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COLLOQUIA & CONFERENCES
INTERPRETING THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION:
THE CASE FOR OPTICS
Mark Smith
Department of History
University of Missouri
October 6, 2006
Friday, 3:30pm-5:30pm
Nursing, Room 127
It has long been fashionable among medievalists to approach the transition
from medieval to early modern science and its culmination in the so-called
Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century in evolutionary rather
than revolutionary terms. A particularly compelling example of this
approach is David Lindberg's analysis of Kepler's account of retinal
imaging, which he reduces to a natural outgrowth of the medieval
Perspectivist theory of light and sight. Card-carrying medievalist thought
I am (and erstwhile student of Lindberg's to boot), I will contravene his
analysis in this paper by showing that, far from evolutionary, the
transition from Perspectivist to Keplerian optics was in fact revolutionary
in a fundamentally Kuhnian way.
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