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Keywords

Progress, science, history, philosophy

Abstract

The popularization of mathematics in the Modern Era and the subsequent proliferation of technologies have created a cultural environment in which the meaning of 'science' is often assumed to be self-evident. Philosophically, this presumptive consensus derives many of its arguments from Popperian criteria, which seek to delineate the critical differences between 'science' and 'non-science.' These demarcations imply that 'science' is an empiric reality, discoverable in both its methods and qualities. Although Kuhnian relativism has attenuated the robustness of these assertions, the fact remains that many individuals purport to have an intuitive ability to state definitively, "This is science." Such claims contradict history. If anything, the historical record suggests that the societal conceptualization of 'science' has been in a continuous state of flux. For example, many disciplines which were once unilaterally accepted as philosophical are now dismissed off-hand; modes of explanation which were once considered authoritative and convincing are now regarded as irreparably flawed; and institutions which once produced significant philosophical achievements are now criticized for their self-defeating methods and repressive elitism. How then should historians reconcile these epistemic disparities? Collingwood has proposed that the object of history is the 'reenactment' of the past. Ideological unification to this degree seems to be temporally unattainable, but the underlying assumption of Collingwood's thesis, that history should be understood in its own terms, is sound. To this end, this paper will attempt to analyze the seemingly incongruous behavior of some of the most venerated natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Sir Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle.

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