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The seventeenth century saw a profound transformation in European thought. The investigation of nature gradually detached itself from inherited interpretive frameworks, though this did not amount to a radical opposition to religion. For many thinkers, the study of the laws of creation was, rather, a path toward rationally grasping the work of God.<\/p>\n
In place of contemplative observation of nature, measurement, experiment, and the search for mathematical laws increasingly took hold. Knowledge increasingly became mastery as well: nature was meant to yield up its secrets, not only to be understood, but to be governed.<\/p>\n
One of the first thinkers to explicitly link knowledge with human capacity for action was Francis Bacon.<\/p>\n
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Behind the venerable monument to the “father of the scientific method” hides a man who believed himself called by providence to reorder the whole of human knowledge from its very foundations, though his own research never came close to that claim.<\/p>\n
This is all the more strange given that Bacon himself conducted scarcely any empirical research of note. While Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter and Harvey unraveled the circulation of the blood, Bacon, from his lavish study, drafted lists and methodological programs on how others ought to practice science.<\/p>\n
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The formula attributed to him, “knowledge is power,” captures the ambivalence of his thought in a single stroke. Knowledge of nature is sought not for the sake of wisdom alone, but to identify causes and produce effects. Nature becomes something to be measured, examined, and rendered useful for human ends. Later thinkers, such as Descartes, gave this development a particularly influential philosophical form with the separation of res cogitans and res extensa.<\/p>\n
Bacon does not call for mere observation of nature. For him, knowledge arises through intervention. Nature must be examined under artificially altered conditions, so that its forces, limits, and causes become visible. In this language already lies an attitude that conceives of the experiment as an instrument of control. It opened new possibilities for research, but at the same time degraded nature into an object of control and exploitation.<\/p>\n
For Bacon, religion and the investigation of nature posed no contradiction in this respect. On the contrary: each was meant to contribute, in its own way, to overcoming the consequences of the Fall. Faith was to renew humankind morally; science and technology, in turn, were to recover part of humanity’s lost dominion over creation.<\/p>\n
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It is precisely here that a connection characteristic of early modernity between the Christian worldview and the idea of scientific progress becomes visible. The new natural science did not simply arise from the displacement of religion. In Bacon, it drew much of its legitimacy from religion itself: the investigation and exploitation of nature could be understood as a contribution to restoring an order intended by God.<\/p>\n
This piety, however, had a political underside. In his essay “Of Unity in Religion,” Bacon describes religion as the most important bond of human society, whose value lies less in theological truth than in its pacifying, order-preserving effect. Disunity in matters of faith, he feared, not only opened the door to the mockery of unbelievers, but endangered the social order as a whole.<\/p>\n
This logic translated easily into political terms: while the scientific elite deciphered the mechanisms of the world, faith was meant to instill a moral conscience in subjects and keep them pacified. Herein lies the seed of a two-tiered society of knowledge: truth remained the exclusive instrument of those who governed, for the domination of nature and the state, while faith was degraded into a disciplinary duty for the governed.<\/p>\n
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In 1621, Bacon lost, in the wake of a corruption scandal, all the offices he had attained under James I, after his career had long stalled under Elizabeth I. His defense was that he had, on occasion, also ruled against people from whom he had accepted money. Despite this, he remained convinced that he would revolutionize humanity with his new methodology.<\/p>\n
One of the more notable ironies of the history of science is that his final experiment, as the story goes, was an attempt to determine whether cold could preserve organic flesh, a piece of everyday knowledge that peoples of cold climates had possessed since the Stone Age. While stuffing a dead chicken with snow in March 1626, he caught a chill that developed into pneumonia and, a few days later, killed him.<\/p>\n
Thus ended the life of a man who had come to understand knowledge not merely as contemplation, but as an instrument of human agency. But while Bacon was concerned above all with a new method for knowing nature through observation and experiment, a younger contemporary took up an even more fundamental question. Ren\u00e9 Descartes asked not only how we can know the world, but what we can know about it with certainty.<\/p>\n
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One of the most consequential distinctions in modern European philosophy received its classical form in his work: the separation between thinking mind, res cogitans, and extended matter, res extensa. It shaped scientific thought far beyond Descartes and still lingers today in some of its methodological habits. Yet its origins raise questions.<\/p>\n
The Cartesian cut contributed decisively to conceiving the material body as a calculable machine and to investigating nature free of theological or moral interpretation. It is true that modern science has long since abandoned the assumption that mind and matter are two separate substances; in laboratory practice, however, one mostly still proceeds as if they were, because this reductionism is methodologically very practical. Metaphysical dualism has lost much of its weight, but the habit of thought it fostered persists.<\/p>\n
