The Widening of the Horizons and the Explanatory Crisis in Natural Sciences in the Seventeenth Europe
Beginning with the seventeenth century, the explanatory crisis in the field of the natural sciences can be observed. Among the mainsprings of this state of affairs one can point at, on the one hand, the widening of the world’s horizon due to the newly discovered geographic areas, which results in an increasing number of new empirical data. One the other hand, the world’s horizon is extended in the micro scale due to the invention of the microscope used in scientific research. The aim of this paper is to present the attitude to these problems of one of the most prominent English biologists of seventeenth century – John Ray.
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