Renaissance and early modern science

Medieval science carried on the views of the Hellenist civilization of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as shown by Alhazen's lost work A Book in which I have Summarized the Science of Optics from the Two Books of Euclid and Ptolemy, to which I have added the Notions of the First Discourse which is Missing from Ptolemy's Book from Ibn Abi Usaibia's catalog, as cited in (Smith 2001).^{:91(vol.1),p.xv} Alhazen conclusively disproved Ptolemy's theory of vision, but he retained Aristotle's ontology; Roger Bacon, Vitello, and John Peckham each built up a scholastic ontology upon Alhazen's Book of Optics, a causal chain beginning with sensation, perception, and finally apperception of the individual and universal forms of Aristotle.^[28] This model of vision became known as Perspectivism, which was exploited and studied by the artists of the Renaissance.

Galileo Galilei, father of modern science.^{[29]: Vol. 24, No. 1, p. 36}

A. Mark Smith points out the perspectivist theory of vision, which pivots on three of Aristotle's four causes, formal, material, and final, "is remarkably economical, reasonable, and coherent."^[30] Although Alhacen knew that a scene imaged through an aperture is inverted, he argued that vision is about perception. This was overturned by Kepler,^[31]:p.102 who modelled the eye as a water-filled glass sphere with an aperture in front of it to model the entrance pupil. He found that all the light from a single point of the scene was imaged at a single point at the back of the glass sphere. The optical chain ends on the retina at the back of the eye and the image is inverted.^{[nb 10]}
Copernicus formulated a heliocentric model of the solar system unlike the geocentric model of Ptolemy's Almagest.
Galileo made innovative use of experiment and mathematics. However, he became persecuted after Pope Urban VIII blessed Galileo to write about the Copernican system. Galileo had used arguments from the Pope and put them in the voice of the simpleton in the work "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems," which greatly offended him.^[32]
In Northern Europe, the new technology of the printing press was widely used to publish many arguments, including some that disagreed widely with contemporary ideas of nature. René Descartes and Francis Bacon published philosophical arguments in favor of a new type of non-Aristotelian science. Descartes argued that mathematics could be used in order to study nature, as Galileo had done, and Bacon emphasized the importance of experiment over contemplation. Bacon questioned the Aristotelian concepts of formal cause and final cause, and promoted the idea that science should study the laws of "simple" natures, such as heat, rather than assuming that there is any specific nature, or "formal cause," of each complex type of thing. This new modern science began to see itself as describing "laws of nature." This updated approach to studies in nature was seen as mechanistic. Bacon also argued that science should aim for the first time at practical inventions for the improvement of all human life.