Cartesianism was thus a historically and regionally specific model of thought, not a timeless law of nature. Above all, the idea of a purely objective observation of nature, from a disembodied, neutral standpoint outside the world, remains a construct. As researchers, we are always ourselves part of the system, inescapably inscribed in a cultural and bodily reality. The neutral outside observer is a useful methodological fiction, not a reflection of reality.<\/p>\n
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Descartes did not separate mind and body out of philosophical necessity alone. He drew a boundary behind which lay safety. To the soul he secured immortality, and with it, to the Church, its essential concern. In exchange, he secured for himself the body and the entire material world as the territory of a new, mechanistic physics. That territory was thereby withdrawn from the reach of theologians.<\/p>\n
Descartes lived in an age in which the Church could accuse someone of heresy. In 1633, Galileo Galilei was condemned by the Roman Inquisition after defending the heliocentric model as physical reality, against ecclesiastical decree, a doctrine Descartes himself shared. Fearing a similar fate, Descartes suppressed his work “The World” and sought a solution that would let him pursue natural science without becoming a target of the Inquisition himself.<\/p>\n
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How far this experience shaped Descartes’ philosophy remains a matter of debate. Stephen Gaukroger, however, has argued convincingly that Galileo’s condemnation led Descartes to shore up his natural philosophy with a new metaphysical foundation. His philosophy would then not merely have been an epistemological search for certainty, but at the same time an attempt to shield a mechanistic physics from theological attack.<\/p>\n
Descartes most likely held the dualism out of genuine philosophical conviction, but formulated it at a historical juncture in which any natural philosophy that clashed with church doctrine carried political and personal risk: serious metaphysics and shrewd self-protection at once.<\/p>\n
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Cartesian dualism opened new possibilities for the investigation of nature. Descartes himself stated his aim plainly: through the new science, humankind was to become the master and possessor of nature, as he put it in the Discourse on Method. What he had in mind, above all, were very concrete goals, such as better medicine and the relief of human suffering, not the conquest of nature as such.<\/p>\n
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Descartes defined matter as pure, inert extension, governed exclusively by mechanical laws, and mind as absolutely immaterial, indivisible, and without spatial extension. But how can two substances interact that share not a single property? How can an immaterial thought, the decision to raise one’s arm, set a physical muscle in motion? And how can a material stimulus, a needle in the skin, produce an immaterial sensation of pain?<\/p>\n
This problem is not a later sharpening of the issue: already in 1643, Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate put exactly this question to Descartes in their correspondence, how a pure thinking substance, lacking contact and extension, could move the body’s “animal spirits” at all. Elisabeth thus did not criticize Descartes from the outside, but turned his own dualism against its own premises.<\/p>\n
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Descartes himself saw this dilemma. His stopgap solution was the pineal gland in the brain, which he called the true seat of the soul, where mind and body supposedly touched. But this is a false solution, since it merely displaces the problem. A gland, too, is extended matter. Wherever the immaterial mind meets material tissue, a physical and logical miracle remains. In his physiology, Descartes reduces the human body to a hydraulic clockwork.<\/p>\n
Descartes himself insists, in the Sixth Meditation, that he is not merely present in the body as a pilot in his ship, but fused with it into a single unity. Yet this assurance remains without consequence: his own system of two radically separate substances cannot deliver the unity it promises. It is precisely for this reason that Gilbert Ryle, in his book The Concept of Mind (1949), mocked Descartes’ legacy as the “ghost in the machine”: a mind that, despite all its protestations, is no more than a pilot sitting in the cockpit, surrounded by instruments that register pain, hunger, and grief as mere data readouts.<\/p>\n
This abstraction contradicts every real human experience: we do not merely have a body, we are bodily. When we are hungry, exhausted, ill, or aroused, our mind does not go on thinking untouched in some pure sphere. Hunger, pain, and grief permeate thought itself, rather than remaining mere readouts on an instrument panel.<\/p>\n
The living cannot be broken down into a purely geometric mechanism and a disembodied processing center. Descartes cannot account, within his own system, for the unity of life, and thereby contradicts, as the pineal gland and the failed pilot disavowal show, his own premises.<\/p>\n
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What emerges, in retrospect, as the consequence of this thinking reaches, however, further than Descartes himself intended. The separation of mind and matter helped establish an understanding of nature as mute matter without inner life, something to be measured, used, and controlled. Body and mind, humanity and nature, subject and object became separate spheres.<\/p>\n
From many non-Western perspectives, and particularly from various Indigenous perspectives, this separation appears foreign. In numerous traditions, humans, animals, plants, and spiritual beings are not understood as separate domains, but as different expressions of the same indivisible reality, in constant mutual dependence.
