Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Clearly, the effect of the medieval industrial revolution on Galileo was
profound. His early career, during which practical and mechanical inter-
ests predominated, demonstrates most dramatically that prior to 1600
Western technology had surpassed Western science by developing on a
separate and, until recently, little noticed path. It is hardly an accident,
then, that Galileo opens the
Discourses
of 1638 with an acknowledgment
of his debt to the Venice arsenal—and by implication to the mechanical
arts—as the source of his fascination with how things function mechan-
ically (one is again reminded of the mechanical clock and its central place
in Western culture by this time). Reflecting this essentially technological
milieu, Galileo made more explicit the new “feel” for matter and motion
that was, as the historian of science Herbert Butterfield puts it, “the result
not of any topic but of the new texture of human experience in a new
age.”
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To reiterate, Galileo embodied a new breed of scientist, one who
combined philosophical and mechanical interests in order to move
beyond what he and others perceived to be the sterility of the speculative
approach of both ancient and medieval science. This new combination,
in alliance with developments in astronomy and mathematics, effectively
nullified the Aristotelian conception of knowledge and its emphasis on
teleological explanations and accounts. Instead, science was now limited
to the search for efficient and material causes mechanically construed;
and although religious aspirations initially animated the need to demon-
strate the mathematical orderliness of the universe (one sees this espe-
cially in the work of Johannes Kepler), such ideals soon faded away in
favor of more worldly and pragmatic motives.
Freedom and Mechanism: The Cartesian Compromise
Equally, if not more important, was the metaphysics implicit in Galileo's
mathematization of nature. It fell immediately to Descartes to flesh out
the meaning of this new world of mathematically determinable bodies
in motion. Deeply impressed, like his contemporaries, “by lifelike clock-
work mechanisms and indeed by all automation,” he quickly grasped the
significance of machines for a new metaphysics that would reflect and
explain a world consonant with the new Galilean science.
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Butterfield
writes that René Descartes “was determined to have a science as closely
knit, as regularly ordered, as any piece of mathematics—one which, so
