Scientific revolution

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani first approaches the scientific revolution as the Galilean-Cartesian break with Aristotle's finalist physics. With inertia and impact, motion comes from outside. Descartes "de-animates" the world and thus, through a ruse of reason, completes Christian transcendence against animism1. He sees in it a passage from quality to quantity: colour, weight or temperature become measurable relations, which creates a consensus23. With Kant, he holds that Galileo and Torricelli discover that reason sees only what it produces itself2. In 2021, drawing on a reading of André Akoun on Koyré, he presents the passage from the closed world to the infinite universe as a crisis of the subject, from Nicholas of Cusa to Kepler's horror at Bruno's universe, echoing Pascal4. He also links the appearance of automata to it5. Against Heidegger, who traces the atomic bomb back to Descartes, he defends this break as a conquest of abstraction in which truth becomes the daughter of time. He also compares Bellarmine's "we cannot know" to the supposed absence of any alternative to capitalism6.

1. 1#1.4 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?10 Dec 2015
2. 2#1.5 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?10 Dec 2015
3. 3Musicosophie 11. Musiques modales et tonales24 Jan 2021
4. 49 #11 Comment des sciences de l'histoire peuvent-elles être réelles?7 Jan 2021
5. 59 #22 Science et/ou philosophie de l' "intelligence artificielle" - 2ème partie27 May 2021
6. 6La panzer-philosophie contre le cogito : néo-fascisme ou idéologie de la nature. Heidegger/Descartes5 Mar 2022

Introduction produced automatically from the 7 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.