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In the history of ideas, the 'continuity thesis' is the hypothesis that there was no radical discontinuity between the intellectual development of the High Middle Ages, and the developments in the Renaissance and early modern period. Thus the idea of an intellectual or scientific revolution following the Renaissance is a myth. Continuity theorists argue that the real intellectual revolution came earlier, either in the 12th century, with Averroes' revival of Aristotle and its embrace by the Latin West during a Renaissance of the 12th century, or even earlier at the turn of the millenium in the Islamic civilization. (See Scientific Revolution for the contrary view.)

Contents

Duhem

Franklin and Pasnau

Briffault

Bala

Notes

References

Duhem

The idea of a continuity, rather than contrast between medieval and modern thought begins with Pierre Duhem, the French physicist and philosopher of science. It is set out in his ten volume work on the history of science, ''Le système du monde: histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic''. Unlike many former historians such as Voltaire and Condorcet, who did not consider the Middle Ages to be of much intellectual importance , he tried to show that the Roman Catholic Church had helped foster the development of Western science. His work was prompted by his research into the origins of statics, where he encountered the works of medieval mathematicians and philosophers such as Nicole Oresme and Roger Bacon. He consequently came to regard them as the founders of modern science, their having in his view anticipated many of the discoveries of Galileo and later thinkers. Duhem concluded that "the mechanics and physics of which modern times are justifiably proud proceed, by an uninterrupted series of scarcely perceptible improvements, from doctrines professed in the heart of the medieval schools."^[1].

Franklin and Pasnau

More recently the Australian mathematician and historian of science James Franklin has argued that the idea of a European Renaissance is a myth. ^[2]. He characterizes the myth as the view that around the fifteenth century (ca. 1400s AD/CE):

★ There was a sudden dawning of a new outlook on the world after a thousand years of darkness

★ Ancient learning was rediscovered

★ New ideas about intellectual inquiry and freedom replaced reliance on authority

★ Scientific investigation replaced the sterile disputes of the schools.
He claims that the Renaissance was in fact a period when thought declined significantly, bringing to an end a period of advance in the late Middle Ages, and that the twelfth century was the "real, true, and unqualified renaissance". For example, the rediscovery of ancient knowledge, which the later Italian humanists claimed for themselves, was actually accomplished in the twelfth century.
Franklin cites many examples of scientific advances in the medieval period that predate or anticipate later 'discoveries'. For example, the first advances in geometrical optics and mechanics were in the twelfth century. The first steps in understanding motion, and continuous variation in general, occurred in the fourteenth centuries with the work of the scientists of the Merton School, at Oxford in the 1330s and 1340s. (Franklin notes that there is no phrase in ancient Greek or Latin equivalent to "kilometres per hour"). Nicole Oresme, who wrote on theology and money, devoted much of his effort to science and mathematics and invented graphs, was the first to perform calculations involving probability, and the first to compare the workings of the universe to a clock. (See also Grant 1974.)
But little of importance occurs in any other branches of science in the two centuries between Oresme and Copernicus. Like other historians of this period, Franklin attributes the decline to the plague of 1348-1350, (the black death), which killed a third of the people in Europe. Huizinga's examination of this period ^[3] suggests a tendency towards elaborate theory of signs, which Franklin compares with the degeneracy of modern Marxism. He cites the late Renaissance naturalist Aldrovandi, who considered his account of the snake incomplete until he had treated it in its anatomical, heraldic, allegorical, medicinal, anecdotal, historical and mythical aspects. He marks the fifteenth century as coinciding with the decline of literature. Chaucer died in 1400; the next writers that anyone still reads are Erasmus, More, Rabelais and Machiavelli, just after 1500. "It is hard to think of any writer in English between Chaucer and Spenser who is now read even by the most enthusiastic students. The gap is almost two hundred years." He points to the development of astrology and alchemy in the heyday of the Renaissance.
Franklin concedes that in painting the Renaissance really did excel, but unfortunately the artistic skill of the Renaissance concealed its incompetence in anything else. He cites Da Vinci, who was supposed to be good at everything, but who on examination, "had nothing of importance to say on most subjects". (A standard history of mathematics says that "[Leonardo's] published jottings on mathematics are trivial, even puerile, and show no mathematical talent whatever." The invention of printing he compares to television, which produced "a flood of drivel catering to the lowest common denominator of the paying public, plus a quantity of propaganda paid for by the sponsors".
The philosopher and historian Robert Pasnau makes a similar, but more extreme claim that "modernity came in the late twelfth century, with Averroes' magisterial revival of Aristotle and its almost immediate embrace by the Latin West." ^[4]
Pasnau argues (p. 4) that in some branches of seventeenth-century philosophy, the insights of the scholastic era fall into neglect and disrepute. He disputes the modernist view of medieval thought as subservient to the views of Aristotle. By contrast "scholastic philosophers agree among themselves no more than does any group of philosophers from any historical period." Furthermore, the almost unknown period between 1400 and 1600 was not barren, but gave rise to vast quantities of material, much of which still survives. This complicates any generalizations about the supposedly novel developments in the seventeenth-century. He claims that the concerns of scholastic philosophy are largely continuous with the central themes of the modern era, that early modern philosophy, though different in tone and style, is a natural progression out of later medieval debates, and that a grasp of the scholastic background is essential to an understanding of the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, and others.

Briffault

Robert Briffault (1876-1948) also criticized the idea of a Renaissance taking place in the 15th century. He instead argued that "a real Renaissance" took place centuries earlier in the Islamic civilization at the turn of the millenium:^[5]

Bala

Another contrary view has been recently proposed by Arun Bala in his dialogical history of the birth of modern science. Bala argues that the changes involved in the Scientific Revolution – the mathematical realist turn, the mechanical philosophy, the corpuscular (atomic) philosophy, the central role assigned to the Sun in Copernican heliocentrism - have to be seen as rooted in multicultural influences on Europe. Islamic science gave the first exemplar of a mathematical realist theory with Alhazen's ''Book of Optics'' in which physical light rays traveled along mathematical straight lines. The swift transfer of Chinese mechanical technologies in the medieval era shifted European sensibilities to perceive the world in the image of a machine. The Indian number system, which developed in close association with atomism in India, carried implicitly a new mode of mathematical atomic thinking. And the heliocentric theory which assigned central status to the sun, as well as Newton’s concept of force acting at a distance, were rooted in ancient Egyptian religious ideas associated with Hermeticism. Bala argues that by ignoring such multicultural impacts we have been led to a Eurocentric conception of the the Scientific Revolution.^[6]

Notes

1. Duhem 1905 vol. 1, part iv, p. 38
2. Franklin, "The Renaissance Myth"
3. Huizinga 1919
4. Pasnau 2006
5. Briffault, p. 188-191.
6. Bala, 2006

References

★ Bala, Arun, ''The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science''. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ISBN 978-1-4039-7468-6.

★ Briffault, Robert, ''Making of Humanity''.

★ Duhem, Pierre, ''Les origines de la statique'', Harvard University Press 1905.

★ Franklin , J., "The Renaissance Myth"

★ Franklin, J., ''The Science of Conjecture, Evidence and Probability before Pascal'', 2002.

★ Grant, E., ''Sourcebook in Medieval Science'', Harvard University Press 1974.

★ Huff, Toby E., ''The Rise of Early Modern Science'', Cambridge University Press 1993.

★ Huizinga, J., ''The Waning of the Middle Ages'', 1919.

★ Pasnau, R., "The Origins of Modern Philosophy ", ms, Colarado 2006.