The art of experimental natural history

The art of experimental natural history PDF

Author: Dana Jalobeanu

Publisher: Zeta Books

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 6068266923

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Francis Bacon introduced his contemporaries to a new way of investigating nature. He called it "natural and experimental history." Despite its rather traditional name, Bacon's natural and experimental history was a new discipline: it comprised new ideas, new practices and new models of collaborative research. This new discipline was, in many ways, a surprisingly successful project. It provided early modern naturalists with tools, methods and models for both investigating nature and writing about their subject. It also offered a set of norms and values for guiding research. And yet, this new discipline was not a science of nature -- it was more like an art. This book aims to trace the emergence, evolution and reception of Francis Bacon's art of experimental natural history.

A Natural History of Color

A Natural History of Color PDF

Author: Rob DeSalle

Publisher: Pegasus Books

Published: 2020-07-07

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781643134420

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A star curator at the American Museum of Natural History widens the palette and shows how the physical, natural, and cultural context of color are inextricably tied to what we see right before our eyes. Is color a phenomenon of science or a thing of art? Over the years, color has dazzled, enhanced, and clarified the world we see, embraced through the experimental palettes of painting, the advent of the color photograph, Technicolor pictures, color printing, on and on, a vivid and vibrant celebrated continuum. These turns to represent reality in “living color” echo our evolutionary reliance on and indeed privileging of color as a complex and vital form of consumption, classification, and creation. It’s everywhere we look, yet do we really know much of anything about it? Finding color in stars and light, examining the system of classification that determines survival through natural selection, studying the arrival of color in our universe and as a fulcrum for philosophy, DeSalle’s brilliant A Natural History of Color establishes that an understanding of color on many different levels is at the heart of learning about nature, neurobiology, individualism, even a philosophy of existence. Color and a fine tuned understanding of it is vital to understanding ourselves and our consciousness.

A Natural History of Vision

A Natural History of Vision PDF

Author: Nicholas J. Wade

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2000-01-31

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 9780262731294

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This illustrated survey covers what Nicholas Wade calls the "observational era of vision," beginning with the Greek philosophers and ending with Wheatstone's description of the stereoscope in the late 1830s.

Worlds of Natural History

Worlds of Natural History PDF

Author: Helen Anne Curry

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-11-22

Total Pages: 683

ISBN-13: 131651031X

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Explores the development of natural history since the Renaissance and contextualizes current discussions of biodiversity.

A Natural History of Human Thinking

A Natural History of Human Thinking PDF

Author: Michael Tomasello

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-04-09

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0674986830

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Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Tomasello maintains that our prehuman ancestors, like today's great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive, aiming only at their individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements, early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative partners. Tomasello's "shared intentionality hypothesis" captures how these more socially complex forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive, humans had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives, to draw socially recursive inferences, and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together and coordinate thoughts. A Natural History of Human Thinking is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and cognition.

Kant and the Transformation of Natural History

Kant and the Transformation of Natural History PDF

Author: Andrew Cooper

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-09

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0192869787

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Andrew Cooper presents the first systematic study of Kant's account of natural history. Cooper contends that Kant made a decisive contribution to one of the most explosive and understudied revolutions in the history of science: the addition of time to the frame in which explanations are required, sought, and justified in natural science. Through addressing a wide range of Kant's works, Cooper challenges the claim that Kant's theory of science denies a developmental conception of nature and argues instead that it establishes a method by which natural historians can genuinely dispute historical claims and potentially come to consensus. This method, Cooper argues, can be used to expose serious flaws in Kant's own historical reasoning, including the formation and defence of his racist views. The book will be valuable to philosophers seeking to discern both the power and limitations of Kant's theory of science, and to historians of science working on the fractured landscape of eighteenth-century Newtonianism.

Experimental Life

Experimental Life PDF

Author: Robert Mitchell

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2013-12-16

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1421410885

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Experimental Life establishes the multiple ways in which Romantic authors appropriated the notion of experimentation from the natural sciences. Winner of the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, BSLS Book Prize of the British Society for Literature and Science If the objective of the Romantic movement was nothing less than to redefine the meaning of life itself, what role did experiments play in this movement? While earlier scholarship has established both the importance of science generally and vitalism specifically, with regard to Romanticism no study has investigated what it meant for artists to experiment and how those experiments related to their interest in the concept of life. Experimental Life draws on approaches and ideas from contemporary science studies, proposing the concept of experimental vitalism to show both how Romantic authors appropriated the concept of experimentation from the sciences and the impact of their appropriation on post-Romantic concepts of literature and art. Robert Mitchell navigates complex conceptual arenas such as network theory, gift exchange, paranoia, and biomedia and introduces new concepts, such as cryptogamia, chylopoietic discourse, trance-plantation, and the poetics of suspension. As a result, Experimental Life is a wide-ranging summation and extension of the current state of literary studies, the history of science, cultural critique, and theory.

A Natural History of Transition

A Natural History of Transition PDF

Author: Callum Angus

Publisher:

Published: 2021-04-27

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9781999058876

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Fiction. Short Stories. LGBTQIA Studies. A NATURAL HISTORY OF TRANSITION is a collection of short stories that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation. Like the landscape studied over eons, change does not have an expiration date for these trans characters, who grow as tall as buildings, turn into mountains, unravel hometown mysteries, and give birth to cocoons. Portland-based author Callum Angus infuses his work with a mix of alternative history, horror, and a reality heavily dosed with magic. Callum Angus is one of the younger writers I'm most excited by, with a mind full of marvels and an ear to match. Every story surprises; every sentence strives gorgeously toward music. This is writing as transition, as entrancement, as transcendence.--Garth Greenwell

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