Critical Issues in Organizations (RLE: Organizations) by Clegg, Stewart;Dunkerley, David;

of nature, namely the most precise and the most condensed, but also the most complete collection of information under the relationships of law existing within nature (Heisenberg,1962, p.14). It is this particular relationship of an independent and free being confronted by an enigmatic but ordered world which defines the 'science of discovery'. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century changes the relationships between the forms of the mind, substitutes modern mathematical and experimental rationalism for the archaic rationalism of Aristotleanism, wipes out the qualitative physics of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance and replaces it by quantitative physics. It transforms divinity into a hypothesis which is simply necessary to put the universe in motion and ceases to seek the metaphysical counterpart of its theoretical successes. It becomes intelligible, however, only when it is located in the transformation of the distribution of resources and powers of traditional cultural institutions. The continuity of medieval thought was insured by universities, by the church and by various forms of patronage. The 'philosophers' who devoted themselves to the observation of the facts of nature or to speculative reflection could only do so as members of religious orders or as teachers, as doctors and alchemists, dependent upon princes and kings. The 'new philosophy' encountered in these powers devoted to the reproduction of tradition an opposition which was so total and so r