The Origins of the Idea of Scientific Progress: Bernard de Fontenelle and His Contemporaries

Daniel Spelda works as a professor at the Department of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic). In his research, he has concentrated on the philosophical problems, concepts, and categories that played a role in the development of early modern science, including curiosity, teleology, progress, and the centre of the universe. In recent years, he has addressed the question of how the early modern natural philosophers understood the history of their field and their position in the course of cultural history.