Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

98 SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS UP TO DESCARTES
‘technology’—as ‘the scientific study of the practical or industrial arts’. 5 It is
now commonplace to refer to the great abundance of technical activity and of
technical advances in the Latin Middle Ages, but it is more problematic how far
the latter were recognized as constituting a progressive movement. Many, and
particularly those emphasizing the effects of Christian doctrine and monastic
discipline, have seen a conscious thrust in the direction of improvement, but the
evidence is sparse, especially compared with that to be found in the Renaissance
and later periods. Then, a frequently met symbolic triad to emphasize the
technical superiority of the moderns over the ancients was that constituted by
printing, gunpowder and the magnetic compass, although ironically all of these
can in one form or another be traced back to China, in whose civilizations few
symptoms of a general idea of progress have been located. 6 We should add the
example of clocks. In China, and also in the Muslim countries, there had been a
penchant for producing very elaborate water-driven clocks. Around 1300,
mechanical clocks appeared in Europe, and very soon cathedrals and cities were
vying with each other to produce ever more ornate devices, which, by their very
public display, had a better chance than the other three of infecting the populace
with the ideal of progress. Interestingly enough, Giovanni Dondi, the fourteenthcentury
constructor of a particularly impressive astronomical clock, was at pains
to disparage modern achievements in comparison with those of the ancients. 7
But Giovanni was a university man, associated with the nascent humanism, and
particularly that represented by Petrarch. His show of modesty may not have
been shared by his less learned contemporaries: it certainly was not by their
successors, and very soon humanists also were singing to the same tune. 8
In a seminal article published almost half a century ago Edgar Zilsel 9 saw the
effective genesis of the ideal of scientific progress as located among the
‘superior artisans’ of the sixteenth century, and with qualifications this thesis has
proved remarkably resilient. One necessary modification was to bring
contemporary scholars who systematically examined the crafts more centrally
into the picture, and, together with this, I think that we should emphasize more
than has sometimes been done a somewhat speculative aspect of the indisputably
important role of printing. This is in shifting the image of knowledge. In the
Middle Ages, knowledge was viewed as predominantly an individual affair, a
habitus ingrained into a person’s mind by education. In acquiring such a habitus
the individual progressed, but there was no very potent image of a general
increase of knowledge. With the advent of printing, books multiplied in overall
physical volume far more than ever before, and it is plausible to envisage with
this the image of a concomitant (although not proportional) increase in their
contents, so that the sum total of knowledge itself appeared to have increased. To
put it in contemporary terms, we have progress in Sir Karl Popper’s ‘Third
World’ of objective knowledge, conceived as existing independently of the
knowing subject. 10
But, whatever the causative influences, the idea of technical progress certainly
became prominent in the sixteenth century, and was associated with a search for