reading celestial signs and what they implied for China and the Emperor, so they were interested in new abilities to perform their roles. But unsurprisingly, at the same time, there was much resistance from Chinese “scientists” who were repeatedly humiliated by their lack of knowledge and inability to make celestial predications as accurately as the Jesuits, as well as from tradition-minded members of the Chinese education and administrative establishment.
With this new knowledge, the Chinese did nothing at all. They made no advancements in the technology, they made no new significant discoveries, and they did not change their “scientific” approach at all. Nor did they make any advancements from the telescope to a unified Newtonian theory of motion. There was no scientific revolution in China, even though all the necessary physical instruments and rational methods were fully available. And the second generation of Jesuits in China was persecuted and ultimately expelled from China, whereupon the Chinese returned to their view that rediscovering lost wisdom through traditional means, rather than innovation, was the proper study of science. According to Huff, they showed a “curiosity deficit”—the exact opposite of what the Europeans showed. And so nothing changed in China, from a scientific perspective, until the 20th Century (when the Chinese, to a certain extent, adopted Western approaches, and only to the extent they did so did they, and do they, advance scientifically).
Huff next turns to the Muslim world, with much the same result. By this time, of course, the action in the Muslim world was not in Arabia, but in India and the Ottoman Empire. Money, power and education were concentrated in those areas (and stayed that way until oil was commercialized in the Twentieth Century). In his earlier book, Huff covers the traditional, madrassa-based educational system in more detail, but the bottom line is that Muslim education after the first few hundred years was violently opposed to any innovation, in theology and in science. Nonetheless, astronomy was tolerated, most of the time, in part because it was necessary for determining proper religious ritual. And the Arab world (both Muslims and non-Muslims) made significant contributions to optics and mathematics several hundred years before the invention of the telescope, though such advances had long since stopped. Those advances, especially in mathematics, were “facilitating” advances, including the wholly new invention of plane and spherical trigonometry, but did not themselves create or advance a theory or practice of science.
Both the Mughals and the Ottomans received telescopes within a few years after their invention; neither did anything more with them than the Chinese, and in many ways they did less. And, of course, they made no progress toward a unified theory of Newtonian motion, in large part because of the dominant Muslim doctrine of atomism or occasionalism, expressed by the violently anti-rationalist and anti-philosophical Al-Ghazali, that there is no cause-and-effect independent of God’s immediate and present will at every single junction of reality.
This ends Part I of the book. Part II, which is somewhat loosely related, is “Patterns of Education.” Here Huff searches for why the cultural results he describes in Part I obtained. He examines the ideals of higher education in each culture from the Twelfth Century forward, noting, in essence, that the European system changed utterly, a “revolutionary reconstruction,” but the others did not. Again, he uses the reactions to the telescope as evidence of this. The Muslim world continued its educational stultification and hostility to the “rational sciences”; the Chinese continued their rote mandarin education based on memorization of texts encapsulating the supposedly perfect knowledge of the past.
In Part III, Huff expands on his theme of the European scientific revolution, by going into detail about individuals and achievements. He discusses how various Royal Societies encouraged and spurred inquiry across Europe (in part by being legally autonomous in a way inconceivable, even today, in the Muslim and Chinese worlds). He notes how vastly more advanced European medicine was, in part because (contrary to myth) it was Muslims, not Christians, who forbade dissection of human corpses. He discusses microscopy, magnetism, vacuums, and water pumps, as other pillars in the range of inquiry leading to Newton. All of these things were based on what Huff calls “thought experiments,” again noting that thought experiments did not exist in the rest of the world—there was some tinkering, particularly in China, but no effort to fit engineering advances into a theory of scientific progress or generally applicable theories. As earlier, this section contains many fascinating details, such as early electrical work and Kepler’s derivation of his planetary laws. Huff brings his narrative to a conclusion with a detailed account of Newton’s “grand synthesis” in the “Principia,” the work of several years unrelenting labor and the capstone of the scientific revolution and the indispensable basis for the modern world.
I don’t think this book is as satisfying as “The Rise of Early Modern Science.” Reading this instead of that would be a mistake. But I do think that reading both greatly enhances the reader’s overall understanding and appreciation of how we got to where we are, at least in terms of material science. Whether our culture retains the key elements that allowed us to get here, or instead has stultified as did Muslim and Chinese culture, is a different question.
