L'introuvable révolution scientifique : Francesco Redi et la génération spontanée

• Published in: Annals of science 2010-10, Vol.67 (4), p.431-455
• Main Author: DURIS, P
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Experiments; History; History of science and technology; Insects; Life sciences; Natural sciences; Redi, Francesco (1626-98); Science; Science history; Scientists
• ISSN: 0003-3790; 1464-505X
• DOI: 10.1080/00033791003615650

The Italian naturalist F. Redi established in 1668 that insects are not produced by the way of equivocal generation, contrary to what was affirmed since the Antiquity. For that reason, many historians of sciences acknowledge his experiments, like those of Galileo, Boyle or Huygens, contributed to the scientific revolution that emerges in the seventeenth century in Western Europe. Based on the commentaries sparked off by the works of Redi, in his time and today, our contribution shows on the contrary that nothing at all in his approach reveals such an intention. Questioning without arrogance the knowledge and the authority of the Ancients, careful interrogation of the literariness of the Scriptures, adoption of an experimental reasoning still dependent on the scholastic argumentation, those are the main characteristics of his work. But those also could be the ones of Harvey, Borelli or Swammerdam's works. To defend the idea of a scientific revolution in the life sciences similar in its conditions and tempo to the one described in the history of the physical sciences would be a mistake, not to say an anachronism. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]