Middle Ages Renaissance Modern Age What is the purpose of life? Middle Age Nature •Life expectancy was 27 years •40% of the children born did not survive infancy •95% never travelled more than 4 miles from their place of birth •Majority lived in abject poverty Big Question in Middle Age – What is the purpose of life? Renaissance Nature •Peter the Hermit’s crusade let 40,000 men across the face of Europe for the first time in contact with culture they never have seen. • Opening of trade out of the city- states of Italy •Merchants travelled far to East and West •Curiosity about human differences •New interest to find out things Big Question in Renaissance – “Is understanding of the universe possible?” The Answer is “Yes, it is.”
In Modern Age there is a method of thinking called Analysis – hailed as the tool to enlightenment/understanding. Analysis is a 3-step process by which you take something you want to understand apart, try to understand the behaviour of each part taken separately , and then assemble the understanding of the parts aggregated into an understanding of the whole. First step: take it apart. Second step: try to understand what the parts do. Third step: try to assemble the understanding of the parts into an understanding of the whole. This became the dominant method of thought in the Western World.
Doc 1 Cause and effect Our commitment to cause and effect thinking led to three very fundamental doctrines which permeated our thought for almost 400 years. • First ,If I want to explain a phenomenon, all I have to do is find its cause. When I find this cause, I have a complete explanation of the phenomenon because the cause is sufficient for the effect. The question is – is there any end to the causal regression? • The second consequence of cause-and-effect thinking was even more profound. We did not need the environment to explain anything. It enabled us to develop a theory of explanation that excluded the environment. • The third component that came out of cause and effect was this: does anything ever happen by chance? Spontaneously? Certainly appears to be so.
Science became a crusade in search of the element, because we believed that understanding the universe would only be possible when we had understanding of the elements of which it was composed, and therefore we first had to identify them and understand them.
If you take these three doctrines together – understandability, analysis as a method of inquiry, cause and effect as sufficient relationship to explain everything, and put them together, what would we get? Isaac Newton – because he was the first one to synthesize all those thoughts into a single image. - Newton said the universe is a machine. He did not say the universe is like a machine, he said it is a machine.
The Industrial Revolution was about the mechanization of work The problem: deal with work so we could mechanize it, apply machines to it. Here is a job to be done - how do we do it? First , analyze it. Take the task apart. How far down to do you take it? Frederick Taylor believed in reducing work to its elements by work analysis. Then next is to mechanize those tasks.
Two fundamental concepts:
Work Machine
We assigned these tasks to people; we mechanized the others. Following the analytical procedures, we aggregated all of them, so we had a sequence, or a network of elementary tasks performed by men and machines to produce a product. Compiled by Dr. L Mee-Yan Cheung Judge © 1