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GAUKROGER, Stephen. The Emergence of a Scientific Culture; Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. ix + 563 pp. Cloth, $65.00-As the author tells us in his Introduction, he has set out to write a conceptual and cultural history of the emergence of a scientific culture in the West from the early modern period to the present Gaukroger's study shows clearly that modern science is the outcome of a distinctive culture long in the making, a culture whose history begins in classical antiquity.
Scholars agree that since classical antiquity there have been a number of civilizations that have witnesed a scientific revolution. Gaukroger speaks of the "rich productive scientific cultures in which fundamental and especially intractable, physical, medical, astronomical, and other problems are opened up and dealt with in an innovative and concerted fashion, producing cumulative results over several generations." He identifies these as Greece and the Hellenic diaspora, Arab/Islamic North Africa/Near East/ Iberian Peninsula in the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries, Paris and Oxford in the 13th and 14th centuries, and China from the 12th to the 14th centuries.
The "scientific revolution" of 17th and 18th century Europe is something different Gaukroger's book is an attempt to answer the question: why did it occur in the West and in the modern era and why not in Greek...