第四章：勇敢者有新世界

原书及其作者：Jerry Brotton 的 “The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction”，大主题，小开本。文艺复兴对于欧洲，是从不假思索的中世纪世界中出离的年代，它就和现代性本身一样复杂。

系列上一篇：Brave new world｜新世界

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Chapter 5 Science and philosophy

p98 His fate encapsulates modern anxieties about the ethics of scientific experimentation. This ambivalence (we want to know, but can we know too much?) captures the mood of the transformations in popular and applied science that took place in the 15th and 16th centuries. The individual’s relationship to his/her mind, body, and environment were all transformed as a result of renewed scientific collaboration in the pursuit of practical problem-solving, exchanges of ideas between cultures, and the impact of new technologies.

From macrocosm to microcosm

• 日心说出现，早期的解剖学医书出现(anatomy)，还有更多的许多领域的学科知识在非常密集的涌现着各种突破。就像前面很多章的内容应该产生的启发一样，这些突破许多都与现实的需要和各方权力角斗中的投资密切相关，因此非常自然的，新知识和新技术的不断涌现也反过来让当时的社会的求知氛围更浓烈，形势的的变化更加动态。
• 当然，伴随着激动人心的技术知识革新大潮一起出现的还有，传统宗教世界观大受冲击、人们在新知面前害怕彷徨、宗教努力破害某些学者、热钱涌入投资各种只是“被认为“有灵效的药物或商品、一些有害无益的医学治疗方式出现又消失、资本持有者和一些学者或医生发生合作勾兑或者冲突排挤…

Science from the east

• 阿拉伯世界在保存和翻译古希腊的知识与思想遗产方面，扮演的角色万分重要。

The art of science

• 现在数学和其他许多新兴科学长足发展，人们自然而然地被激发出一种热情，认为和科学沾边的就是好的(猛的让我想起2021年大为流行的“元宇宙”概念)，那艺术创作当然也要与科学融合。

p108 The printing press brought together art and science as never before, and one of the individuals who capitalized on this situation was Albrecht Dürer. He quickly mastered the new technique of copperplate engraving, and travelled to Italy ‘to learn the secrets of the art of perspective’. He believed that ‘the new art must be based upon science – in particular, upon mathematics, as the most exact, logical, and graphically constructive of the sciences’. In 1525 he published a treatise on geometry and perspective entitled A Course in the Art of Measurement with Compass and Ruler, to ‘benefit not only the painters but also goldsmiths, sculptors, stonemasons, carpenters and all those who have to rely on measurement’.

• 同时，这时期的许多“科学”也像一种想象的艺术。达·芬奇就是文艺复兴年间人，除了画作，他也有许多军事和建筑方面设计蓝图。这些蓝图不可不说是从对科学的思考和自信中诞生的，但其中许多设计根本不切实际，或者对于当时的技术、材料水平来讲完全不现实。这样的蓝图也没成功吸引到愿意掏钱的赞助者，达芬奇的绝大多设计图样从未被建造。

Natural philosophy

p110 There was no divide between science, philosophy, and magic in the 15th century. All three came under the general heading of ‘natural philosophy’.

P110-112 Central to the development of natural philosophy was the recovery of classical authors, most importantly the work of Aristotle and Plato. At the beginning of the 15th century Aristotle remained the basis for all scholastic speculation on philosophy and science. Kept alive in the Arabic translations and commentaries of Averroës and Avicenna, Aristotle provided a systematic perspective on mankind’s relationship with the natural world. Surviving texts like his Physics, Metaphysics, and Meteorology provided scholars with the logical tools to understand the forces that created the natural world. Mankind existed within this world as a mortal ‘political animal’ destined to forge social communities thanks to his ability to reason above and beyond any other animal. From the early 15th century, humanist scholars began to translate Aristotle into Latin and discover new texts such as the Poetics and the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanics. Engineers in building and construction utilized the Mechanics with its description of motion and mechanical devices. In the world of political and domestic management Leonardo Bruni translated the Politics, Nicomachean Ethics, and Oeconomicus, the latter a study of estates and household organization, which he argued were central to the civic organization of 15th-century Italian society.

P113 Subsequent philosophers rapidly expanded and refined Ficino’s Neoplatonism. In the introduction to his Conclusiones (1486), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola attempted to create what he called ‘the concord of Plato and Aristotle’, in an attempt to unify classical philosophy with Christianity. Pico drew on mystical Jewish and Arabic texts (he started learning Arabic in acknowledgement of the significance of Arab philosophy) to establish natural philosophy as the best method of metaphysical enquiry. ‘Natural philosophy’ he claimed, ‘will allay the strife and differences of opinion which vex, distract, and wound the spirit’. Unfortunately, Pico’s Conclusiones were investigated by a papal commission that condemned some of his theses as heretical.

P113-114 Both Plato and Aristotle continued to exert an enormous influence upon the art, literature, philosophy, and science of the 16th century. Neoplatonism inspired the artistic and literary work of figures as diverse as Michelangelo, Erasmus, and Spenser, while Aristotelianism remained a sufficiently diverse body of work to allow scientists and philosophers to revise it in line with their expanding world. However, as the century drew to a close, the intellectual primacy of both philosophers was slowly but surely eroded. The discovery of America led Montaigne to realize in 1580 that the work of Aristotle and Plato ‘cannot apply to these new lands’. Galileo’s refutation of Aristotle’s theories of motion, acceleration, and the nature of the universe in the early 17th century led him to conclude ‘I greatly doubt that Aristotle ever tested by experiment’.

P114-115 Bacon proposed a completely new vision of scientific knowledge based on the careful compilation of natural data based on observation, experimentation, and induction; in other words, deriving general theoretical principles from particular facts. It was a massive undertaking of the reformation of the classification of the natural sciences that remained incomplete at the time of his death, but it broke with the classical assumptions revered by Renaissance scholars, and anticipated the experimental science carried out by the Royal Society in the later decades of the 17th century. In 1626 Bacon completed his New Atlantis, a utopian world that drew on Plato, but whose most valued citizens were no longer philosophers but experimental scientists. It was a shift that would influence modern science and its break with philosophy.

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原书信息：Brotton, Jerry, The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions (Oxford, 2006; online edn, Oxford Academic, 24 Sept. 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780192801630.001.0001