As well as seeing how academics didn’t always agree on the outcomes of historical eras such as the Middle Ages in the first unit, I learned about the different approaches people had regarding the Scientific Revolution, from authors such as Newman, Cajete, Cañizares-Esguerra, Kuhn, Merchant, and Cunningham and Williams. I never considered the possibility of there being multiple scientific revolutions instead of one big one in Europe. Doing a debate arguing for the latter let me appreciate both sides of the argument, even though I do still believe in the latter. Along with that, I never thought about how many individual people worked together to create such a big historical change. Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton all contributed to the Scientific Revolution in their own way. As I’ve said in my last reflection, I’ve learned specific examples of the accomplishments of various cultures in all fields: art, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, medicine, etc., and the methods and thought processes that led to these innovations. In the last unit, I learned about the specifics of the Scientific Revolution i.e. scientific institutions, the role of women in science, the epistemology of Native American and African science and further context as to what alchemy actually is.
The content of this course is relevant to me because there is a strong focus on philosophy, which I am very interested in. The amount of information regarding philosophy in this course definitely got me thinking more about philosophy, sometimes to a distressing degree. The ideas of important ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle were built on over time by the philosophers succeeding them. Examples are mechanical philosophy, atomism and humanism, which made me think about the nature of people and the universe far too much.