This makes visible that Descartes’ division of the world is not self-evident, but historically and culturally shaped.<\/p>\n
Cartesian dualism was a powerful tool. It made the world calculable and thereby made science immensely effective. What it lost sight of in the process was what cannot be isolated and calculated: the relationship, the dependency, the being-with between humans and nature.
Nature thereby ceased to be a counterpart with which humans stood in relation. It became an object.<\/p>\n
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The most effective rule need not force the human being. It need only convince him that his submission serves his own interest.<\/p>\n
Where Francis Bacon delivered nature to the rack of the experiment and Ren\u00e9 Descartes reduced the organism to a soulless automaton, Thomas Hobbes transferred the mechanistic worldview to human coexistence. In his principal work, Leviathan (1651), he drafted the blueprint for a state that does not protect individual freedom, but subjects it to an absolute order of security.<\/p>\n
Hobbes’ thought was the product of an age torn apart by violence: shaped by the English Civil War and his exile in Paris, he was driven by one fundamental question: what keeps human beings from destroying one another when no external force compels them to restrain themselves?<\/p>\n
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His answer was rooted in a radical materialism: nothing exists in the universe but matter and motion. Hobbes dissected the human being, too, as a mechanical apparatus: the heart is a spring, the joints are wheels, the nerves are strings. He explained human action in terms of desires, aversions, and passions. Two forces proved decisive for his political theory: the restless striving for power and the existential fear of violent death. For Hobbes, neither moral bonds nor mutual trust suffice to secure peace in any lasting way.<\/p>\n
From this anthropology follows the famous thought experiment of the state of nature: without a higher authority, the war of all against all threatens; life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Since contracts without the sword are mere words, neither individual conscience nor rival political authorities can reliably secure peace.<\/p>\n
The consequence is the social contract: to escape permanent fear of death, equal and vulnerable individuals transfer their political rights to an absolute sovereign, the Leviathan. This secular act is, however, a one-way street: unlike what will later be the case in Locke, the contract is in principle irrevocable. The sovereign determines law, property, public teaching, and censorship, without having to answer to any higher political authority over the governed. Even a true doctrine may be suppressed if its public dissemination, in the sovereign’s judgment, endangers the peace.<\/p>\n
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Hobbes describes the human being in the state of nature as a creature whose promises carry no reliable weight so long as no higher power compels their being kept. He meets this problem with a radical solution: those involved agree to authorize one and the same sovereign, whose power will thenceforth enforce the fulfillment of their obligations.<\/p>\n
But in doing so, Hobbes does not solve the problem completely; he merely shifts it into the founding act itself. For the power meant to guarantee cooperation arises, precisely, from the cooperation of those who bring it into being. This is exactly where Jean Hampton’s fundamental critique sets in.<\/p>\n
If the conditions of the state of nature scarcely allow for reliable cooperation, how could those involved possibly carry out the very coordinated, joint action through which the sovereign comes into existence in the first place? The solution presupposes, at least provisionally, precisely the capacity for cooperation whose unreliability it is supposed to overcome.<\/p>\n
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Equally unconvincing is the near-unlimited power Hobbes grants the sovereign. The Leviathan is composed of the same fearful, self-interested, power-hungry human beings as the society it is meant to govern. Why should the danger vanish precisely where human power reaches its greatest concentration? Hobbes attempts to solve the risk of disorderly violence by concentrating violence in a sovereign authority and withdrawing it, to a large extent, from the control of those who submit to it.<\/p>\n