Huff’s premise about the material aspects of the modern world, which he does not claim is original, is that while we frequently treat the Industrial Revolution as the basis of the modern world, preceding that was a scientific revolution, on which the Industrial Revolution wholly depended. By “science,” Huff means not technology, which can be obtained from tinkering, but “a search for the underlying principles and properties of nature.” This scientific revolution was a purely European phenomenon, which “produced an enormous flow of discoveries that transformed scientific thought,” and “resulted in the accumulation of an enormous amount of intellectual capital absent outside Europe.” And this intellectual capital (shades of Thomas Sowell, who also emphasizes the intellectual capital of a culture as the determinant of its success) was essential for the emergence of Newton’s thinking, on which all modern science, and the modern material world, is based.
But across most of the globe, the result of this scientific revolution, all technical aspects of which were fully and immediately available to the rest of the world, was—nothing at all. It is this huge difference among world cultures that Huff seeks to describe and explain. Huff’s book therefore fits into the general category of books about the “Great Divergence”—i.e., books attempting to explain why the West is now massively materially superior to the rest of the world, whereas until 1500 or so it was behind the rest of the world. (Huff acknowledges, in the text and in his copious footnotes, that other scholars dispute that a “scientific revolution” occurred, or that its impact was as important as Huff says.)
Huff does not sugarcoat the failures of the rest of the world to participate in European innovation and scientific advancement. “Whatever glories ancient China, India, or the Islamic Middle East may have enjoyed in the past, their contributions to the making of modern science were minor. This conclusion will seem shocking to many readers, largely because of the romantic view of China that can be found in histories of it. Likewise, the Arab-Islamic achievements in mathematics and astronomy have often been discussed, but their direct influence on Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, among others, have yet to be shown.” And from this, Huff draws the conclusion, in almost so many words, that given this record of non-Western scientific failure, it remains to be seen whether these cultures will succeed in the modern world, especially to the extent their cultures remain mired in non-Western ways of scientific thought.
Huff begins with a detailed exploration of when, how, and why the telescope, what he calls “the discovery machine,” and around which the entire book revolves, was invented. I don’t mean to give the impression that this is a book about telescopes, with some thoughts about cultures and their effect on science as an adjunct. Rather, it’s a book about how “not all [] cultural universes are equally encouraging of scientific inquiry, neither are they equally supportive of original ideas.” The telescope is ideal for this study, since very quickly after its invention it, and the easy methods used to make it, were globally disseminated by Europeans. This was before the age of imperialism, so it was offered, not forced. The reactions of different cultures, and what they did with the new knowledge, are used by Huff to draw larger conclusions about those cultures and their systems of education, innovation, and development.
The telescope was invented in Holland and quickly spread; it became a truly famous instrument in the hands of Galileo, whose simultaneous skills in lens grinding and cosmology made him ideally suited to take up the new instrument and use it for new purposes. Although eyeglasses had been used for some time, the telescope was not a wholly obvious consequence, in part because focal lengths were poorly understood and differed for each lens. Galileo was interested in scientific knowledge, but he most of all aspired to be not a mere “mathematician,” one who only analyzed the sky, but a “philosopher,” one who was recognized as qualified to inquire into and talk about the causes of things. Huff discusses this at length, along with the efforts of other early astronomers, first to confirm Galileo’s results, then to expand them.
This section of the book contains many fascinating accounts, including attempts to understand the rings of Saturn and how viewing the phases of Venus proved that Venus circled the Sun. Another fascinating account is of the “geoheliocentric system,” an intermediate system proposed by Tycho Brahe, in which the Sun revolved around the Earth—but all the other planets revolved around the Sun, thus solving a variety of observational puzzles while retaining the core of the heliocentric system. In fact, this was the system presented by the Jesuits to the Chinese, due to religious trepidation about endorsing the “full” heliocentric system (which, of course, was NOT the primary reason Galileo was put under house arrest).
At this point, one theme that springs out from Huff’s discussion, although he does not much remark on it as an independent theme, is the eagerness with which the Roman Catholic Church participated in, funded, and spread new scientific thought. This, of course, is the opposite of the ignorant stereotype, namely, that in which modern lumpen-intellectuals chant a call and response: “Galileo!” “Evil, ignorant, repressive Catholics!” Moreover, most international spread of European science, that is to say, all modern science, was done by missionaries. This was not done incidentally, but, as in China, as a deliberate part of their program to benefit the cultures they were converting (and, not incidentally, to impress them with European and Christian superiority in knowledge).
