CH 15: COMPARISON

Why did the Scientific Revolution occur in Europe rather than in China or the Islamic world?


Europe’s historical development as a reinvigorated and fragmented civilization arguably gave rise to conditions particularly favorable to the scientific enterprise. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Europeans had evolved a legal system that guaranteed a mea sure of independence for a variety of institutions — the Church, towns and cities, guilds, professional associations, and universities. This legal revolution was based on the idea of a “corporation,” a collective group of people that was treated as a unit, a legal person, with certain rights to regulate and control its own members.

Most important for the development of science in the West was the autonomy of its emerging universities. By 1215, the University of Paris was recognized as a “corporation of masters and scholars,” which could admit and expel students, establish courses of instruction, and grant a “license to teach” to its faculty. Such universities — for example, in Paris, Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, and Salamanca — became “neutral zones of intellectual autonomy” in which scholars could pursue their studies in relative freedom from the dictates of church or state authorities. Within them, the study of the natural order began to slowly separate itself from philosophy and theology and to gain a distinct identity. Their curricula featured “a basically scientific core of readings and lectures” that drew heavily on the writings of the Greek thinker Aristotle, which had only recently become available to Western Europeans. Most of the major figures in the Scientific Revolution had been trained in and were affiliated with these universities.

pg. 665