Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Historical Tendencies on Social Sciences
- Scientific Revolution
- Science emerged as a distinct mode of inquiry in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries during a period
known as the Scientific Revolution
- The period of great advances in the
sciences, roughly 1500-1700
- Copernicus placed the sun at the
center of the universe, rather than
the earth.
- Galileo put forth the basic principle of
relativity (the laws of physics are the same in
any system that is moving at a constant speed
in a straight line).
- Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) is responsible for
creating Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.
- Empiricism
- Empiricism about concepts is the
view that our concepts derive in
some sense from our experiences.
- Philosophical empiricists hold no knowledge to be
properly inferred or deduced unless it is derived
from one's sense-based experience.
- Hume denied that inductive inference can be justified by
logical argument, but he defended a wider conception of
rationality (or at least sensible action) based on our natural
impulses to believe and act
- Rationalism,
- The first Western philosopher to stress rationalist insight was
Pythagoras, a shadowy figure of the 6th century . Noticing that, for
a right triangle, a square built on its hypotenuse equals the sum of
those on its sides and that the pitches of notes sounded on a lute bear
a mathematical relation to the lengths of the strings
- Rationalism is a philosophical movement which gathered
momentum during the Age of Reason of the 17th Century. It is
usually associated with the introduction of mathematical methods
into philosophy during this period by the major rationalist figures,
Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza
- René Descartes is one of the earliest and best known proponents
of Rationalism. He believed that knowledge of eternal truths could
be attained by reason alone, without the need for any sensory
experience.
- Baruch Spinoza's philosophy centred on several
principles, most of which relied on his notion that God is
the only absolute substance and that substance is
composed of two attributes, thought and extension
- Gottfried Leibniz attempted believed that ideas exist in the
intellect innately, but only in a virtual sense, and it is only
when the mind reflects on itself that those ideas are
actualized.
- Nicolas Malebranche posited that although humans attain
knowledge through ideas rather than sensory perceptions,
those ideas exist only in God, so that when we access them
intellectually, we apprehend objective truth
- Evolutionism
- In the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced Western biological
thinking: essentialism, the belief that every species has essential
characteristics that are unalterable, a concept which had developed from
medieval Aristotelian metaphysics, and that fit well with natural theology
- Darwin’s evolutionary theory of natural selection gave a more
rational explanation of the formation of new species. As per natural
selection, various species originated from a single species as a result
of adaptation to the changing environment.
- It's a scientific theory of the origin of
species of plants and animals
- Positivism
- Comte explains that, in its quest for
truth the society passes through
three successive evolution phases
- Positivism is a philosophical theory stating that
certain ("positive") knowledge is based on natural
phenomena and their properties and relations
- It's a philosophical system founded by Auguste Comte,
concerned with positive facts and phenomena, and
excluding speculation upon ultimate causes or origins.