In the next two chapters, Huff discusses how the telescope came to China and the Muslim world, and what the results were. In China, the Jesuits, beginning with Matteo Ricci, worked closely with Chinese allies, notably Xu Guangqi, to translate large amounts of the latest technical scientific literature (along with older works, such as Aristotle). Very quickly, the Jesuits “set about providing all the basic tools that were needed to put Chinese astronomy on the same observational footing as European astronomy of the early seventeenth century.” The official Chinese Bureau of Mathematics and Astronomy was focused on reading celestial signs and what they implied for China and the Emperor, so they were interested in new abilities to perform their roles. But unsurprisingly, at the same time, there was much resistance from Chinese “scientists” who were repeatedly humiliated by their lack of knowledge and inability to make celestial predications as accurately as the Jesuits, as well as from tradition-minded members of the Chinese education and administrative establishment.
With this new knowledge, the Chinese did nothing at all. They made no advancements in the technology, they made no new significant discoveries, and they did not change their “scientific” approach at all. Nor did they make any advancements from the telescope to a unified Newtonian theory of motion. There was no scientific revolution in China, even though all the necessary physical instruments and rational methods were fully available. And the second generation of Jesuits in China was persecuted and ultimately expelled from China, whereupon the Chinese returned to their view that rediscovering lost wisdom through traditional means, rather than innovation, was the proper study of science. According to Huff, they showed a “curiosity deficit”—the exact opposite of what the Europeans showed. And so nothing changed in China, from a scientific perspective, until the 20th Century (when the Chinese, to a certain extent, adopted Western approaches, and only to the extent they did so did they, and do they, advance scientifically).
Huff next turns to the Muslim world, with much the same result. By this time, of course, the action in the Muslim world was not in Arabia, but in India and the Ottoman Empire. Money, power and education were concentrated in those areas (and stayed that way until oil was commercialized in the Twentieth Century). In his earlier book, Huff covers the traditional, madrassa-based educational system in more detail, but the bottom line is that Muslim education after the first few hundred years was violently opposed to any innovation, in theology and in science. Nonetheless, astronomy was tolerated, most of the time, in part because it was necessary for determining proper religious ritual. And the Arab world (both Muslims and non-Muslims) made significant contributions to optics and mathematics several hundred years before the invention of the telescope, though such advances had long since stopped. Those advances, especially in mathematics, were “facilitating” advances, including the wholly new invention of plane and spherical trigonometry, but did not themselves create or advance a theory or practice of science.
Both the Mughals and the Ottomans received telescopes within a few years after their invention; neither did anything more with them than the Chinese, and in many ways they did less. And, of course, they made no progress toward a unified theory of Newtonian motion, in large part because of the dominant Muslim doctrine of atomism or occasionalism, expressed by the violently anti-rationalist and anti-philosophical Al-Ghazali, that there is no cause-and-effect independent of God’s immediate and present will at every single junction of reality.
This ends Part I of the book. Part II, which is somewhat loosely related, is “Patterns of Education.” Here Huff searches for why the cultural results he describes in Part I obtained. He examines the ideals of higher education in each culture from the Twelfth Century forward, noting, in essence, that the European system changed utterly, a “revolutionary reconstruction,” but the others did not. Again, he uses the reactions to the telescope as evidence of this. The Muslim world continued its educational stultification and hostility to the “rational sciences”; the Chinese continued their rote mandarin education based on memorization of texts encapsulating the supposedly perfect knowledge of the past.
In Part III, Huff expands on his theme of the European scientific revolution, by going into detail about individuals and achievements. He discusses how various Royal Societies encouraged and spurred inquiry across Europe (in part by being legally autonomous in a way inconceivable, even today, in the Muslim and Chinese worlds). He notes how vastly more advanced European medicine was, in part because (contrary to myth) it was Muslims, not Christians, who forbade dissection of human corpses. He discusses microscopy, magnetism, vacuums, and water pumps, as other pillars in the range of inquiry leading to Newton. All of these things were based on what Huff calls “thought experiments,” again noting that thought experiments did not exist in the rest of the world—there was some tinkering, particularly in China, but no effort to fit engineering advances into a theory of scientific progress or generally applicable theories. As earlier, this section contains many fascinating details, such as early electrical work and Kepler’s derivation of his planetary laws. Huff brings his narrative to a conclusion with a detailed account of Newton’s “grand synthesis” in the “Principia,” the work of several years unrelenting labor and the capstone of the scientific revolution and the indispensable basis for the modern world.
