“Y, entonces, la realidad física se matematizó. A vueltas con la Revolución Científica”
"And then Physical Reality Became Mathematised. Going around with the Scientific Revolution"
Abstract
Just as, back in the 6th century BC where the beginnings of rational thought took place, in the 15th and 16th centuries, philosophy and science shared interests such that, many times, they appeared intertwined. Regarding rational and argumentative thought, science and philosophy were born together and with the same eagerness to know the surrounding world in a different way from how it had been captured by myth. Or so the tradition suggests. Whatever the relationship between reason and myth, it is certain that Aristotle called the first philosophers, the pre-Socratics, the "physicists". However, although at the birth of Western culture it was philosophy, or rather, philosophical questions, that were the elements that set scientific research in motion, the truth is that in the centuries that followed the Middle Ages, philosophy, both the nominalist style in the last medieval century, the 14th, and the Renaissance itself, showed a clear eagerness to resemble science. And, as we know, science is science when its objects are quantified or, in general, mathematised. In this way, it is easy to deduce that mathematics was the die that shaped the way of knowing and approaching the post-medieval world, which, no more and no less, was crowned by a revolution, the so-called scientific revolution, after which nothing was the same. This work, then, aims to offer some historical and philosophical keys that help us to understand how the world ceased to be a mystery in so far as it was qualitative and became a set of phenomena that only by being mathematised achieved the status of objects worthy of knowledge.
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