science: The Craft Tradition and Early Empiricism in Europe

Certain technical innovations during the Early Middle Ages, e.g., development of the heavy plow, the windmill, and the magnetic compass, as well as improvements in ship design, had increased agricultural productivity and navigation and contributed to the rise of cities, with their craft guilds and universities. These changes were more pronounced in N Europe than in the south. The introduction of papermaking (12th cent.) and printing (1436–50) made possible the recording of craft traditions that had been handed down orally in previous centuries. This served to reduce the gap between the artisan classes and the scholar classes and contributed to the development of certain individuals who combined elements of both traditions—the artist-engineers such as Leonardo da Vinci, whose studies of flight and other technological problems were far beyond their time, and the artist-mathematicians, such as Albrecht Dürer, who examined the laws of perspective and wrote a textbook on geometry. Many artists came to study anatomy in detail.

Beginning in the 12th cent. the Arabic versions of Greek works were translated into Latin, an edition of Ptolemy's Almagest being translated at Toledo, and one of Aristotle's biological works in Sicily. Leonardo da Pisa (Fibonacci) presented some of the new Hindu-Arabic mathematics in the early 13th cent., and the medical and alchemical works were also translated. Also in the 13th cent., a trend toward empiricism was promoted by Roger Bacon and others, but this was short-lived. The dominant philosophy of science and other fields was the Christianized version of Aristotelian philosophy created by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas in the 13th cent. This view tended to treat scientific theories as extensions of philosophy and, for example, postulated the existence of angelic agents to account for the movements of the heavenly bodies. Even so, the craft traditions continued to develop in an independent manner, particularly medieval alchemy, and certain schools grew up that were not dominated by the main scholastic philosophy. The rebirth, or Renaissance, of learning spread throughout the West from the 14th to the 16th cent. and was further enhanced by the great voyages of discovery that began in the 15th cent.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• Promise and Problems of Modern Science
• Modern Science and Technology
• Astronomy beyond the Visual Spectrum
• The Abstraction of Mathematics
• Biology Becomes an Interdisciplinary Science
• Advances in Chemistry
• Quantum Theory and the Theory of Relativity
• The Impact of Elementary Particles
• Revolutions in Modern Science
• Science and the Industrial Revolution
• New Ideas in Biology
• Birth of Modern Geology
• Advances in Astronomy
• Innovations in Chemistry
• The Evolution of Mathematics and Physics
• The Age of Classical Science
• The Impact of Sir Isaac Newton
• Improved Communication of Scientific Knowledge
• The Rejection of Traditional Paradigms
• The Scientific Revolution
• The Craft Tradition and Early Empiricism in Europe
• Muslim Preservation of Learning
• Scientific Progress in China and India
• Influence of the Alexandrian Schools
• Early Greek Contributions to Science
• Practical Applications in the Ancient Middle East
• The Beginnings of Science
• Branches of Specialization
• Role of Measurement and Experiment
• The Scientific Method
• Bibliography

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