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... rom the organization of the whole. Accordingly, systems thinking concentrates not on basic building blocks, but on basic principles of organization. Systems thinking is "contextual, " which is the opposite of analytical thinking. Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; systems thinking means putting it into the context of a larger whole. One gathers, indeed, from our standard histories of the sciences, written mostly in the last generation, that the world lay steeped in the darkness and night of superstition, till one day Copernicus bravely cast aside the errors of his fellows, looked at the heavens and observed nature, the first man since the Greeks to do so, and discovered...
the truth about the solar system. The next day, so to speak, Galileo climbed the leaning Tower of Pisa, dropped down his weights, and as they thudded to the ground, Aristotle was crushed to earth and the laws of falling bodies sprang into being. [Source: The Career of Philosophy, vol 1, 1962 ] It was the achievement of men like Copernicus and Galileo sift through centuries of scientific knowledge and to create a new world view. This was a world view based as much on previous science and knowledge as it was on new developments derived from the scientific method. web web greatest scientific achievement of the 17 th century was clearly the mathematical system of the universe produced by Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727).
It was Newton who went far beyond Galileo by taking observations of the heavens and turning them into measured and irrefutable fact. Thanks to Newton, the western intellectual tradition would now include a concrete and scientific explanation of the motion of the heavens. Because of his greatness, the 17 th century could almost be called the Age of Newton. By the 17 th century, science, scientific thinking and the experimental method had become the territory of more men, and by the mid- 18 th century, increasing numbers of women would be included as well.
If I have seen further it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants. -- -Isaac Newton War Then, in the 300 's AD, those people from Inner Asia came once again, this time riding horses and shooting at the foot soldiers of the Classical Empires with short but powerful bows. They attacked all of the empires from China to Rome, and succeeded, at least for a time, in conquering and ruling a sizable portion of each of them. The Roman empire was centered on the basins of the eastern and western Mediterranean Sea, although it had extended its power to include most of continental Europe up to the Rhine and Danube rivers. Although it had begun as a city-state and a republic, it had become a empire in about 30 BC and power had been concentrated in the hands of an emperor who, like the emperors of the other Classical Empires, was considered to be at least semi-divine if not completely so. When the Roman empire emerged, however, it was missing one important thing. There was no provision for how power was to pass from a dead ruler to his successor.
Over time, various methods were tried, usually being imposed by violence of one sort or another. At the same time, the Romans found that they had to invest a lot of their resources in building fortifications to defend the western portions of their frontier against various tribes of people, all speaking variations of old German and so called Germanic barbarians. They were not really barbarians except from the Roman point of view, but that's how the Romans described them, and the description has more or less stuck. On their eastern frontier, the Romans found themselves engaged in a long and costly series of wars with the New Persian Empire, wars which weakened the Romans a great deal and gained them very little. In the first place, they were unable to continue the investment necessary to maintain the unity of the eastern and western halves of the empire, and so divided the empire into two parts. The western section was far less developed and well-populated than the eastern portion of the old empire, so it was necessary to increase taxes there.
The result of this was the disappearance of the middle class and the flight of independent farmers to the protection of their wealthy (and tax-exempt) noble neighbors. The West slowly sank while the East, freed of the expense of maintaining the West, soon began to flourish. The old state religion hadn't seemed to work very well in keeping people peaceful and loyal to the central government, so Constantine, for reasons best known to himself, chose to make a mystical eastern cult known as Christianity the state religion. It took a long time for these reforms to take hold, but, by 400, the empire was a far different place than it had been. Barbarian Invasions The Barbarian Invasions were the Germanic tribes invading the Roman Empire and coincided with the disintegration of the Roman Empire. The Roman world suffered a series of disasters, barbarians were only one.
Huns, Vandals... in general there was no resistance, because the masses knew it was useless. The west fell back again into the elementary economic life of primitive peoples. The indications are that they were few in number, but once they invaded a country, they would be joined by the oppressed. Conclusion Western Europe was at the end of the great belt of civilizations and was cut off from the advances those civilizations made in later years.
Such things as paper, printing, gunpowder, the compass, windmills, and many other innovations, reached Europe only after they had been common for many years in the rest of the civilized world. What is more, Western Europe was the only portion of a Classical Civilization to fall to "barbarian" invaders and not to be recovered. It had to create a new tradition acceptable to the disparate people who inhabited the region. The Germanic inhabitants had no tradition of centralized rule and there was no central geographic feature (such as a great river basin) upon which to base such a centralized rule.
Although the ideal of a Roman Empire of the West remained attractive for a long time, the Europeans began to adapt the traditions and culture of a Classical Empire to an essentially decentralized and egalitarian society. Bibliography:
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Research essay sample on 17 Th Century Eastern And Western
