> [!NOTE]+ Meta > Author:: Patricia Smith > Reference:: Smith, P.H. (2018) _The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution_. University of Chicago Press. > Date:: 2018 > Tags:: #warp/book > WeftLinks:: [[Scientific value of craft]] > Claim:: [[Claim - There is craft in laboratory and other scientific work]] > [!SUMMARY] Summary > Artisans played a critical role in the Scientific Revolution in the northern European Renaissance. The Scientific Revolution led by figures such as Francis Bacon involved a more active study of nature. In this, they drew from the practice of artisans in their manipulation of nature. In direct form, artisans were critical in the representations of nature that powered scientific knowledge of the time. ### Highlights > naturalistic artisans furthered science in an additional and even more profound way than communicating information or making possible the accurate description of the objects of nature. > In the sixteenth century, individuals seeking to reform philosophy began to employ the terms and modes of proving and validating certain knowledge (scientia) that artisans had used. Some of these reformers, such as Parace1sus, incorporated the arti-sanal epistemology into their philosophical reform. Others, such as Francis Bacon took the goals and values of the mechanical arts and their productive works based on knowledge of nature as the basis of their philosophical reform but excluded the practitioners and artisans themselves from the actual process of knowledge production. Building on the reform of knowledge of both Paracelsus and Bacon, new philosophers in the seventeenth century appropriated to themselves the artisanal expertise about > Durer and the other artisans discussed in the foregoing pages laid the foundations for a new epistemology, a new scientia based on nature. Paracelsus, Palissy, and others explicitly viewed their new science as part of a reform of philosophy. In this intellectual revolution from the bottom up, these artisans transformed the contemplative discipline of natural philosophy into an active one.