New Directions in Thought and Culture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering key astronomical models, natural philosophers, scientific methodologies, political treatises, and institutional developments of the Scientific Revolution.

Scientific revolution

The sweeping change in the scientific view of the universe that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, establishing new scientific concepts and methods of construction that became the standard for assessing the validity of knowledge in the West.

Geocentrism

The dominant pre-Copernican outlook assuming that the earth was the center of the universe, combining Ptolemy's mathematical astronomy from the Almagest (150 C.E.) with the physical cosmology of Aristotle.

Epicycle

In the Ptolemaic astronomical system, a small circle around which a planet uniformly revolved, designed so that its center orbited along a larger circle to accurately replicate retrograde planetary motion as viewed from Earth.

Deferent

In the Ptolemaic system, the larger circle with the earth at or near its center, along which the center of a planet's epicycle moved uniformly.

Nicolaus Copernicus

A Polish priest and astronomer (1473–1543) who published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543), proposing a sun-centered model to reform the calendar for Easter and critique the dominant Ptolemaic system.

Heliocentric model

An astronomical system assuming that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun in circular or elliptical paths, retaining smaller epicycles in Copernicus's early version to explain planetary speed and retrograde motion.

Tycho Brahe

A Danish astronomer (1546–1601) who advocated an earth-centered universe where Mercury and Venus orbited the sun while the moon, sun, and other planets orbited the earth, compiling an extensive body of naked-eye planetary data.

Johannes Kepler

A German astronomer (1571–1630) influenced by Renaissance Neoplatonism who used Tycho Brahe's empirical data to publish The New Astronomy (1609), demonstrating that planetary orbits are elliptical rather than circular.

Galileo Galilei

An Italian mathematician and natural philosopher (1564–1642) who turned a Dutch telescope to the heavens in 1609, discovered Jupiter's moons and sunspots, and argued that nature conforms to mathematical laws rather than scholastic logic.

Isaac Newton

An English natural philosopher (1642–1727) who published Principia Mathematica (1687), formulating the law of universal gravitation—proportional to the inverse square of the distance—to explain planetary motion and inertia.

Empiricism

The philosophical methodology and practice of using experiment and observation derived from sensory evidence to construct scientific theories, championed by Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.

Mechanism

The early modern worldview that explained physical nature using mechanical metaphors—most notably comparing the universe to a clock designed by a divine watchmaker—and prioritized mathematical measurement over qualitative and sacramental meanings.

Francis Bacon

An English lawyer, statesman, and philosopher (1561–1626) regarded as the father of empiricism, who attacked scholastic devotion to ancient authority and advocated the pursuit of knowledge to improve the human condition and aid state power.

Novum Organum

A 1620 philosophical treatise by Francis Bacon that urged investigators of nature to rely on sensory induction over scholastic syllogisms, famously comparing true philosophers to bees rather than ants or spiders.

René Descartes

A French mathematician and philosopher (1596–1650) who invented analytic geometry and authored Discourse on Method (1637), establishing a philosophy based on rational deduction from clear, distinct, and indubitable ideas.

Rational deduction

Descartes's scientific method that prioritized reasoning from fundamental, self-evident general principles down to specific facts, in contrast to empirical observation and induction.

Extension

In Cartesian dualism, the defining property by which material bodies occupy physical space, marking the material realm that human reason can comprehend to the exclusion of nonmaterial entities.

Thomas Hobbes

An original English political philosopher (1588–1679) who applied mechanical and materialistic views of human nature to author Leviathan (1651), defending absolute sovereign power to suppress anarchy and civil conflict.

State of nature (Hobbesian)

Hobbes's concept of the natural human condition without a common political master, characterized by perpetual competition, mutual diffidence, 'a war of every man against every man,' and life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

John Locke

An influential seventeenth-century English philosopher (1632–1704) who defended limited representative government, argued for broad Christian religious toleration, and pioneered empirical psychology.

Second Treatise of Government

A 1690 work by John Locke asserting that political society is formed via contract to protect preexisting natural rights of life, liberty, and property, conferring a right of rebellion if rulers breach that trust.

Letter Concerning Toleration

A 1689 tract by John Locke arguing that government exists to preserve civil interests rather than enforce religion, advocating toleration among voluntary Christian groups while excluding Roman Catholics and atheists.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding

A 1690 psychological treatise by John Locke depicting the human mind at birth as a blank tablet (tabula rasa), rejecting the doctrine of original sin in favor of knowledge formed entirely through sense experience.

Institutions of sharing

Scientific academies and societies founded in the seventeenth century—such as the Royal Society of London and the French Academy of Science—to allow natural philosophers to gather, debate, publish findings, and witness verified experiments outside traditional universities.

Projectors

An English term for seventeenth-century individuals who sought the patronage and endorsement of scientific societies for practical, often commercial or military, inventions and technological schemes.

Margaret Cavendish

The Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673) and author of Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), who debated contemporary natural philosophers and became the only woman in the seventeenth century permitted to attend a meeting of the Royal Society of London.

Maria Cunitz

A German artisan-class female astronomer who published a treatise on astronomy so advanced that her husband was required to add a preface verifying that she, rather than he, had written it.