Hobbes did not have to imagine the abuse of sovereign power. He was surrounded by princes who waged wars, enforced religious conformity, levied taxes, and mobilized their subjects for dynastic interests. The danger of concentrated power was, for him, no hypothetical quantity, but a political reality.<\/p>\n
John Locke, his immediate successor in that same early modern debate, recognizes exactly this problem: because you fear the foxes, you deliver yourselves up to the lion. Whoever submits to the unlimited arbitrary will of a single man to protect himself from the occasional injustice of his neighbors exposes himself, in truth, to a far greater, if concentrated, danger.<\/p>\n
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The deeper doubt, however, concerns his very conception of the human being. Hobbes wrote under the impression of an age whose political conflicts escalated into the English Civil War. Competition, distrust, and the striving for power are real human possibilities. But it does not follow from this that they define the essence of human coexistence. Cooperation and mutual bonds are not later inventions of the state.<\/p>\n
Christopher Boehm has described, drawing on egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, how groups without a centralized state monopoly on violence can limit the power of individuals through shared norms and collective counter-power. The state of nature that Hobbes portrays as a war of all against all appears, from this perspective, less as an anthropological fact than as the generalization of a particular idea of human conflict.<\/p>\n
With this, Hobbes’ thought experiment reaches its own limit. Absolute power does not eliminate arbitrariness; it concentrates its danger. Whoever submits to the Leviathan trades the insecurity of distributed power for the danger of a power that faces almost no counterweight at all.<\/p>\n
Lasting peace, however, does not arise from fear and obedience alone. It requires something that Hobbes’ own construction must already presuppose, even before his Leviathan can come into existence: the capacity of human beings to trust one another, to act together, and to bind themselves mutually to rules. Without that capacity, there is no social contract. Without trust, there is no society.<\/p>\n
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What had begun with Francis Bacon as a methodological program, had condensed in Ren\u00e9 Descartes into a universal philosophy, and had been transformed by Thomas Hobbes into a cold political construct, received with Isaac Newton a mathematical force that European thought could no longer escape.<\/p>\n
With the appearance of the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, a turning point in the history of thought took place: Newton showed, with extraordinary mathematical clarity, that a falling apple, the flight of a cannonball, and the orbits of the celestial bodies obey the same universal laws. The three laws of motion and the principle of gravitation united heaven and earth in a single mathematical language.<\/p>\n
What had previously been philosophical speculation or bold assertion could now be calculated, predicted, and empirically confirmed. The Principia were mathematically so demanding that, at first, only a very small learned elite truly understood them. Its cultural impact unfolded only gradually, reaching its full force in the eighteenth century.<\/p>\n
The cosmic machine worked. After the grim wars of religion, this new image of a nature ordered by law exerted a considerable intellectual pull. The world no longer appeared as an impenetrable thicket of mystical forces, but presented itself as a luminous, harmonious masterpiece of eternal lawfulness, comprehensible to the human mind.<\/p>\n
Out of wonder at this new order there gradually grew an intoxication with calculability. Without this genuine moment of intellectual liberation, the fascination that modernity exerts can hardly be understood.<\/p>\n
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But out of the success of celestial mechanics arose a temptation with far-reaching consequences: the belief that economics, the psyche, law, and society, too, could be traced back to general, knowable laws. In the eighteenth century, this hope became a wide-ranging intellectual program. David Hume sought, with his Treatise of Human Nature of 1739, to ground a “science of man” in experience and observation; Condorcet would later attempt to make social and moral questions, too, accessible to a systematic science.<\/p>\n
Newton’s triumph thus created one of the defining guiding images of the Enlightenment: the idea that the whole of human existence could be measured, optimized, and controlled after the model of an error-free mechanics.
