Reijer Hooykaas Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

The student of palaetiological sciences is a scientist and a historian. The former tries to be as uniformitarian as possible, the latter has to recognize the contingency of events which will ever be a 'skandalon' to the scientist. Verily, the geologist 'lives in a divided world'

Reijer Hooykaas
The history of science shows so many examples of the 'irrational' notions and theories of to-day becoming the 'rational' notions and theories of to-morrow, that it seems largely a matter of being accustomed to them whether they are considered rational or not, natural or not.

Reijer Hooykaas
The Portuguese had undertaken their voyages towards the southern hemisphere in spite of the science of their day... they followed an irresistible urge, which went against their scientific and religious convictions.

Reijer Hooykaas
In the first chapter of Genesis it is made evident that absolutely nothing, except God, has any claim to divinity; even the sun and the moon, supreme gods of the neighbouring peoples, are set in their places between the herbs and the animals and are brought into the service of mankind.

Reijer Hooykaas
Pascal scornfully said that simple workmen had been able to convince of error those great men that are called 'philosophers'. It was, then, these unlearned men... who were most ready to believe 'what they saw with their eyes and touched with their hands'.

Reijer Hooykaas
Perhaps there is no literature in Europe that mirrors so clearly as the Portuguese, the painful conflict in the minds of people who, on the one hand, by their humanistic education, not only knew better but also more uncritically admired, ancient learning than their medieval predecessors, and, who, on the other hand, in the same epoch, were confronted with abundant proofs of the insufficiency and fallibility of that same Antiquity.

Reijer Hooykaas
Metaphorically speaking, whereas the bodily ingredients of science may have been Greek, its vitamins and hormones were biblical.

Reijer Hooykaas
Our thesis now is that the Portuguese seafarers and scientists of the 15th and 16th centuries made an important contribution to the rise of modern science by unintentionally undermining the belief in scientific authorities and by strengthening the confidence in an empirical, natural, historical method.

Reijer Hooykaas