In order to narrate the history of the Jesuit educational program as a chapter of the scientific revolution I shall attempt to develop some conceptual tools for comparing between competing discourses interacting in the same cultural field. In the second half of the 16th century the Jesuits gained a central position in an existing cultural field which they tended to re-structure in accordance with their values and specific interests. My reconstruction of the various discourses within that field will be done in terms of three categories: 1) The strategies used in the constitution of phenomena as objects of scientific discourse; 2) The ways the boundaries of discourse were constructed, and 3) The type of authority claimed for speakers within a certain discourse.

Senior Lecturer at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv University.