Was the Renaissance an improvement for society in anything other than arts?

Was the Renaissance an improvement for society in anything other than arts?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_speed_theorem
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Grosseteste#Science
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Calculators
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

No

Right. Fuck Newton and the likes. An interest in science has never helped any society, right?

It didn't improve the life of the layman but neither did anything until well after the working conditions of the Industrial Revolutions were made non-abusive.

>(1452-1591)
>Died in 1591

Totally a dependable source.

But those were all early modern thinkers, not renaissance ones. They were part of the current of reacting against the renaissance if anything.

The worldview shifted and brought man back as the measure of all things, for the first time since the classical age of Athens.
Obviously this would pave the way for modernity.

It was a step back in most things.

Philosophy and science for one. All the progress of the Gothic Era was lost, as Renaissance humanists returned to worshiping ancient Greek authors as absolute truth. It took three centuries for science to return to the level of the mid 1300s. And of course it was the era of Protestantism and religious wars, and of witch hunts and various other atrocities.

In everything but art, the Renaissance was a dark age compared to the late Middle Ages.

Reminder that Renaissance happened only in Italy, some parts of
>H
>R
>E
And Netherlands. The rest of Europe were backwater shitholes as always

>progress
>Gothic Era

Not really.

People speak a lot of "science" in the Renaissance, but most of the "scientists" of the era were mystical hacks such as Paracelsus, Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino who thought that good scholarship was masturbating over Greek texts.

Compare it with the late Middle Ages where we had people like Thomas Bradwardine, Jean Buridan and Nichole Oresme advancing a mathematization of physics that 300 years later would led to the actual Scientific Revolution. The Renaissance actually hindered the scientific progress of mankind with it's puerile obsession with the Greeks.

>hello I am retarded

OK.

Yeah it's not like Copernicus or Galileo existed or anything

It should be noted that the actual scientists from the period, such as Andreas Vesalius and Nicholaus Copernicus, came from outside Italy and mostly from a later period than the 15th century which is the core of the Renaissance.

It was a anti-church meme to rustle popes jimmies

Galileo did nothing but repeat things that had been discovered centuries earlier, and he got persecuted for it. Truly a golden age of science.

Stop posting.

>Copernicus

See He was born and educated mostly in Poland so he wasn't immersed in the humanist culture of 15th century Italy.

>Galileo

Lived in a later era and part of his work was just rediscovering shit that Medieval scholars already knew.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_speed_theorem

Daily reminder the renaissance is a meme and no serious modern historian calls the early middle ages as "the dark ages"

Galileo himself was supported by the church in his research,, back then science was mere abstraction and not part of the "real world" and only served to "save the appearances" it was only when Galileo tried to meme his heliocentrism into theology and church, even ridiculing the pope publicly that he fell from grace

It should be also noted that the reason the Church opposed Galileo was not actually theological. The science of the time supported geocentrism.

What Galileo did was propose a new scientific method, based on experimentation and mathematical modeling, instead of direct observation of reality as was favoured by the Greeks.

In this context Galileo is better seen as a continuation of Late Medieval scholarship than as part of the "Renaissance". Scholars in the Middle Ages were the first to advance experimentation and mathematization of physics.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Grosseteste#Science

>It has been argued that Grosseteste played a key role in the development of the scientific method. Grosseteste did introduce to the Latin West the notion of controlled experiment and related it to demonstrative science, as one among many ways of arriving at such knowledge [...] These ideas established a tradition that carried forward to Padua and Galileo Galilei in the 17th century.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Calculators

>The advances these men made were initially purely mathematical but later became relevant to mechanics. They used Aristotelian logic and physics. They also studied and attempted to quantify every physical and observable characteristic, like heat, force, color, density, and light. Aristotle believed that only length and motion were able to be quantified. But they used his philosophy and proved it untrue by being able to calculate things such as temperature and power.[1] They developed Al-Battani's work on trigonometry and their most famous work was the development of the mean speed theorem, (though it was later credited to Galileo) which is known as "The Law of Falling Bodies".

Yeah but then again the 14th century was an improvement over the 10th century.

Art and Architecture really changed (or were revived depending on how you look at it). The other aspects of society continued advancing since they had done for the past few centuries.

I should clarify that.

Most other areas of human progress did not experience some sort of revival but rather continued evolving.

>Yeah but then again the 14th century was an improvement over the 10th century.

The 14th century was probably the worst time to live in Europe since the stone age.

1350 was the height of Western culture, science, and civilisation. Then the Black Plague and the Hundred Years War destroyed that world.

For the people that died in plague or famine, the survivors got to experience the best two centuries until the industrial revolution.

Literally wrong.

Yes
Galileo himself couldn't disprove geocentrism observationally
Only latter when telescopes became more powerful it could be proven the changes in stellar parallax which Aristotles referred was proof of geocentrism

Except because several popes were prime examples of renaissance prince.

The real question is why was the Renaissance so shit? Obviously largely because of humanism, but why did it take that shape?

I think countries are the constants. Italy had never been a place of scientific advancement. The centres of science during the Middle Ages were France and England. The Renaissance was shit because France and England had been turned irrelevant around 1400, and Italy was the cultural heart now. The Scientific Revolution only picked up again where it left off once the centre of Western civilisation shifted back to France and England in the 17th century.

Must have been awesome to lose all your family and friends. Hey, but land got cheap!

ITT: Everyone is Jon Snow

2 centuries is like what 8 generations?

>there was only one year of plague and after that everything was alright

The latter ones were more localized and less virulent.

Shall we discuss the impact of syphilis (the kind that isn't a first name) on early modern Europe now? You know infection rate, mental insanity, rot or the cures that involved mercury?

Renaissance Architecture was pretty nice, shame everyone forgot about it.
Nice reddit meme