GEOGRAPHY, TRADITION AND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION - AN INTERPRETATIVE ESSAY

This essay examines the relationship geography sustained with traditional sources of knowledge during the period of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even while confirming traditional beliefs derived from magic and astrology, geography challenged traditional dogma by its anti-authoritarian emphasis on experience. In due course geography came to adopt and to advance the new epistemological tradition of the nascent scientific culture - classical foundationalism. This examination of geography's "pre-modern' and "modern' encounter with the methods and content of "scientific' knowledge has important historiographical and philosophical implications for the contemporary practice of geography in its "post-modern' phase. -Author