The Emergence of a Scientific Culture PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Emergence of a Scientific Culture PDF full book. Access full book title The Emergence of a Scientific Culture by Stephen Gaukroger. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Stephen Gaukroger Publisher: Clarendon Press ISBN: 0191563919 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 576
Book Description
Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners. The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development—-and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer.
Author: Peter Allan Dale Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 354
Book Description
One of the preoccupations of Victorian writers was the search for a philosophical replacement of romanticism. This book traces the course of that search. Peter Dale centers his analysis on positivism. In clear opposition to romanticism, positivism was militantly realistic and antiromantic. Its realism was based on observation of the structures of the natural world and on the scientific method that provided the way to understand those structures. Positivism became the dominant ideology of the later Victorian age; Dale argues that because of its influence on both practical and contemplative life, it was the true intellectual successor to romanticism. Dale approaches positivism through the important writings of George Henry Lewes, but extends his focus to include the effect of positivism on such writers as George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, Charles Darwin, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and others, in an attempt to show an ongoing engagement between science and the imagination.
Author: Stephen Gaukroger Publisher: Clarendon Press ISBN: 0191563919 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 576
Book Description
Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners. The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development—-and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer.
Author: Dr. Jan Visser Publisher: Brill ISBN: 9789004416796 Category : Knowledge, Theory of Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Seeking Understanding: The Lifelong Pursuit to Build the Scientific Mind explores the multiple ways in which the human mind grows in understanding of the self and the world as an essential dimension of transformative learning along the lifespan.
Author: Carl Sagan Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101201835 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 316
Book Description
“Ann Druyan has unearthed a treasure. It is a treasure of reason, compassion, and scientific awe. It should be the next book you read.” —Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith “A stunningly valuable legacy left to all of us by a great human being. I miss him so.” —Kurt Vonnegut Carl Sagan's prophetic vision of the tragic resurgence of fundamentalism and the hope-filled potential of the next great development in human spirituality The late great astronomer and astrophysicist describes his personal search to understand the nature of the sacred in the vastness of the cosmos. Exhibiting a breadth of intellect nothing short of astounding, Sagan presents his views on a wide range of topics, including the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets, creationism and so-called intelligent design, and a new concept of science as "informed worship." Originally presented at the centennial celebration of the famous Gifford Lectures in Scotland in 1985 but never published, this book offers a unique encounter with one of the most remarkable minds of the twentieth century.
Author: Steven Shapin Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022639848X Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
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
Author: Joyce Chaplin Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0465008852 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 434
Book Description
Famous, fascinating Benjamin Franklin -- he would be neither without his accomplishments in science. Joyce Chaplin's authoritative biography considers all of Franklin's work in the sciences, showing how, during the rise and fall of the first British empire, science became central to public culture and therefore to Franklin's success. Having demonstrated in his earliest experiments and observations that he could master nature, Franklin showed the world that he was uniquely suited to solve problems in every realm. In the famous adage, Franklin "snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from the tyrants" -- in that order. The famous kite and other experiments with electricity were only part of Franklin's accomplishments. He charted the Gulf Stream, made important observations on meteorology, and used the burgeoning science of "political arithmetic" to make unprecedented statements about America's power. Even as he stepped onto the world stage as an illustrious statesman and diplomat in the years leading up to the American Revolution, his fascination with nature was unrelenting. Franklin was the first American whose "genius" for science qualified him as a genius in political affairs. It is only through understanding Franklin's full engagement with the sciences that we can understand this great Founding Father and the world he shaped.
Author: Max F. Perutz Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 9780198590279 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 388
Book Description
This collection of essays from Nobel Laureate Max Perutz explores a wide range of scientific and personal topics with insight and lucidity. It includes lively anecdotes about key figures in 20th-century science.
Author: Sheldon Richmond Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1527549224 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 221
Book Description
Computers are supposed to be smart, yet they frustrate both ordinary users and computer technologists. Why are people frustrated by smart machines? Computers don’t fit people. People think in terms of comparisons, stories, and analogies, and seek feedback, whereas computers are based on a fundamental design that does not fit with analogical and feedback thinking. They impose a binary, an all-or-nothing, approach to everything. Moreover, the social world and institutions that have developed around computer technology hide and reinforce the lack of alignment between computers and people. This book suggests a solution: we do not have to accept the way things are now and work around the bad social and technical design of computers. Rather, it proposes a diverse, distributed, critical discussion of how to design and build both computer technology and its social institutions.
Author: Stephen Gaukroger
Author: Peter Allan Dale
Author: Stephen Gaukroger
Author: Dr. Jan Visser
Author: Carl Sagan
Author: Steven Shapin
Author: C. P. Snow
Author: Joyce Chaplin
Author: Max F. Perutz
Author: Frank M. Turner
Author: Sheldon Richmond