I don’t think this book is as satisfying as “The Rise of Early Modern Science.” Reading this instead of that would be a mistake. But I do think that reading both greatly enhances the reader’s overall understanding and appreciation of how we got to where we are, at least in terms of material science. Whether our culture retains the key elements that allowed us to get here, or instead has stultified as did Muslim and Chinese culture, is a different question.
September 6, 2020
Must read for those interested in the East Vs the West saga. The anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist writing of late misses out of one key aspect of the West - intellectual curiosity. While the Mughal Empire, the Ming Empire of China and the Ottoman Empire had huge wealth, way beyond European nations could dream of, they lacked in curiosity, that ultimately became the driving force behind the rise of the west (besides things like war capitalism, slavery, exploitation of the colonized groups). Toby Huff has convincingly argued the case for the West.
September 10, 2016
This was a very relevant book that seeks to find an explanation for the technological (and thus economic) success of the West, in comparison to China, India and the Middle East. The author Huff, bases his investigation around the explosion of scientific ideas following the invention of the telescope. At that time, travel was such that ideas, such as the telescope were transferred around the world in a relatively short space of time. In Europe the invention of the telescope resulted in numerous reproductions and improvements of the invention, as well as the invention of the microscope. In Europe, these new scientific tools created in an explosion of ideas in science (primarily physics, biology and medicine). In contrast, the introduction of the telescope into China, India and the Middle East had virtually no effect on those cultures. No scientific interest was created, no attempt to reproduce the technology was attempted and the net result was negligible on those societies.
Huff, then starts to investigate the reasons for what took place. He concludes that the scientific revolution was fundamentally built upon a society that allowed for creative thought. In Europe, based on the Greek, Jewish and Christian heritages, there was the fundamental idea that there was order in the Universe due to the creation of all things by a God of order. In this environment it was an acceptable area of investigation to seek to understand God’s creation. As a result the scientific progress made by the Greeks and Romans was retained, improved on, and taught through Christendom. In contrast the eastern cultures were built upon the idea that they were superior, and had no need of foreign ideas. Thus, the likes of Aristotle were ignored. Instead all hopes and emphasis were places on the likes of the writings of Confucius and Mohammed, and those religious based educations systems within China, India and the Middle East. The result was, even the concept of scientific truth was meaningless within those societies, and therefore ignored. Huff discusses the attempt of Catholic missionaries to prove “truth” using scientific astronomical predictions. While they consistently won any competition with the Chinese astronomers, this had no lasting effects in the Chinese culture.
Huff also discusses how the huge increase in education following the reformation had an enormous effect in increasing scientific achievement. Following the lead of Luther and others, reading the Bible for oneself was considered crucially important within the Protestant world. This huge increase in literacy was accompanied by an increase in additional education outside of Biblical studies and greatly aided technological advancement. In comparison, the Madrassas of the Middle East were completely constrained by the teaching of the Koran; since according to Islam the Koran contains everything that is required – and therefore nothing else is needed or should be added. Thus, protestant Europe succeeded in surpassing the rest of Europe in the scientific race.
The book was therefore timely in that part of the current atheist agenda is to suggest that it was Christianity that held back scientific progress. Instead, the strong evidence is that science was able to take off because of the Christian based society that it was spawned in. This does not mean that the visible Church is innocent – far from it. But rather that science may not have ever started without the Christian world view as a base.
Huff, then starts to investigate the reasons for what took place. He concludes that the scientific revolution was fundamentally built upon a society that allowed for creative thought. In Europe, based on the Greek, Jewish and Christian heritages, there was the fundamental idea that there was order in the Universe due to the creation of all things by a God of order. In this environment it was an acceptable area of investigation to seek to understand God’s creation. As a result the scientific progress made by the Greeks and Romans was retained, improved on, and taught through Christendom. In contrast the eastern cultures were built upon the idea that they were superior, and had no need of foreign ideas. Thus, the likes of Aristotle were ignored. Instead all hopes and emphasis were places on the likes of the writings of Confucius and Mohammed, and those religious based educations systems within China, India and the Middle East. The result was, even the concept of scientific truth was meaningless within those societies, and therefore ignored. Huff discusses the attempt of Catholic missionaries to prove “truth” using scientific astronomical predictions. While they consistently won any competition with the Chinese astronomers, this had no lasting effects in the Chinese culture.
