ABSTRACT
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Europe a profound change began to take place in man’s conception of the world and his place in it. This change had many aspects-artistic, cultural, economic, political, literary, and intellectual-which historians have vainly tried to capture by the single term ‘Renaissance’. In this chapter we will study the changes in intellectual or philosophic outlook of this period that laid the foundations for the development of modern science. This aspect of the Renaissance was undoubtedly its most important contribution to the shaping of modern Western civilization. It led to the age of science and high technology in which we now live. For the history of our own subject, the social sciences, the rise of natural science was of crucial importance. When social sciences began to develop, they were inspired by the achievements of the natural sciences; they attempted to apply to human sociality the new conceptions that the natural sciences had been successfully using in the investigation of natural phenomena. In order to study the history of social science, and appreciate its philosophic problems, we have to devote some attention to the conceptual revolution that was begun, and progressively continued, by natural science.
