Readers of this monumental study of the past four centuries - the
era of modern science - have a great treat in store. Cohen, the
distinguished Harvard historian of science, is a lucid expositor
who states his views boldly and provides rich documentation. His
explicit intention is to examine the historical meaning of the term
"revolution" as it was used by innovators and their contemporaries
at specific times and places, and how its use reflects and affects
social and political currents. To some extent he regards Thomas
Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a watershed,
promoting lively debate that has affected science-historians as
much as scientists. (Contemporary geologists are among the first to
admit that the plate tectonics revolution fulfills Kuhn's notion of
a basic shift in the paradigm.) Criteria for revolution are,
however, strictly historical: 1) acknowledgment of the signal
importance of the contribution by peers; 2) historical evidence
that the scientific innovation was adopted; 3) affirmation by past
and present historians, philosophers, and historians of science; 4)
agreement among today's workers in the scientific field that the
work was revolutionary. By these criteria Newton, Descartes,
Harvey, Lavoisier, Darwin, Bohr, Einstein, and Freud are
revoluionary figures; Copernicus, Kepler, Vesalius, and Paracelsus
are not. Cohen is particularly emphatic with regard to Copernicus.
Not only does he regard Copernicus as an almost slavish follower of
Ptolemy, departing only in his declaration that the earth moves;
but Cohen also takes to task myriad scholars for erroneously
attributing to Kant the statement that he was effecting a
"Copernican revolution" in philosophy. Cohen says that Kant was a
modernist in his use of the word revolution, giving it the
post-1789 meaning of a radical transformation (as in government),
as opposed to earlier cyclical or ebb-and-flow notions of
revolution (inherent in the Latin root and the use of the word in
mathematics or astronomy). Much of the value of Cohen's text lies
in the meticulous case histories of his celebrated cast of
characters - embracing their writings, their style, the views of
friends and enemies, and the larger cultural context. In addition
to the natural sciences and medicine, Cohen also examines the
status of the encyclopedists, the French positivists, Goethe, Marx,
Engels, and some contemporaries of Freud. A final chapter discusses
the joining of today's notion of revolutions as radical, with the
idea of conversion - as when a scientist staunchly opposed to an
innovation suddenly "sees the light." (Cohen offers more than one
area where scholarship in needed, e.g., explorations of the
psychology of revolutionary thinkers, analysis of how concepts are
transformed.) A wonderful excursion into past and present
revolutions that enriches the literature and should in itself
generate some fine mind-turnings. (Kirkus Reviews)
Only a scholar as rich in learning as I. Bernard Cohen could do
justice to a theme so subtle and yet so grand. Spanning five
centuries and virtually all of scientific endeavor, "Revolution in
Science" traces the nuances that differentiate both scientific
revolutions and human perceptions of them, weaving threads of
detail from physics, mathematics, behaviorism, Freud, atomic
physics, and even plate tectonics and molecular biology, into the
larger fabric of intellectual history.
How did "revolution," a term from the physical sciences, meaning
a turning again and implying permanence and recurrence--the
cyclical succession of the seasons, the 'revolutions' of the
planets in their orbits--become transformed into an expression for
radical change in political and socioeconomic affairs, then become
appropriated once again to the sciences?
How have political revolutions--French, American, Bolshevik--and
such intellectual forces as Darwinism further modified the concept,
from revolution in science as a dramatic break with the past to the
idea that science progresses by the slow accumulation of knowledge?
And what does each transformation in each historical period tell us
about the deep conceptual changes in our image of the scientist and
scientific activity?
Cohen's exploration seeks to uncover nothing less than the
nature of all scientific revolutions, the stages by which they
occur, their time scale, specific criteria for determining whether
or not there has been a revolution, and the creative factors in
producing a revolutionary new idea. His book is a probing analysis
of the history of an idea and one of the most impressive surveys of
the history of science ever undertaken.
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