Huff also discusses how the huge increase in education following the reformation had an enormous effect in increasing scientific achievement. Following the lead of Luther and others, reading the Bible for oneself was considered crucially important within the Protestant world. This huge increase in literacy was accompanied by an increase in additional education outside of Biblical studies and greatly aided technological advancement. In comparison, the Madrassas of the Middle East were completely constrained by the teaching of the Koran; since according to Islam the Koran contains everything that is required – and therefore nothing else is needed or should be added. Thus, protestant Europe succeeded in surpassing the rest of Europe in the scientific race.
The book was therefore timely in that part of the current atheist agenda is to suggest that it was Christianity that held back scientific progress. Instead, the strong evidence is that science was able to take off because of the Christian based society that it was spawned in. This does not mean that the visible Church is innocent – far from it. But rather that science may not have ever started without the Christian world view as a base.
August 22, 2011
I have not read Huff's earlier book on the subject, but my impression is that it raised quite a stir. This book seems like it tries not to raise too much of a stir.It outlines the transformation of natural philopsophy into natural science in Europe and the main outline of the scientific revolution. It then compares it to the progress of natural philosophy in the islamic world (focusing on Mughal India and the Ottoman empire) and China, especially the impact of certain inventions - the telescope is a central figure. In between, it acknowledges the debt the scientific revolution owed to medieval natural philosophy and looks through the impact natural philosophy from the middle east had on the european scientific revolution. It points out that islamic world and china never experienced anything resembling a scientific revolution and, indeed, for many centuries were stuck in their own worldviews and older natural philosophy.
This is hardly news. The book spends a lot of time on making this point, which I guess is because of Huff's long quarrel with Saliba et.al. It really did not need to do so, though - while there is no doubt of the depth medieval europe's intellectual takeoff in the 12th century was influenced by the natural philosophy of the middle east and the islamic world, the post-14th century influence, and more acutely the direct influence on the 17th century and the scientific revolution, is much more in doubt in general academia, and some of the links proposed are extremely tenous.
Where Huff should have spent more time was the parts of his book where he comes to what the book is supposed to be about - WHY the west developed its scientific system and the middle east and china did not produce anything comparable, and indeed only "hopped on the train" when it was entirely apparent what an advantage modern science brought the western world. As it is, he comes up with several good reasons - and some which I really cannot comment on - was independent legal entities in the style of the medieval corporation really absent from the ottoman and mughal empires? I seem to recall seeing an Ottoman letter of privilegues in an Istanbul museum (I cannot recall exactly which, though. Oddly, the museum seemed to thing letters of privilegues were early human rights documents) but I really am not to knowledegable about early modern muslim legal matters.
I was really hoping for more meat on the subject of the reasons for "The Great Divergence" and where they can be found. Perhaps that can be found in his older book? As it is, this book reads like a broad history on the scientific revolution that argues for it being a western enterprise that other parts of the world found hard to emulate, not an explanation for why it was a western enterprise.
This is hardly news. The book spends a lot of time on making this point, which I guess is because of Huff's long quarrel with Saliba et.al. It really did not need to do so, though - while there is no doubt of the depth medieval europe's intellectual takeoff in the 12th century was influenced by the natural philosophy of the middle east and the islamic world, the post-14th century influence, and more acutely the direct influence on the 17th century and the scientific revolution, is much more in doubt in general academia, and some of the links proposed are extremely tenous.
Where Huff should have spent more time was the parts of his book where he comes to what the book is supposed to be about - WHY the west developed its scientific system and the middle east and china did not produce anything comparable, and indeed only "hopped on the train" when it was entirely apparent what an advantage modern science brought the western world. As it is, he comes up with several good reasons - and some which I really cannot comment on - was independent legal entities in the style of the medieval corporation really absent from the ottoman and mughal empires? I seem to recall seeing an Ottoman letter of privilegues in an Istanbul museum (I cannot recall exactly which, though. Oddly, the museum seemed to thing letters of privilegues were early human rights documents) but I really am not to knowledegable about early modern muslim legal matters.
I was really hoping for more meat on the subject of the reasons for "The Great Divergence" and where they can be found. Perhaps that can be found in his older book? As it is, this book reads like a broad history on the scientific revolution that argues for it being a western enterprise that other parts of the world found hard to emulate, not an explanation for why it was a western enterprise.
February 19, 2013
This book, although well written, tries to do two things at once.
I`m left with the feeling that focusing on either the development of modern science, or cultural differences between civilizations would have made it a better story.
And why is it, that there are so great cultural differences? Why doesn`t the writer deal with that? THAT would have made for a great story!
February 29, 2016
It was extremely boring, badly argumented and very narrowminded.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews