ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the principle that big pictures are both necessary and desirable: that if our subject is to provide not merely accumulated information or discourse without meaning, but vision, growth, understanding and liberation – as our students have a right to expect of us and as we have a right to demand of ourselves – then we need to think explicitly about the overall picture of the history of science which we present and within which we work. The moral characterization of ‘the scientific revolution’ too has been weakened by more recent research, as new historiographies laying emphasis on the role of ‘context’ or external factors’ have made it more difficult to maintain the prime role of free, independent thought. New historiography and new research on the history of science, then, provides one kind of explanation for why the original defining characteristics of ‘the scientific revolution’ seem dubious.
