Toward the Scientific Revolution

Calendar

SES #	TOPICS	KEY DATES
Week 1: Introduction
1	Introductory Lecture
Week 2: Beginnings
2	“What is Science?”
3	The Presocratics
Week 3: The World According to Plato and Aristotle
4	Plato’s World
5	Aristotle’s Physics
Week 4: Aristotle’s Biology
6	Aristotle and Hippocrates on Biology and Medicine	First Paper Due
Week 5: Ancient Mathematics, Astronomy, and Engineering
7	Ptolemy and Euclid
8	Galen and Alexandrian Engineers
Week 6: Science in the Middle Ages
9	Arabic Science
10	Medieval European Universities
Week 7: Medieval Technology
11	Medieval Technology
Week 8: The European Renaissance
12	No lecture	In-class Midterm Exam
13	Patronage, Alchemy, and Humanism
Week 9: Revolutions in the Body and in the Stars
14	Vesalius and Anatomy
15	The Copernican Revolution	Second Paper Due
Week 10: Observatories and Ellipses
16	Tycho Brahe and the New Astronomy
17	Kepler: Mysticism and Mars
Week 11: Galileo: Astronomy, and the Church
18	Interpreting Scripture and the Heavens
Week 12: Galileo’s Physics and Bacon’s Collecting
19	Galileo’s Physics
20	Bacon and the Culture of Collecting	Second Paper Revision Due
Week 13: Descartes’s New Methods for the New Sciences
21	Descartes’s Mechanical Philosophy
Week 14: Newton and Newtonianism
22	Newton’s Dynamics and Gravitation
23	Newton’s Optics and the Culture of Newtonianism
Week 15: Laboratories, Societies, and Gentlemen
24	England’s Royal Society
25	No lecture	Final Paper Due