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08778_Field_TCGG T543.txt
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1996-04-10
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so John U. Nef has given us the connection between
Renaissance science and commerce. His Cultural Foundations of
Industrial Civilization is a study of quantification, especially as
it intruded into the commercial world. The spirit of rigorous
separation and translation of functions by stress on visual
quantity had beset the later scholastic centuries and
contributed to the mechanization of the scribal craft, as we
have seen. The pursuit of dichotomies and divisions carried over
from scholasticism to mathematics and science, as Nef
indicates (pp. 4­5):
The very separation of science from faith, from
ethics and from art, which is so characteristic of our
times, is at the roots of the industrialized world in which
we live. In a letter destined for Fermat, which he sent to
Father Mersenne in 1637, Descartes remarked that the