ABSTRACT
As we noted in Chapter 7, the scientific revolution began in central Europe with Copernicus, Brahe and Kepler, shifted to Galileo’s Italy, moved to Descartes’ France and came to Newton in Cambridge, England. The scientific revolution was also a philosophical revolution, and for reasons we noted. In the seventeenth century science was “natural philosophy,” and figures that history would consign exclusively to one or the other of these two fieldsphilosophy or science-contributed to both. Thus Newton wrote a good deal of philosophy of science, and Descartes made contributions to physics. But it was the British empiricists who made a self-conscious attempt to examine whether the theory of knowledge espoused by these scientists would vindicate the methods which Newton, Boyle, Harvey, and other experimental scientists employed to expand the frontiers of human knowledge so vastly in their time.