The later eighteenth century turned Isaac Newton into the icon of a sterile, purely secular rationalism, an image that, however, scarcely corresponded to the real Newton.<\/p>\n
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Behind the author of the Principia hid a thinker who, for decades, secretly tended alchemical furnaces, deciphered biblical prophecies, and left behind numerous manuscript pages on the chronology of the Apocalypse. For Newton, God was in no way a superfluous hypothesis or a distant observer, nor was nature a soulless automaton.<\/p>\n
His universe was far less disenchanted than the later myth of the cosmos as a perfect piece of clockwork wanted to suggest. Since Newton recognized that the mutual gravitation of the planets would eventually destabilize the system, he took it for granted that God had to intervene directly from time to time to readjust the celestial orbits, a circumstance that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz dismissed with scorn as the confession of an incompetent watchmaker, whose work would grind to a halt without regular repair.<\/p>\n
For Newton, the machine still urgently needed its celestial engineer. Only the more radical Enlightenment thinkers of later generations did away with these mystical and theological convictions and finally removed the creator from the equation, until only the cold order of mathematical laws remained.<\/p>\n
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But whoever managed to understand the heavens without the Church’s dictates would,
sooner or later, begin to ask why they should still need it for the order of the earth.<\/p>\n
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The autonomy of thought may seem self-evident to us today, but it was won in a bitter struggle. The Church at the time claimed not only the authority to interpret the political and social order, but had occupied the innermost core of the human being: his conscience, his confession, his fear of sin, his hope of salvation. It was the instance that defined what was true, what was good, and what led to salvation.<\/p>\n
Whoever departed from it endangered not only the salvation of his soul, but also his earthly life. Philosophy and science could only be practiced so long as they did not contradict revelation. Thinking otherwise had consequences: it threatened not only hell in the life to come, but also excommunication and, in the worst case, the stake in this life. Giordano Bruno was burned alive in 1600, in Rome, on the Campo de’ Fiori, accused of a series of theological and cosmological heresies.<\/p>\n
Liberation from ecclesiastical dogma did not begin when a handful of philosophers decided to think differently. It was a struggle fought not in learned circles or salons, but from pulpits, on battlefields, and in the conscience of ordinary people.<\/p>\n
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Historically, the shift toward a mathematical-mechanical worldview resulted from a variety of motives. Europe lay in ruins after the Thirty Years’ War. Millions had died in a conflict in which religious antagonisms were bound up with dynastic power struggles.
With measure, number, and experiment, science offered knowledge whose validity no longer depended directly on professing the right confession.<\/p>\n
Herein lay an undeniably emancipatory force: truth could increasingly be examined, tested, and disputed, without a religious authority having to decide every question first. A stone falls according to the same laws for Protestants and Catholics alike.
But the claim to validity of this method did not remain confined to the laws of nature.<\/p>\n
The method capable of calculating the stars soon seemed called upon to pronounce on society and morality as well. It promised order and stability in a reality experienced as extremely chaotic and threatening. In the long run, this development helped undermine the religious legitimation of secular and ecclesiastical power. This did not happen overnight, but across generations in which inherited certainties gradually lost their self-evidence.<\/p>\n
The problem lay not in this new freedom of thought, but in its gradual narrowing. This new authority called itself reason. It soon claimed an interpretive authority comparable to that once held by the Church, and in doing so developed its own dogmas.<\/p>\n
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The thinkers of the seventeenth century investigated, measured, and calculated the world, making possible advances that radically transformed human life. But at the same time, they increasingly conceived of nature as something that could be separated from human beings, technically mastered, and economically exploited.<\/p>\n
Bacon advocated the subjugation of nature, Descartes separated mind and matter, Hobbes transferred mechanistic thinking to human society, and Newton described a world whose movements obeyed mathematical laws. Newton alone did not see in mechanics a refuge from theology, but its confirmation: for him, the laws of nature proved the greatness of their creator.<\/p>\n
In the process, the capacity to make things measurable and usable was confused with the capacity to grasp reality in its depth. Newton’s mathematical laws were, in themselves, an undeniable advance in knowledge. But raising this mechanical model to the standard of all reality was the product of a shortsighted abstraction.<\/p>\n
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What was proclaimed as a truth of humankind was not a universal view of the world, but the particular worldview of a learned elite of Western Europe, one that increasingly elevated its own categories to the standard of reality and reason itself.<\/p>\n
But what if reason is more than mere calculation? What if it must also be capable of asking about the whole, of recognizing relationships, of respecting the living, of knowing the measure of where and how far one may intervene?<\/p>\n
The separation of mind and matter changed not only the idea of what nature is. It also touched on the question of how humans understand themselves in relation to the world. The scientific-technical revolution brought modernity undeniable achievements, but these came bound up with a growing estrangement from the experience of being part of a larger whole.<\/p>\n
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Other traditions never began from such a separation. In many Indigenous societies of the Amazon, the rainforest is far more than a resource. People live with it in a relationship of reciprocity, belonging, and responsibility that carries a deep existential meaning.
