Option I: answer the following question -- paying full attention to formal requirements for spelling, grammar and documentation.
I have characterized the medieval period as a "cozy nest," in which a single, widely shared worldview defined human existence especially in moral terms -- and thereby provided human beings with a view of their lives and existence as having meaning and purpose.
The cozy nest is further marked by a logic of synthesis or connection alongside difference -- which allows, in large terms, the medieval worldview to hold together reason and revelation, nature and grace, and the natural with the moral and supernatural.
The shift to the modern world, by contrast, is centrally a shift to a logic of "either/or." This new logic -- apparent first of all in the Averroist/Occamist "doctrine of the two-fold truth" -- results in a radical divorce between reason and revelation, and the natural and the moral.
We have seen this shift in logic, and the resulting dualism, in other ways. For example, we have seen the shift from a Franciscan/Thomistic optimism regarding the complementary relationship between nature and reason, on the one hand, and the supernatural and revelation, on the other -- to an Augustinian/ Lutheran pessimism regarding nature and human nature, a pessimism accompanied by the tendency to believe that the human being must choose "the things of God" (including the salvation of a soul in an afterlife) over against "the things of this world" (including the insights of reason). And so there is a shift from from Thomas' political theory which assumes that human reason is capable of understanding a divinely created natural law, and which thus sees reason and the divinely-created on the basis of a conception of a divine law working to prescribe what ought to be the case (i.e., as guided by a value -- the good of the community). What replaces this, as "modern," is a political theory which strongly divorces the prescriptive (as belonging to the domain of "values," "faith," the "supernatural," etc.) from the purely descriptive function of a "rational" political theory -- i.e., one limited to a description not of how men ought to behave, but how they do behave. Such a theory then focuses on efficient means of acquiring power -- a power entirely divorced from ethical or religious concerns. In this shift, there is the further consequence that we move from the limited monarchy prescribed by Thomas (limited because the power of the sovereign must be restricted by the ethical and religious values which, while grounded in God the Creator, are nonetheless accessible to reason) -- to the absolute power of the modern sovereign (absolute and unlimited because "modern" reason has no insight into values, the domain of faith, etc.; rather, this modern reason has only a descriptive ability). In other words, the doctrine of the two-fold truth, once made definitive of modern assumptions about a dualistic split between values, faith, the supernatural vs. reason and nature -- this doctrine issues in a pessimism regarding human nature (as now simply desire-driven) and thus about human politics (as requiring an absolute sovereign).
Using this summary as an outline, describe this shift in worldview in somewhat more detail. To do so, take up primarily the shifts in political theory we have explored in Dante, Marsiglio, Bodin, and Machiavelli. While some general description of the political views of each person is desirable -- your primary theme is to show:
(a) how the new logic is apparent in the views of each person, and
(b) how this new logic thus results in a view quite different from the traditional medieval view (using Aquinas as your point of contrast).
2. We have further seen this shift towards dualism show up in the very terms which emerge here -- i.e., the dichotomy "moderns" suggest defines the "moderns" vs. the "medievals." That is, as we see especially in figures such as Francis Bacon, there is an effort to present "the new science" as something genuinely new, as revolutionary, as a start de novo, etc.
Despite these claims of novelty, however, I have stressed how the various "revolutions" proposed by Bacon and others are at best partial revolutions. For example, while Bacon stresses the empiricist approach of collecting and organizing data based on sense-experience -- he remains thoroughly "classical" or "medieval" in his assumption regarding the goal of science as attempting to uncover the truth regarding substances, in contrast, as his method is more suited to doing, to uncovering truth regarding relationships between events. Similarly, subsequent major figures of "the new science," while making genuinely novel strides in the direction of establishing what becomes modern science, remain firmly attached to some dimension of ancient or classical thought (e.g., Kepler's Pythagoreanism, Galileo's Platonism and reliance on Archimedes, etc.)
Criticize or support this claim by elaborating on at least three of these figures and their contributions to the new science. To answer this question with some completeness, you may need to turn to additional outside resources.
Option II. Pick a topic(s), theme(s), and/or figure(s) from the material we have explored so far which interest you the most. Develop an outline for a writing project -- either in the form of a paper and/or in the form of Storyspace and/or Web set -- about these topic(s), theme(s), and/or figure(s) and discuss it with me.