Explaining the Rise of Modern Science: A Dialogical Perspective

In his study How Modern Science Came into the World: Four Civilizations, One 17th-century Breakthrough the historian of science Floris Cohen develops a comparative history of nature-knowledge in Europe, China, the Islamic world, and to some extent India, which argues for the European origins of three modes of nature-knowledge—kinetic corpuscular, realist mathematical, and fact-finding experimental—that emerged and combined in Europe to produce modern science. Arun Bala argues in this chapter that these three ‘modes of nature-knowledge’ are more illuminatingly seen as inspired by outside influences on Renaissance Europe—the computational techniques associated with the Indian number system, the Arabic optics of Ibn al-Haytham, and the flow of technologies from China. He shows that a dialogical approach emphasizing Afro-Eurasian circulations of knowledge, which goes beyond Cohen’s civilizational comparative perspective, better explains the rise of modern science by linking it into the global context of Renaissance Europe.