There, nature is neither hostile wilderness nor romantic idyll. The rainforest protects and nourishes, but it equally demands vigilance, sets limits, requires respect, and can withdraw itself.<\/p>\n
The rainforest is not mute matter, but a co-protagonist. This is not an observation made from a distance, but something that reveals itself only once one has lived there long enough and experienced it in one’s own body. Animals, plants, and rivers send out signals that must be heeded if one is to survive.<\/p>\n
Meaning and understanding are not an invention of the human intellect, but a fundamental condition of this entire living space. Signs are read, warnings are responded to, and one’s own actions are oriented by the rainforest’s reactions.<\/p>\n
This relationship is often harsh, demanding, and dangerous. But it compels an attitude that the thinking of nature’s domination has lost entirely: the willingness to engage with a counterpart one cannot control. The self takes shape precisely in exchange with this living counterpart. Tending the relationship with the rainforest preserves not only the rainforest itself. At the same time, it brings forth the identity of the people who live with it, and shapes who they are and to what they belong.<\/p>\n
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This worldview is difficult to render in European concepts, for it opposes the separation of mind and matter with something fundamentally different. Instead of a separation, it describes a continuum of being, in which the human being is not isolated, but experiences himself as part of a living ecosystem, as one being among others within a shared cosmos.<\/p>\n
This makes visible something that Western perception increasingly tends to suppress, not only in thought, but in its very relationship to the world. It is not a matter of longing for a more original or more harmonious world, but of a different way of understanding the relationship between human beings and the world.<\/p>\n
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What if the world is not a puzzle that must be solved in full,
\nbut a counterpart in which one participates,
\nwithout ever fully understanding or possessing it?<\/p>\n
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The next chapter turns to John Locke and the question of who the world belongs to.<\/p>\n
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In John Locke, too, the divine right of kings was to give way to a clear, rational order: a state of nature functioning according to fixed laws, and a logic of appropriation that handed the world over, as unexploited no-man’s-land, to planned management. What presented itself as liberation from monarchical arbitrariness was, at the same time, the philosophical justification of a new form of domination: the rule of the owner over the land. Where Newton turned the cosmos into calculable mass, Locke turned the earth into alienable property.<\/p>\n
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My particular thanks go to Andreas Weber. The ideas in his book Being and Sharing: A Practice of Creative Existence have inspired several passages of this text and have considerably deepened my own reflections.<\/em><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_blurb title=”Author: Rolf Friberg” image=”@ET-DC@eyJkeW5hbWljIjp0cnVlLCJjb250ZW50IjoicG9zdF9hdXRob3JfcHJvZmlsZV9waWN0dXJlIiwic2V0dGluZ3MiOnt9fQ==@” _builder_version=”4.27.8″ _dynamic_attributes=”content,image” _module_preset=”default” header_font=”Soehne Leicht||||||||” header_text_color=”#000000″ header_font_size=”15px” body_font=”Cormorant SC||||||||” body_text_align=”center” body_text_color=”#FFFFFF” body_font_size=”1px” image_icon_custom_margin=”30px||||false|false” text_orientation=”center” custom_margin=”53px||||false|false” custom_padding=”||||false|false” border_width_all=”1px” border_radii_image=”on|100px|100px|100px|100px” locked=”off” global_colors_info=”{}”]@ET-DC@eyJkeW5hbWljIjp0cnVlLCJjb250ZW50IjoicG9zdF9hdXRob3IiLCJzZXR0aW5ncyI6eyJiZWZvcmUiOiIiLCJhZnRlciI6IkZyaWJlcmciLCJuYW1lX2Zvcm1hdCI6ImZpcnN0X2xhc3RfbmFtZSIsImxpbmsiOiJvZmYiLCJsaW5rX2Rlc3RpbmF0aW9uIjoiYXV0aG9yX2FyY2hpdmUifX0=@[\/et_pb_blurb][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How philosophy and natural science forged a new relationship to nature, humanity, and power, and the legacy we are still managing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19513,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":" In the Name of Reason: How Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and Newton Changed the Western Relationship with Nature, Humanity, and Power.<\/p>","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sin-categorizar-en","category-unkategorisiert"],"yoast_head":"\n