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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A five page paper which considers the social, economic and political conditions which are necessary for scientific revolution to take place, with particular reference to the ideas put forward in Koestler's The Sleepwalkers. Bibliography lists one source.
Page Count:
5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: JL5_JLkoestl.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
is comparatively easy to note the points at which significant changes in thought and practice have occurred: the impression one gains, on looking back, is that the progress of scientific
thought was relatively smooth albeit directed by instances of radical change at various points along the timeline. The implication is that the major figures of scientific revolution are aware of
the changes which they are implementing, and are driven by their own vision of the more modern world which they are creating: in other words, such revolutionary developments are, in
effect, deliberate rather than accidental. Koestler, in Sleepwalkers, challenges this view. He asserts that
those individuals who are regarded as giants of scientific development, such as Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were not working from a self-conscious and overt intention to take metaphysical thought and
transform it into empirical science, but were more like sleepwalkers, acting without conscious and deliberate motivation. Although in retrospect one can perceive a pattern of scientific progress which appears smooth
and organic, Koestler argues that this is not in fact the case, and that scientific advances took place because of changes in social history which provided a more congenial environment
for new ideas to flourish. The two aspects of developing civilisation - socio-historical change and the growth of scientific thought - are therefore dependent on one another for progress to
take place. He notes, for example, that Kepler presented a theory of attraction between planetary bodies which is significantly similar to Newtons laws of gravitation, and yet it is not
until Newtons time that such theories were able to become commonly accepted. He asserts that Galileo was hampered not by his fear of the Church but of the ridicule of
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