“Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.”

— Bertrand Russell, book A History of Western Philosophy

Source: A History of Western Philosophy

Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

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logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and politi… 1872–1970

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“The chief business of seventeenth-century philosophy was to reckon with seventeenth-century science… the chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

R. G. Collingwood (1937), as cited in: Patrick Suppes (1973), Logic, methodology and philosophy of science: Proceedings.

“Science has only existed for a few hundred years, and its most spectacular achievements have occurred within the last century. Viewed from a historical perspective, the modern era of rapid scientific and technological progress appears to be not a permanent feature of reality, but an abberation, a fluke, a product of a singular convergence of social, intellectual, and political factors.”

John Horgan (journalist) (1953) American science journalist

Source: The End of Science (1996), p. 14

“For many centuries before modern science, and for the first two and a half centuries of modern science, the division of reality into matter and light seemed self-evident. …As long as the separation between the massive and the massless persisted, a unified description of the physical world could not be achieved.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Source: The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces (2008), Ch. 1, p. 9.

“Of all tyrannies of unreason in the modern world, one holds a supremely evil preeminence. It covered the period from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth”

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 55
Context: Of all tyrannies of unreason in the modern world, one holds a supremely evil preeminence. It covered the period from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, and throughout those hundred years was waged a war of hatreds,—racial, religious, national, and personal;—of ambitions, ecclesiastical and civil;—of aspirations, patriotic and selfish;—of efforts, noble and vile. During all those weary generations Europe became one broad battlefield,—drenched in human blood and lighted from innumerable scaffolds. In this confused struggle great men appeared—heroes and martyrs, ruffians and scoundrels: all was anarchic. The dominant international gospel was that of Machiavelli.

“The rise of new science in the seventeenth century laid hold upon general culture in the next century. The enlightenment… testified to the widespread belief that at last light had dawned, that dissipation of ignorance, superstition, and bigotry was at hand, and the triumph of reason was assured -- for reason was counterpart in man of the laws of nature which science was disclosing. The reign of law in the natural world was to be followed by the reign of law in human affairs.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

"Fictions of Every Kind" in Books and Bookmen (February 1971)

“Religion can probably out live any scientific discoveries which could be made. It can accommodate itself to them. The root cause of the decay of faith has not been any particular discovery of science, but rather the general spirit of science and certain basic assumptions upon which modern science, from the seventeenth century onwards, has proceeded.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p.5.

“The seventeenth-century Iroquois”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Context: The seventeenth-century Iroquois... practiced a dream psychotherapy that was remarkably similar to Freud's discoveries two hundred years later. The Iroquois recognized the existence of an unconscious, the force of unconscious desires, the way in which the conscious mind attempts to repress unpleasant thoughts, the emergence of unpleasant thoughts in dreams, and the mental and physical (psychosomatic) illnesses that may be caused by the frustration of unconscious desires. The Iroquois knew that their dreams did not deal in facts but rather in symbols.... And one of the techniques employed by the Iroquois seers to uncover the latent meanings behind a dream was free association...<!-- p. 95

“Contract Bridge is likely the most challenging card game extant; it is certainly the the most obsessive for its ranks of zealous followers. The initial progenitor of all Bridge forms is the game of Triumph, which gained currency about A. D. 1500. In the mid seventeenth century, Triumph evolved into Whist, a partnership game for four players. The change from Whist to Bridge occurred about 1886with a publication in London of a small pamphlet, titled Biritch or Russian Whist.”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Eight, Contract Bridge, p. 252

“Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!”

Ian Hacking (1936) Canadian philosopher

Source: The Emergence Of Probability, 1975, Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 31.

“Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.”

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