The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution

The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution PDF

Author: Matthew L. Jones

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-09-15

Total Pages: 809

ISBN-13: 0226409562

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Amid the unrest, dislocation, and uncertainty of seventeenth-century Europe, readers seeking consolation and assurance turned to philosophical and scientific books that offered ways of conquering fears and training the mind—guidance for living a good life. The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution presents a triptych showing how three key early modern scientists, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried Leibniz, envisioned their new work as useful for cultivating virtue and for pursuing a good life. Their scientific and philosophical innovations stemmed in part from their understanding of mathematics and science as cognitive and spiritual exercises that could create a truer mental and spiritual nobility. In portraying the rich contexts surrounding Descartes’ geometry, Pascal’s arithmetical triangle, and Leibniz’s calculus, Matthew L. Jones argues that this drive for moral therapeutics guided important developments of early modern philosophy and the Scientific Revolution.

The Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution PDF

Author: Steven Shapin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-11-05

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 022639848X

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This scholarly and accessible study presents “a provocative new reading” of the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century advances in scientific inquiry (Kirkus Reviews). In The Scientific Revolution, historian Steven Shapin challenges the very idea that any such a “revolution” ever took place. Rejecting the narrative that a new and unifying paradigm suddenly took hold, he demonstrates how the conduct of science emerged from a wide array of early modern philosophical agendas, political commitments, and religious beliefs. In this analysis, early modern science is shown not as a set of disembodied ideas, but as historically situated ways of knowing and doing. Shapin shows that every principle identified as the modernizing essence of science—whether it’s experimentalism, mathematical methodology, or a mechanical conception of nature—was in fact contested by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century practitioners with equal claims to modernity. Shapin argues that this contested legacy is nevertheless rightly understood as the origin of modern science, its problems as well as its acknowledged achievements. This updated edition includes a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship. “An excellent book.” —Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review

Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution

Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution PDF

Author: Toby E. Huff

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-10-11

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1139495356

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Seventeenth-century Europe witnessed an extraordinary flowering of discoveries and innovations. This study, beginning with the Dutch-invented telescope of 1608, casts Galileo's discoveries into a global framework. Although the telescope was soon transmitted to China, Mughal India, and the Ottoman Empire, those civilizations did not respond as Europeans did to the new instrument. In Europe, there was an extraordinary burst of innovations in microscopy, human anatomy, optics, pneumatics, electrical studies, and the science of mechanics. Nearly all of those aided the emergence of Newton's revolutionary grand synthesis, which unified terrestrial and celestial physics under the law of universal gravitation. That achievement had immense implications for all aspects of modern science, technology, and economic development. The economic implications are set out in the concluding epilogue. All these unique developments suggest why the West experienced a singular scientific and economic ascendancy of at least four centuries.

What Galileo Saw

What Galileo Saw PDF

Author: Lawrence Lipking

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2014-12-18

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 0801454840

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The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century has often been called a decisive turning point in human history. It represents, for good or ill, the birth of modern science and modern ways of viewing the world. In What Galileo Saw, Lawrence Lipking offers a new perspective on how to understand what happened then, arguing that artistic imagination and creativity as much as rational thought played a critical role in creating new visions of science and in shaping stories about eye-opening discoveries in cosmology, natural history, engineering, and the life sciences.When Galileo saw the face of the Moon and the moons of Jupiter, Lipking writes, he had to picture a cosmos that could account for them. Kepler thought his geometry could open a window into the mind of God. Francis Bacon's natural history envisioned an order of things that would replace the illusions of language with solid evidence and transform notions of life and death. Descartes designed a hypothetical "Book of Nature" to explain how everything in the universe was constructed. Thomas Browne reconceived the boundaries of truth and error. Robert Hooke, like Leonardo, was both researcher and artist; his schemes illuminate the microscopic and the macrocosmic. And when Isaac Newton imagined nature as a coherent and comprehensive mathematical system, he redefined the goals of science and the meaning of genius.What Galileo Saw bridges the divide between science and art; it brings together Galileo and Milton, Bacon and Shakespeare. Lipking enters the minds and the workshops where the Scientific Revolution was fashioned, drawing on art, literature, and the history of science to reimagine how perceptions about the world and human life could change so drastically, and change forever.

The Two Cultures

The Two Cultures PDF

Author: C. P. Snow

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-03-26

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1107606144

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The importance of science and technology and future of education and research are just some of the subjects discussed here.

The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction

The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction PDF

Author: Lawrence Principe

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-04-28

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 0199567417

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Lawrence M. Principe takes a fresh approach to the story of the scientific revolution, emphasising the historical context of the society and its world view at the time. From astronomy to alchemy and medicine to geology, he tells this fascinating story from the perspective of the historical characters involved.

Scientific Revolution

Scientific Revolution PDF

Author: Captivating History

Publisher:

Published: 2019-11-05

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9781950924363

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Ancient cultures have been looking up at the stars for thousands of years, wondering about their place in the universe. What were those glowing spots in the black cover of night?

The Genesis of Science

The Genesis of Science PDF

Author: James Hannam

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2011-03-22

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 1596982055

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The Not-So-Dark Dark Ages What they forgot to teach you in school: People in the Middle Ages did not think the world was flat The Inquisition never executed anyone because of their scientific ideologies It was medieval scientific discoveries, including various methods, that made possible Western civilization’s “Scientific Revolution” As a physicist and historian of science James Hannam debunks myths of the Middle Ages in his brilliant book The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution. Without the medieval scholars, there would be no modern science. Discover the Dark Ages and their inventions, research methods, and what conclusions they actually made about the shape of the world.

Ingenious Pursuits

Ingenious Pursuits PDF

Author: Lisa Jardine

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2000-12-05

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 0385720017

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In this fascinating look at the European scientific advances of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, historian Lisa Jardine demonstrates that the pursuit of knowledge occurs not in isolation, but rather in the lively interplay and frequently cutthroat competition between creative minds. The great thinkers of that extraordinary age, including Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, and Christopher Wren, are shown in the context in which they lived and worked. We learn of the correspondences they kept with their equally passionate colleagues and come to understand the unique collaborative climate that fostered virtuoso discoveries in the areas of medicine, astronomy, mathematics, biology, chemistry, botany, geography, and engineering. Ingenious Pursuits brilliantly chronicles the true intellectual revolution that continues to shape our very understanding of ourselves, and of the world around us.

The Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution PDF

Author: James R. Jacob

Publisher: Humanities Press International

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781573925464

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An introduction to a large and complicated subject, which has come to be called the Scientific Revolution, this book refers to the fundamental changes in our understanding of the natural world that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These changes led to a rejection of ancient and medieval thinking about the universe in favor of the new thinking that gave birth to modern science. Professor Jacob does not pretend to tell the whole story of this momentous transformation, which is perhaps more important than any other in modern history. But he does highlight and survey what are often considered to be the six principal developments associated with this shift from old to new science. The six changes are: first, the abandonment of an ancient Greek picture of an earth-centered universe and its replacement by the modern picture of a solar system surrounded by an enormous universe; second, the gradual rejection of the Aristotelian binary physics in favor of the modern physics of universal forces; third, a medical revolution that culminated in the discovery of the circulation of the blood, and put animal (and human) physiology on a new foundation; fourth, the shift from an Aristotelian theory of knowledge to a modern skepticism; fifth, the development of new methods for establishing scientific certainty; and, finally, the founding of the world's first national, government-sponsored scientific societies for promoting research, spreading scientific knowledge, and stimulating inquiry.