The Concept of “scientific revolution” in Jürgen Renn’s Historical Epistemology: a Copernicus Process

This thesis will discuss Renn's analysis of the concept of scientific revolutions, placing it in the broader context of his historical theory of knowledge. According to Renn, in fact, the revolutionary character of certain scientific innovations can be conceived without contradicting the progressive structure of its development only from the perspective of a study of the architecture of knowledge and its development. Renn's approach consists of a historical epistemology aimed at the examination of the cognitive and social processes underlying the structuring of the human knowledge, so the present investigation will start from this point in order to reconstruct the central points of his theory and to show how, in accordance with this, scientific revolutions are in fact long processes of reorganisation of systems of knowledge. Finally, it will be presented and discussed the paradigmatic case study of Einstein’s theory of relativity examined by Renn in support of his perspective.