Change and Development
Although it generally is acknowledged that change characterizes many aspects of human life and the larger world and is associated especially closely with science and technology and their influence on society, this phenomenon is not easy to define. One puzzling issue concerns how an object can be one thing, then change, and still remain the same object (that has undergone change). How should such a relationship, which implies both noncontinuity and continuity, be distinguished from replacement? A common response to is to argue that in change there is some development or growth: A thing has immanent within it a feature that over time (through change) is made manifest. The application of this biological notion to scientific, technological, economic, political, or ethical change remains fundamentally problematic and may best be approached through comparisons and in historical terms.
Enlightenment Origins: Change in Science as Progress
Early forms of the interrelated ideas of change and development were expressed in various instances of premodern (European and non-European) thought. Aristotle's On Coming to Be and Passing Away is the first systematic discussion of change. However, it was only in association with the scientific revolution of the 1600s and the Enlightenment of the 1700s that change became a theme for systematic articulation and gave rise to a concept of change as progress that has implications for science, technology, and ethics.
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